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Celts: Romans
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Although literature on the Celts has been abundant, recent archaeological evidence has altered a number of earlier views about them. Misunderstandings had resulted from a too ready acceptance of the writings of Classical writers, including those attributed to Julius Caesar. The traditional enemies of the Celts presented deliberately misleading and malicious accounts of them. The Romans bore in mind their early defeats at the hands of the Celts, which traumatised them and always rankled with them. As a consequence, the Romans continued to fear the Celts as stubborn opponents. It suited the Romans to try to portray them as having an inferior civilisation to that of Rome, no doubt to indicate that conquest by the Romans was for the Celts’ “own good”.
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Although the Celts were fearless warriors, they were too impetuous and individualistic to accept the discipline which was needed to defeat the Romans. Chances of a crushing victory were thrown away until, in the summer of 52 B.C., Caesar trapped Vercingetorix and 80,000 followers in the fortified town of Alesia, on the Seine well upstream from modern Paris. Preparing for a long siege, Caesar ordered his own men to construct an outer ring of defences of their own to hold off any attempt by the Gauls to relieve their heroic leader. By the time the expected reinforcements arrived, the Roman fortifications were complete. The huge army of a quarter of a million men, drawn from 41 tribes, made repeated but futile attempts to break through, and the Celts encircled in the ring of Roman steel slowly starved.
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Celts occupied land in modern day Eastern Europe, Greece, Spain, Northern Italy, Western Europe, England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The Celtic people have mystified anthropologists and historians for generations. They were a non literate culture whose history and literature was preserved through oral tradition. The only written records of their civilization are the texts left by classical authors, the first of which appear circa 500 BCE. These accounts, inaccurate as they may be, are important in that they demonstrate that the Celts came into cultural contact, and sometimes competition, with the Greeks as well as the Romans.
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By the tenth century the 'Celts' had ceased to exist as a completely separate people. Instead they had fragmented into small groups sharing a similar cultural background. It is difficult to guess where the 'Celts' left off and where the British peoples started, which is possibly a more accurate term. It's interesting to note that the name 'Celt' is derived from the word 'Keltoi' a people who the Greeks ran into around 500-400BC. Their term for these people was 'Galatai'. The Romans used the words 'Celtae', 'Galli' and 'Galatae'.
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At the dawn of history in Europe, the Celts in present-day France were known as Gauls. Their descendants were described by Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars. There was ... an early Celtic presence in northern Italy. Other Celtic tribes invaded Italy, establishing there a city they called Mediolanum (modern Milan) and sacking Rome itself in 390 BC following the Battle of the Allia. A century later the defeat of the combined Samnite, Celtic and Etruscan alliance by the Romans in the Third Samnite War sounded the end of the Celtic domination in Europe, but it was not until 192 BC that the Roman armies conquered the last remaining independent Celtic kingdoms in Italy.
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Note: From early times, the ancient Celts traded with the civilized cultures of the Greeks and Etruscans (pre-Roman peoples in Italy). There were other types of interaction--for instance, Cleopatra had a Celtic contingent in her army guard (Dottin, pg. 96). In 335 B.C., Alexander the Great received a delegation of Celts living in the Adriatic area. Pliny reported that the Celts in Gaul invented soap made from tallow and ash. (Dottin, pg.
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