We now turn to look at this tale in more detail. It costs some effort to forget the well-known recent centuries, and see these languages as they appeared at the beginning. Perhaps the best way to begin is to consider how they appeared to those ever curious, but in this case uninvolved, bystanders, the Greeks.

The contenders: Greek and Roman views

The Celts

At the start the Greeks simply saw the Celts as one of the framing nations of their world: Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, says that they lived where the river Istros (Danube) came from, farthest west of all European nations, but for the Cynetes.1 He places them beyond the Pillars of Hercules, effectively on the Atlantic coast where Portugal is today, just as the historian Ephorus2 does a century later, Celts in the west, Scythians in the north. There was something of conventional legend in this story, reminiscent of the Chinese world image which saw the familiar, civilised, world surrounded on all sides by unknown barbarians (see Chapter 4, 'Foreign relations', p. 158). But if so, the cliche had been a lucky guess. On modern evidence there were at the time Celtic speakers all the way across from the source of the Danube to the north of Iberia.

Their first real appearance is in the tale of the young prince Alexander's reception of Celtic amba.s.sadors from the coast of the Adriatic in 335 BC. It was apparently reported by his friend Ptolemy, who as it happened went on to be king of Egypt.3 They were big men, he says, in stature and in opinion of themselves, and demonstrated this with a famous remark. They offered their friendship to Alexander-his empire-building had then yet to begin-but when challenged by him to say whether they were frightened, they declared that there was only one thing which filled them with dread, and that was the thought that the sky might one day crash down on them. This remained a byword for Celtic grandiloquence, but it seems to have been a misunderstanding of a Celtic oath formula. A thousand years later, Irishmen were still binding themselves 'unless the firmament with its showers of stars fall upon the earth, or unless the blue-bordered fish-abounding sea come over the face of the world, or unless the earth quake... '4 Subsequently the Celts (also known as Gauls: Galatai in Greek, Galli in Latin-Caesar comments that Celtae is the Gauls' own word5) did gain a certain reputation. It is set out at length by the historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the late first century BC, and probably following the personal researches of the Greek polymath Posidonius.6 Physically, they were supposed to be tall, lithe and fair, often with their hair artificially bleached with lime, the n.o.bles sporting moustaches that covered their mouths and served as de facto wine-strainers. (This particular joke is over two thousand years old.) Their language sounded deep and altogether harsh. They were not without flair or subtlety, but did lack fixity of purpose, delighting to talk tersely in aphorisms and riddles. Nevertheless, they grew wordy when the time came to build themselves up, or belittle an opponent, in the lead-up to a fight. They dressed in bright colours, with cloaks often in check patterns, and-distinctively in the ancient world-the men wore trousers, called bracae*

The Germans

As for the Germans, the Greeks tended to confuse them with the Celts: after all, they all lived somewhere to the north-west, and no one had yet thought to look for significant differences among such impenetrably barbarous tongues. For the ancients, clear distinguishing features could only be cultural; linguistically, the best that could be done was to note that one tribe had difficulty understanding another.

Even writing in the first century AD, after Caesar had subdued Gaul up to the Rhine, the Greek Strabo could not give much of a description of the Germans.7 Living to the east of the Rhine, they were wilder, bigger and fairer than the Celts, but otherwise very similar. In fact, so quintessentially similar did they appear to Strabo that he etymologised their name Germani, as the Latin for 'out and out [Celts]'. Caesar seems to have been responsible for setting the Rhine as a divider, but there is precious little evidence, archaeological or inscriptional, to back up his distinction, and he probably took the river as a convenient natural boundary to his conquests. Nevertheless, this did soon become the permanent boundary of the Roman empire, which meant that henceforth Gauls and Germans would be politically, if not ethnically, divided along this line.

Caesar's view was that German society was simpler than that of the Gauls, without agriculture but more polarised around military prowess, and less capable of forming large-scale communities. In this he may have uncovered the secret of the Germans' long-term success in fending off Roman conquest.

