Empires Of The Word Part 18

KARNITUS built the tumulus

with a vertical note at the side: TAKOS TOUTAS decision of the tribe But Caesar notes that the most familiar script to the Gauls was Greek writing, and sure enough, Gaulish inscriptions written in Greek are found dating from 300 BC to AD 50. What is now the French Riviera was then very much a Greek coast, with notable colonies such as Nicaea (Nice) and Antipolis (Antibes), all focused on the metropolis of Ma.s.silia (Ma.r.s.eilles), which had been founded c.600 BC. There are about seventy such inscriptions on stone discovered so far, mostly gravestones and dedications, and there are also another 220 pieces of broken pottery with writing on them: this ancient equivalent of sc.r.a.p paper and old bottles and cans is often gratifyingly durable.

segomaros uilloneos tooutious namausatis iorou belesami sosin nemeton 'Segomaros son of Uillu, citizen of Nemausus, dedicated to Belesama this shrine'

These Greek-lettered inscriptions are found along the coast, and all the way up the River Rhone, with a few more in the centre of France, on the upper reaches of the Loire and Seine. Caesar refers to Helvetian records written in Greek, and kept on wooden tablets. But this brings us well into the period of Rome's conquest of Gaul (completed in 51 BC). Thereafter we do find Gaulish written in Roman letters, but only for a century, and never actually replacing the use of Greek script: there have only been sixteen such Gallo-Roman inscriptions discovered to date. The most magnificent remnant of this period yet discovered is a fragmentary Druidical calendar engraved on bronze found at Coligny, not far from the Roman administrative centre of Lugdunum (Lyon).

North of the Seine, the only inscriptions that have turned up are on potters' stamps, which probably came from farther south. Advertising could also use 'eye candy' in a way decidedly reminiscent of the twentieth century: The inscription reads: rextugenos sullias avvot Rextugenos (son) of Sulla made (this pot).

Otherwise, the only evidence of written Gaulish is a few Celtic personal names on pots at Manching in southern Germany, and on a sword at Port in western Switzerland.

But there is hard evidence of another Celtic language, known as Celtiberian, being written in the north-east of central Spain. There are in fact eighty-five inscriptions, and fifty legends on coins, from the last two centuries BC. There is not much in these that incontrovertibly proves them Celtic,* rather than some other related strain of Indo-European, though the suitably grandiloquent name Divorix does appear: 'Divine-King', comparable with Julius Caesar's early adversary Dumnorix, 'World-King'. But they are in the right time and place to be Celtiberians, and it was an accepted truth in the ancient world that these people were Celts: Martial, a first-century AD poet born in the local capital of Bilbilis, liked to claim ancestry from Celts and Iberians.24 However, by AD 50 Gaulish, and indeed Insubrian and Celtiberian, appear largely to have lost their literate status, even in their heartland areas.

How Gaulish spread

How, then, did these languages reach the far parts of Europe where they were spoken? The spread of Celtic across Europe, phenomenal as it was, happened before recorded history. The forces that drove it are a matter for speculation and intuition, rather than for observation and inference. But if we take the culture at its own evaluation, Gaulish owed its success, or rather the success of the lineages that spoke it, to their distinctive equipment, notably wheeled vehicles drawn by horses, and to the magnificent products of their smiths, especially ironwork for warriors' swords, helmets and ring-mail armour.

A linguistic note confirms this. The words for 'iron' in Greek (sideron), Latin (ferrum) and Celtic (isarno-) have separate origins, but the Germanic word (e.g. Gothic eisarn. Old English isern, iren) appears to have been borrowed from Celtic.25 This is unsurprising, since the Celts were evidently the middlemen for the transmission of ironworking to the north of Europe. (Tacitus even mentions (Germania, xliii) that the Cotini, a Gaulish tribe, paid tribute to the German Quadi in iron ore. He adds typically, 'quo magis pudeat-the more shame to them': they should have been able to use the iron to turn the tables.)*

Recorded in the Gaulish name of an old village in the French Jura, Isarnodori, ferrei ostii, 'iron door'. Grimm (1876, vol. I, ch. 4: 5).

Although the technical level was high, then, its military application tended to emphasise individual leaders' prowess, sustained by these prestige products, rather than the development of overwhelming large-scale organisation. Their communities remained small, without even a feudal structure of overlords and kings. Literacy was unnecessary, and largely avoided. Perhaps, as some of their descendants would do two thousand years later on the other side of the world, they had been able to rely on their superior weapons, and prevail against vast odds without troubling to outwit their opponents.

Although Celtic warriors and their villages became widespread, they did not eliminate or submerge the communities in their path. (In this, they contrast markedly with the spread of the Pax Romana, and of Latin with it.) To mention only the ancient communities of whose language we can find some trace, Celtic speakers are found in coexistence with Germans north of the Alps, with Veneti and Etruscans south of them, with Basque speakers (Aquitani) in southern Gaul, with Iberians and Tartessians in Spain, and with Macedonians and Thracians in the Balkans. This was a culture that harried its neighbours and thrust them aside, but did not subjugate or incorporate them.

But besides the raid, and military conquest of new land, there was perhaps one other channel through which the Celtic languages spread, and indeed developed into new and separate languages. This was navigation.

It was an accepted tradition of medieval Europe that Ireland had been populated from the coast of Spain. The usual grounds quoted are twin mistakes about geography and etymology. The reconstructed Tabula Peutingeriana shows Ireland as an island offsh.o.r.e from Brigantia (La Coruna), and St Isidore's influential sixth-century Etymologiae states: 'Hibernia...extends north from Africa. Its forward parts face (H)iberia and the Cantabric Ocean [viz. the Bay of Biscay]. Whence too it is called Hibernia.'26 However, there may have been a lot more to this link. Avienus, gathering coastal navigation information in the fourth century, says, of the 'Holy Island': 'the race of the Hierni inhabits it far and wide. Again the island of the Albiones lies near, and the Tartessians were accustomed to carry business to the end of the Oestrymnides. Citizens of Carthage too and the common folk round the Pillars of Hercules went to these seas.'27 Now lerne was the common Greek term for Ireland, and the Oestrymnides are probably the Scillies, or Cornwall, since he also notes that these islands are 'rich in mine of tin and lead'.28 The whole pa.s.sage is evidence for a link between the British Isles and the southern Iberian region of Tartessus, known to be a focus of Carthage's trade empire.

This link is amply confirmed by archaeological evidence. Impressed by the apparent profusion of exchange relations among the different Atlantic-facing sectors of the European coast, including Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, Galicia and Portugal in the late Bronze Age, 1200-200 BC, Barry Cunliffe has suggested that 'Atlantic Celtic' may have grown up as a lingua franca, or perhaps an elite language, among the various communities on the eastern seaboard.29 This hypothesis, though archaeologically inspired, has a certain attraction from the linguistic and cultural point of view. It gives a medium for the spread of Celtic across to the southern side of the Pyrenees, when there is no tradition of invasion from the north, and most of the intervening territory between southern Gaul and central Spain was in fact always held by Basques. It gives a basis in history to a persistent theme of old Irish literature, the immrama, tales of magical voyages, such as that of St Brendan. And it provides an explanation for a niggling fact of Celtic historical linguistics: the dialectal similarity between Celtiberian and the Goidelic languages of Ireland and western Scotland.

While Lepontic, Gaulish and Brythonic (P-Celtic) all usually convert old kw to p, Celtiberian and Goidelic (Q-Celtic) retain the k element. It would be possible, then, to see Q-Celtic as the original form, spread to the sh.o.r.es of Gaul by effective users of iron, and then, through the establishment of exchange relations.h.i.+ps and trade, beyond to the south and north across the sea. Subsequently, the Celts in Gaul and the Alps innovated in converting kw to p, followed by their close a.s.sociates in Britain, while the peripheral ones, Celtiberian and Goidelic, retained the kw, those in the north, Ierne, later simplifying it to k. *

* In fact, few linguists today take this P/Q criterion as a very strong discriminant. The change could happen anywhere: indeed it has, in modern Romanian, and quite independently in the Italic dialects (e.g. Oscan changed to P, Latin didn't). And even in the centre of the P-dialects, not all Qs changed to P: on the Coligny calendar in the Rhone valley we find EQVOS, EQVI, 'horse' (even though the usual Gaulish name for the horse G.o.ddess is Epona), and the 'Sequani', living on the river 'Sequana' (Seine) in northern Gaul, seem unaffected. But P-Celtic and Q-Celtic are such a chestnut in the tradition that it seems deceptive to leave it out of the discussion.

In fact, some strange changes came over Celtic in the British Isles, as nowhere else: verb-subject-object as basic word order, mutation of initial consonants, conjugated prepositions, strange locutions to express status and activity ('I am in my student', 'I am at reading of my book'), and much else. There are those who believe that these strangenesses are really inherited from the lost previous languages of the old inhabitants, perhaps spoken by the civilisations that raised megalithic monuments. Failing to learn the incoming language fully, they simply continued with many features of their old languages. This is the substrate hypothesis; interesting, but it explains little since we know nothing of the languages of the British Isles prior to Celtic.

Another hypothesis is language mixing, or creolisation. It too can be brought into the theory of Celtic spread by navigation along the Atlantic coast, by noting that major partners in this network, for most of the first millennium BC, were the Phoenicians, many of them (specifically the Carthaginians) based in North Africa, and quite capable of maintaining links along the whole Mediterranean. Now it so happens that in the North African language families, Egyptian, Semitic and Berber, there are direct parallels for at least seventeen of these curious characteristics of British and Irish Celtic, characteristics that are quite unparalleled in any Indo-European language, let alone their Celtic cousins, and which are indeed extremely rare globally.30 If Celtic was indeed spread as a coastal lingua franca, these North Africans, in trade and exchange, would have been among its speakers, and effective in moulding it.

But there is no direct linguistic evidence for any of this at the moment: as to the spread of Gaulish across most of Europe, and the origins of Celtiberian, and the Celtic languages of the British Isles, we are in the realm of speculation and reconstruction. By contrast, we have direct testimony on the advent of Celtic speakers in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean.

The Gauls' advances in the historic record

It is clear that the ideal of the raid, whereby parties of young men would seek to cover themselves with glory and booty, never ceased to be current in Celtic societies that remained independent. Successful raids, especially if perpetrated by younger sons without prospects at home, could turn into de facto invasions. And we also encounter examples of deliberate decisions by Celtic tribes to seek new land in a ma.s.s migration: a famous one is the tribe of the Helvetii, whose intent to move from the Alps into southern Gaul was frustrated by Julius Caesar at the beginning of his Gallic Wars.

These kinds of movement twice led to major incursions by parties of Gauls into the centres of Graeco-Roman civilisation. The first was the sack of Rome by Brennus in 390 BC, followed almost immediately by a withdrawal with ma.s.sive booty and extorted payments. Polybius describes the characteristics of the Gauls who moved into the valley of the Po around this time: They lived in unwalled villages and had no knowledge of the refinements of civilization. As they slept on straw and leaves, ate meat and practised no other pursuits but war and agriculture, their lives were very simple and they were completely unacquainted with any art or science. Their possessions consisted of cattle and gold, since these were the only objects that they could easily take with them whatever their circ.u.mstance and transport wherever they chose. It was of the greatest importance to them to have a following, and the man who was believed to have the greatest number of dependants and companions about him was the most feared and powerful member of the tribe.31 The second was the pillage of Delphi, the Greek religious centre, in 279 BC, carried out by another Brennus, but soon beaten off by the rallying Greeks. Remnants remained as roving mercenaries in Macedonia. But one party (numbering twenty thousand, half of them women and children-so not just a war band) was invited next year to cross the Sea of Marmara into Anatolia, to fight on behalf of Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, against the Seleucid king Antiochus. They gave good service, but afterwards became a liability, until they were settled more permanently in the region around Ancyra. This became the capital of this new settled community, henceforth known either as the Galatians or Gallo-Greeks. Their wars with neighbours, especially the city of Pergamum, and their service as mercenaries (as far afield as Egypt), continued for another century.

Both in northern Italy and in Anatolia it was the Romans who finally settled the hash of restless Gaulish marauders.

A series of Roman pre-emptive aggressions on the Adriatic coast, and the founding of military colonies in the area, between 330 and 270 BC, gained them considerable respect. The first Punic war then intervened (264-41), but after the Romans had seen off the Carthaginians, they returned to the fray, and from 232 to 218 BC pressed farther into the heart of northern Italy with pitched battles and new colonies of their own citizens and allies (hence permanent pockets of Latin speakers) at Placentia (Piacenza) and Cremona. Once again the Carthaginians interrupted, this time with an invasion right through the heart of northern Italy (Hannibal and his elephants, in 217 BC); amazingly, this had no effect against the strengthening Roman hold on the area. When Hannibal had been eliminated-an ordeal that itself took sixteen years-the Romans proceeded once again to battle, with a victory over the Insubrians at Como in 196, and more colonies in the valley of the Po at Bologna, Modena and Parma, effectively staking out the area where the Gauls had previously been able to organise raids. The Boii, the princ.i.p.al warlike tribe, were defeated and stripped of half their territory. Writing fifty years later of a visit to the valley of the Po, Polybius observed that 'Gallia Cisalpina' was now just a name: the place had become a part of Italy.32 In Anatolia, the Romans started to try to bridle the independent Galatians just after they had finished the job on their kinsmen in Italy. In 189 BC a Roman general, as part of a campaign in support of Pergamum (still suffering from Galatian mercenaries), defeated all three const.i.tuent tribes, the Tolistobogii, Trocmi and Tectosages, and sold forty thousand of them into slavery. (The previous century had evidently been good to them, and their population had grown ma.s.sively.) But Galatian provocation continued, not only with Pergamum, but also with other neighbours, Cappadocia to the east, Pontus in the north. A century later, under King Deiotarus, they were allied with Rome, on the strength of a common enmity with the ambitious king of Pontus, Mithradates VI; in a signal feat of political juggling he managed to remain in favour throughout the civil war that followed Caesar's a.s.sa.s.sination, and to die in his bed in 40 BC. Thereafter little more is heard of the Galatians' irrepressible ways, but in 25 BC Augustus made Galatia part of a much larger unit including all the provinces directly to its south, diluting any remaining Celtic ident.i.ty.

The Gallo-Greeks never left a trace of written Gaulish, although they provided the inspiration for some of the finest artistic evocations of the Gauls (in statuary at Pergamum); and the evidence of their names is pretty authentic (Tectosages, 'home-seekers', Deiotarus, 'holy bull'.*) Nevertheless, a memory of their linguistic ident.i.ty lingered: at the end of the fourth century AD, St Jerome, famous for his Latin translation of the Bible, which became the Vulgate, was declaring that he could communicate with Ancyra's Galatians in much the same language as he had heard spoken in his youth near Trier, on the Moselle. But four hundred years is an awfully long time for a language without a written tradition to survive in the midst of h.e.l.lenised Asia Minor: perhaps he was just alluding to something he had read.

* Perhaps this is a glimpse of Gaulish with a Greek accent: the natural Gaulish for this would be Deiwo-tarwos, but Greek had dropped all [w].

This venture into Asia Minor, with its linguistic impact on the central highlands round Ancyra, is instructive about the way in which a language like Gaulish could be spread, and the conditions for its survival. It was the language of a lineage. When its speakers moved, its domain would move with them, and if the community grew, so would the number of its speakers. If the community lost its ident.i.ty, or its distinguis.h.i.+ng customs, the language would disappear.

Consilium: The rationale of Roman Imperium

Consilium: (a) deliberation, consultation, a considering together, counsel; (b) a conclusion made with consideration, determination, resolution, measure, plan, purpose, intention; (c) the persons who deliberate, a council.

Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary The Celtic speakers in Britain proved surprisingly impervious to Latin in the long term, even if it was the country's language of officialdom and literacy for four hundred years. Latin never became the language of the common people in Britain. So it was that Britain's derisory reputation with the Romans was ultimately fulfilled: 'neither brave in battle nor faithful in peace'.33 We must ask how this spread of the conqueror's language could fail to occur.

Mos Maiorum-the Roman way

It is no secret that the basis for the spread of Latin was the political and military spread of the Roman imperium (a word originally meaning command, but later carrying all the connotations of its French rendering, empire.) In this it was unlike Celtic, but rather like English in its early modern career. But like the speakers of English too (and again unlike the Celts), the Romans were seldom nakedly aggressive or belligerent in motivating their campaigns. There was also, among both sets of empire-builders, an unwillingness to talk openly about the commercial and material benefits of what was achieved-again unlike the Celts with their emphasis on the joys of booty. What really drew Rome out to conquer every country round the Mediterranean?

We have seen that very early on (the second century BC) it was a matter of curiosity to Greeks such as Polybius to figure out what made the Romans so speedily victorious, apparently against all comers. Although he made some trenchant remarks about the Roman character (see 'The contenders: Greek and Roman views', p. 279), he did not settle for any easy or simple answer. And even with the benefit of two thousand years' hindsight, it smacks of special pleading (or ex post facto rationalisation) to detect reasons why it had to be just this village halfway down the Mediterranean's central peninsula which was bound to take over the whole circuit of its coasts. Nevertheless, it is possible to see differences between the Romans' way and that of their neighbours, especially those in western Europe, which are our special interest in this chapter.

The Romans were an intensely civic society, with an overriding and persistent aversion to long-term dominion by a single man. Their system of government took checks and balances to heights unequalled before or since. From 510 BC, the traditional date of the foundation of their Res Publica (this Latin term for their const.i.tution, the basis for our word republic, means simply 'the people's property' ), they had organised annual elections for the main offices of state, and each holder was matched with one or more colleagues with whom he must share his power. The two holders of the supreme executive office, called consuls, were each in effect joint king for the year; but their power was only absolute when on campaign outside the city; otherwise every decision, like those of all the office-holders, was subject to provocatio ( 'challenge' ), i.e. appeal to the Roman people. (The joint nature of consuls.h.i.+p even led to their a.s.suming the post of commander-in-chief on alternate days, which could cause military chaos at times of crisis.) The only persistent executive inst.i.tution was the Senatus, the council of 'elders', usually about three hundred strong, made up mostly of men who had previously held office. They were responsible for setting the level of taxes. The Senate was always dominated by the old families that had taken responsibility for government since the beginning. Nevertheless, there was room for the occasional novus h.o.m.o ('new man') of talent (and the necessary means*) to break into the ranks from time to time.

Holders of the top two offices, consuls and praetors, might expect an overseas governors.h.i.+p, to exercise authority pro consule, 'on behalf of the consul', or pro praetore, 'on behalf of the praetor', for a period of years after their term of office ended. These officers undertook many of Rome's foreign wars. In time of national emergency, the consular system could be suspended for six months at a time, and a (single) dictator appointed. Although there were persistent problems from the later second century BC onwards, with over-mighty generals unwilling to accept the limits the system placed on them, these inst.i.tutions were all more or less functioning during the acquisition of Rome's foreign empire, which was largely complete by 44 BC, when Julius Caesar was made dictator for life, and then a.s.sa.s.sinated, leading to the downfall of the Republic. All the inst.i.tutions continued to exist for another five hundred years, but henceforth they were always dominated by a Princeps, 'top man', as the emperor was called, who ruled for life (though this was often cruelly, or mercifully, brief). The term rex, 'king', was still avoided, a taboo surviving from 510 BC, but Rome had in fact returned to being a monarchy, however skilled it might be at dissembling.

* Senators needed to be at least of equestrian rank, for which the qualification (in landed property) was set at 400,000 sestertii. Taking the 1879 valuation in Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary, and applying inflation rates since, this would equate to a present (2003) value of 186,000 or $315,000.

This was evidently a very elaborate system, which could only work because of an ingrained respect for tradition and law. It provided a framework in which an expanding city-state could govern itself in an orderly fas.h.i.+on, while keeping the control of organised force, the army, in the hands of the established cla.s.ses. The Romans preferred predictable principle to charismatic leaders.h.i.+p, and as their influence increased (for in fact their disciplined military organisation seemed to give them the edge in most conflicts) they exported this pattern of government into the cities they conquered and then enlisted. Little by little, the benefits of Roman citizens.h.i.+p were extended throughout the expanding empire, giving the new subjects (some of them) a strong motivation for loyalty. In effect, the Roman empire in its day stood for the benefits of globalisation: good communications, access to all that the world could provide, and freedom (usually) from arbitrary government and oppression. To adopt a favourite Roman phrase: otium c.u.m dignitate-peace with honour, or (equivalently) leisure with good value.

But this respect for tradition did not extend to a particular respect for the older remnants of their language, Latin. Although the Romans' most ancient code of laws, the famous Twelve Tables, was written in Latin, somehow no authoritative version of them survived until the end of the Republic. The Romans were unsentimental about their own language; even their closest equivalent to Holy Writ, the Sibylline Books, consulted for guidance in time of trouble, were not written in Latin, but Greek hexameter verse.

Latin was simply the language that they had grown up with; when dealing with foreigners, it was practical to use it, since the solid base of the Roman Republic meant that in negotiations foreigners were almost always in the suppliant position. The Greek language created an exception to this preference, since, as the Romans expanded their knowledge of Italy and the world beyond its sh.o.r.es, they discovered Greek colonies everywhere, doing business, and generally projecting a self-confident att.i.tude, derived from an aggressively literate culture, and links with their metropoleis ('mother cities') back in the eastern Mediterranean. And as the Romans discovered the undreamtof heights to which Greek culture had been developed, they were happy (at first) to use the Greek language for their own intellectual work rather than undertake the onerous task of trying to build up Latin to compete with it. The first known literary production by a Roman, Fabius Pictor's history of Rome (late third century BC), was in Greek. Although there was an attempt early on to establish a literary tradition that was more traditionally Roman, with Livius Andronicus and Naevius writing their Latin epics in Saturnian metre, they failed to carry the day. Henceforth almost all Latin works were closely modelled on Greek originals.

One aspect of Greek culture found an immediate resonance in Rome. This was the respect for rhetoric, what the Romans called ars oratoria, the skills of persuasion, which were just as important as those of fighting and military command in these city-states (both Greek and Roman), where decisions were almost always taken by a.s.semblies, not individuals. Training in oratory became the core of Roman higher education, students working up debates (controversiae) and policy speeches (suasoriae) in the way in which nowadays they turn out essays; and the effect on Latin style was pervasive, lasting long after the decline of free inst.i.tutions. Even love poetry can sound rather hectoring in Latin, a favourite trick being to turn to an imaginary audience. And poems and speeches were seen as very much the same game: in the second century AD Marcus Aper ('Mark Hogg'), a noted advocate from Gaul, was pointing out how much harder it was to get a name for oneself through poetry than through oratory, especially in the provinces.34 Latin was spread round the empire not least by the army, originally made up of citizens but into which increasingly men were enlisted from all over, and also by the common Roman policy of granting soldiers land on which to settle after their discharge. (We have already noted the role played by the army in Latinising one of their earliest poets, Ennius, originally an Oscan speaker; and how strategically placed colonies ultimately converted Cisalpine Gaul into just another part of Italy.) This never had a major effect in the eastern Mediterranean, where the lingua franca, Greek, was just too well established ever to be shaken. But in Gaul and Iberia the Roman colonies seem to have led to the eventual decline and replacement of their Celtic languages by Latin.

The desertion of Gaulish

Inscriptions in Gaulish had all died out a hundred years after the Roman conquest, although there are scattered anecdotes indicating some survival of the spoken language for a couple of hundred more years. In the second century St Irenaeus, who came west from Asia Minor to take up a bishopric in Lugdunum (Lyons), reports having to learn 'a barbarous tongue' when he arrived there.35 In the third century, the great lawyer Ulpian stated that certain sworn statements could be made in Gaulish.36 Then, towards the end of that century, the historian Lampridius mentions that a Druidess had used Gaulish to foretell the death of Alexander Severus (who reigned 222-35). And in a dialogue of Sulpicius Severus (363-425), a Gaul who does not speak Latin well is told: 'speak to us in Celtic, or if you prefer, in Gaulish'. And even in the fifth century, Sidonius Apollinaris37 declares that the n.o.bility of the Arverni, a tribe in central southern Gaul, had just recently learnt Latin and cast off the 'rough scales of Gaulish speech' (sermonis Gallici squamam).

But from the evidence of the languages' progeny (the sorry fact that they had none), it is clear that Gaulish and Celtiberian were effectively finished by the Roman takeover, and its introduction of Latin. Despite the Gaulish respect for eloquence noted by Lucian, Cla.s.sical culture had nothing positive to say about the value of the Celtic language traditions, and they were allowed to lapse.

This total loss is surprising, since five hundred and more years later so many myths were written down in Irish and Welsh, retelling the adventures of G.o.ds such as Nuada of the Silver Hand (Gaulish Nodens), Lugh of the Long Arm-or Lieu Skilful Hand-(Lugus), Brigid the High (Brigindona or Brigantia), Goibhniu or Gofannon the Smith (Gobannio), Morrigan or Rhiannon the Great Queen (Rigantona), and not forgetting Ogma (Ogmios) himself; and surviving iconography (for example, on the magnificent cauldron found at Gundestrup) shows that other G.o.ds, such as the horned Cernunnos, had complicated myths. This demonstrates that there must have been a wealth of fascinating and unfamiliar subject matter that the Gauls could have retold if they had had the will.

The loss was not inevitable, for the transformation that Latin had undergone to incorporate prestigious Greek shows that it was quite possible for one ancient language to take on board another's culture without being capsized;* and the survival of Greek in the east itself shows that even Latin was not invincible, in the face of a self-confident tradition. But neither Gauls nor Celtiberians made any attempt that we know of to recast Roman culture in their own Celtic terms. Rather, they seem to have adopted the new Roman, and Latin-speaking, ways with alacrity, since it is precisely the areas of western Europe that spoke Celtic in the ancient world which now have Latin-derived languages: French, Occitan, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, as well as a few other smaller languages derived from Latin. This is doubly surprising when we contrast the nature of Roman society with what the Gauls and Celtiberians had previously known. A civic, centralised, urban society replaced the more scattered, and sometimes more mobile, village life of the past. Evidently, for the Celts, it felt like progress. The Romans must have won the loyalty of the rising generation, for Vercingetorix, the organiser of Gaul's last struggle for independence, was never invoked as a heroic inspiration (until Napoleon III took him up 1900 years later), and there were only a couple of revolts, fairly easily put down, in the generation following the Roman conquest of Gaul. Gaul had fallen to Caesar in a blitzkrieg taking just eight years. By contrast, it had taken Rome almost two centuries to completely establish its control of Spain (from the expulsion of the Carthaginians in 206 to Augustus's Cantabrian Wars ending in 19 BC). Nevertheless, Spain too quietened down about the same time, and at last accepted as its fate the Pax Romana.

* And just about the same time, Armenian was doing much the same thing with an infusion of Persian.

Latin among the Basques and the Britons

Surrender, then, or perhaps even enthusiastic take-up, was the majority option when the inhabitants of ancient western Europe were brought into the Roman empire. But it is worthwhile sparing a moment to consider two cases where this option was not taken.

One was Basque, presumably the language of the Aquitanians of southwest Gaul* (and the Vascones in Iberia) in Caesar's time, which survived the influx of Latin to replace its Gaulish and Celtiberian neighbours, as it has survived everything else that history has thrown at it in the last two thousand years. It is the special case, par excellence, of European language history, since it pre-dates all the Indo-European languages. There are records of Basques serving in the Roman army (indeed, a group of them travelling with the over-mighty general Marius allowed him to mount a brief reign of terror in Rome in 86 BC;38 others are known to have served on Hadrian's Wall in Britain), but their ident.i.ty proved equal to the challenge of Roman rule. They borrowed the words for 'olive' and 'oil' (oliva, olio), and 'statue' (estatu), showing the acceptance of certain aspects of Roman life that had been new to them, but otherwise show no effect from five hundred years of presence in the Roman empire.

The more complicated case is that of language survival in Britain. We have already seen from the evidence of place names that a language either very like Gaulish, or a dialect of it, was spoken here at the time of the Roman invasions. Personal names tell the same story: among the names of noted kings and queens among the Britons we have Ca.s.si-vellaunos ('oak-dominator'), Tascio-vanos ('badger-slayer'), Cuno-belinos ('dog of the G.o.d Belinos'-Shakepeare's Cymbeline), Caratacos ('beloved'), Boudicca ('Victoria'-cf. Irish buadach, 'triumphant').

* Names mentioned in Aquitanian inscriptions appear to have Basque roots, e.g. Cison, Andere, Nescato and Bihoxvs beside Basque gizon, 'man', andere, 'lady', neskato, 'girl', and bihotz, 'heart' (Gorrochategui 1995: 38).

After the conquest of AD 43, which led to full-scale permanent occupation, the Romans made a conscious effort to spread Latin, and indeed Roman education, among the British elite. Tacitus comments cynically on the education plans of Agricola (governor of Britain from 77 to 84 and, as it happened, his father-in-law): he instructed the sons of the chiefs in liberal arts, and expressed a preference for the native wit of the British over the studies of the Gauls, so as to plant a desire for eloquence in people who had previously rejected the Roman language altogether. So they took to our dress, and wearing the toga. Gradually they were drawn off into decadence, with colonnades and baths and chic parties. That was called a civilized life [humanitas] by these innocents, whereas it was really part of their enslavement.39 In a bitter irony, these studies were initiated in the winter after Agricola had finally obliterated, with much carnage, the centre of Druidical learning on the Isle of Anglesey.

Although they had started from the same language, we can detect, from the odd remark made by Romans, that the British were bracketed with, but not quite up to, the continental Gauls in their adoption of Latin. In a satire on the way the world had gone mad, Juvenal (a contemporary of Tacitus in the second century AD) wrote: Today the whole world has its Greek and Roman Athens; the eloquent Gauls have taught the British to be advocates, and Thule is talking of hiring an oratory teacher.40 The mention of Thule here, which as far as the Romans were concerned might have been the North Pole, shows that Juvenal is thinking in terms of extremes. This is the condescension of the Roman establishment, showing much in common between old and more recent imperialisms: the conquerors might well tell subject minorities that their only hope lay in civilising themselves, but would never take them seriously when they tried to make good on this aspiration.

There is direct evidence that Latin did spread beyond formal and government uses. Odd tiles with scribbled Latin graffiti have turned up on sites, most amusingly at Newgate in London: AVSTALIS DIBVS XIII VAGATUR SIB COTIDIM, 'Gus has been wandering off every day for thirteen days', an example of ancient whistle-blowing. The waters at the health resort and holiday centre that the Romans developed at Bath have yielded over a hundred ritual curses and oath tokens, written in rough Latin (sometimes backwards): DOCIMEDIS PERDIDIT MANICTLIA DVA QVI ILLAS INVOLA VI VT MENTES S VA PERDET OCVLOS S VS IN FANO VBI DESTINA, 'Docimedes has lost a pair of gloves. May whoever has made off with them lose his wits and his eyes in the temple where [the G.o.ddess] decides.'

And Welsh, that modern descendant of the British language which was being spoken in and among this colloquial Latin, has preserved over six hundred words borrowed from it, including such household terms as mur, ffenestr, gwydr, cegin, cyllell, ffwrn, sebon, ysbwng (wall, window, gla.s.s, kitchen, knife, oven, soap, sponge) and ceirios, castan, lili, rhos, fioled (cherry, chestnut, lily, rose, violet). There are many more words in more intellectual domains such as law and Christianity.

In the modern era it has been argued, from some phonetic properties of these borrowings, that Latin as spoken in Britain was more conservative than in other parts of the Roman empire.41 Conceivably, this could suggest that it was less well established in ordinary currency, remaining instead a stiff and formal means of expression. St Patrick, who grew up on the Scottish borders in the early fifth century, complained that his Latin was always weak, because having been captured by Irish raiders when he was sixteen, he had missed out on the crucial years of education. Evidently Latin was not an everyday means of expression even in his well-to-do family.

But whatever the glimmer of truth that may have been detected here, our reliance on written records distorts our sense of the role that must have gone on being played by British. This absence of written British is quite surprising, and has not been explained. Gaulish was often written down on the Continent, but British was evidently not: in Britain, only two inscriptions from the Roman period in a language other than Latin have ever been discovered. They are two of the inscriptions on tin/lead sheet from the waters of Bath, and seem to be in something like Celtic, but are not decipherable at all.42 Latin persisted after the Roman conquest as the language of learning: in Britain, as elsewhere, essentially unchallenged until the Renaissance and the Enlightenment of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries gradually made the use of European vernaculars acceptable for serious factual writing. But somehow, some time in the fifth century, between the Roman withdrawal from Britain and the Saxon conquest of England, it got lost as a language of the British people.

There is no point in contenting ourselves, as some have, with non-explanations, such as a general retreat, visible in the period, from the cities, something that is evidenced by a run-down in developed services such as aqueducts, and part of the decline of the empire as a whole before the incursions from the east. This may indeed have happened, and may have weakened the areas in Britain where Latin was most likely to be used. But it does not discriminate between the situation in Gaul and that in Britain: we would still need to explain why only in Britain did Latin remain a language of the cities, leaving British strong in the country, whereas Latin spread to every corner of the land in most of Gaul.

We shall return to this when we consider what became of British itself, over most of what is now England. But however weak British turned out to be in compet.i.tion with English, it must be remembered that British had outlived Latin in this island, even if it had never been seen as a language worth writing down. There is no trace of any Romance language a.s.suming a life of its own in Britain after the departure of the last Roman garrisons from Britain to defend Italy in the early 400s.

Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances

einfallen: (a) to collapse, to cave in; (b) in ein Land ~ to invade (a country); (c) (night) to fall, (winter) to set in; (d) (beams of light) to be incident; (e) (game birds) to come in, settle; (f) to join in, come in (on a piece of music), break in (to a conversation); (g) (thought) occur to somebody...

Collins German Dictionary einfallen:... loan translation of Latin incidere.

Reklams Etymologisches Worterbuch von Lutz Mackensen

The Germanic invasions-irresistible and ineffectual