A century and a half later, the basic separation between Gaul and German at the Rhine was reiterated by Tacitus in his treatise Germania, although he noted that there were a few German tribes who had crossed over. He also provided the cla.s.sic treatment of the character of German society, as Posidonius and Caesar had done for Gaul. He saw them as a society of small isolated families, feeling crowded if they could see their neighbours' chimney smoke even in the distance, and coming together only for the enn.o.bling purpose of glory in war. He rather admired their egalitarian upbringing, physical fitness in harsh conditions, and simple morality.

* In fact, this word is borrowed from Germanic. Besides breeks or britches, it underlies the Celtic word for footwear, brogues.

Such differences would in fact not be sought until 1599, when Joseph Justus Scaliger cla.s.sified Latin, Greek, Germanic and Slavonic languages through their different words for G.o.d.

We now know, on the basis of contemporary Gaulish inscriptions, and the subsequent development of the languages into the distinct families of Celtic and Germanic, that there were substantive linguistic divisions between Celt and German. There are monumental inscriptions in discernibly Celtic languages (in Iberian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman scripts) from the first centuries BC and AD from all over northern Iberia, Gaul, northern Italy and even (though only of Celtic names) in southern Germany, at Manching on the Danube. Likewise, discernibly Germanic inscriptions (written in the runic alphabet) have been found on small portable items such as weapons and safety pins (fibulae), from Slovenia in the first century BC to Denmark two hundred years later. From the extremely sketchy evidence we have, it seems that Caesar's Gallic/Germanic distinction was real, but that there was a major overlap of the languages' spheres in the area that today comprises western Germany and Austria.

The Romans

More interesting than the Greeks' failure to distinguish the essence of the Gaul and the German was their evolving att.i.tude to the Romans, the third contender for linguistic spread over western Europe.

There is nothing to pre-figure the destiny of Rome in cla.s.sical Greek literature. The first surviving mention of the city is from the fourth century BC, in a fragment of Aristotle.8 He also mentions their neighbours the Oscans ('Opikoi, also called Ausones') in a global discussion of the origins of communal dining, quoting chroniclers of the Greek colonists. But he does not mention the radically new const.i.tution that the Romans had adopted in the past century, abolishing kings and inst.i.tuting a republic under the balanced equality of two elected consuls.

Evidently, the first Greeks to encounter Latin speakers would have been colonists: they probably saw them as a bit of local colour among the Etruscans who controlled the landward side of the Greek settlements at Pithecusae (Ischia) and Kyme (c.u.mae). It would have been Greek colonists then who, over five hundred years, witnessed the gradual emergence of Rome, chief city of the region of Latium, from domination by Etruscans to independence and then commanding influence among the indigenous nations of Italy. There is a story9 that in 323 BC the Romans sent one of the many deputations that went to Babylon to congratulate Alexander, the new master of the Persian empire. If true, it probably shows that they had heard rumours that he next planned to turn his conquering attentions to the west. This was 150 years before the Romans had any serious interests in the eastern Mediterranean.

Greeks were fascinated by Rome's winning ways in global politics, and characteristically began to theorise some sort of explanation. Polybius had made the best of his deportation from Greece to Italy in 167 BC (his father had been a prominent Achaean politician) by getting to know the Roman elite: he then devoted much of his life to writing an account of 'how and by what kind of government almost the whole inhabited world was brought under Roman rule ...'10 In the event, although he knew many of the Roman protagonists or their children and grandchildren, and reconstructed a meticulous narrative of events and motives since 220 BC, he offers no simple answer to his question. But he does stress the moral impression made by the Romans: 'Italians in general have a natural advantage over Phoenicians and Africans both in physical strength and personal courage, but at the same time their inst.i.tutions contribute very powerfully towards fostering a spirit of bravery in their young men.'11 He also cites the Roman fear of divine retribution after death, superst.i.tion though it may be, as fostering honesty: 'At any rate, the result is that among the Greeks, apart from anything else, men who hold public office cannot be trusted with the safekeeping of so much as a single talent, even if they have ten accountants and as many seals and twice as many witnesses, whereas among the Romans their magistrates handle large sums of money and scrupulously perform their duty because they have given their word on oath.'12 Less cultivated the Romans might be; but there was something about them that impressed the Greeks.

Two hundred years later, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor and Gaul had been added to Roman domains, and Roman dominance must have come to seem a fact of nature. Nevertheless, even then Greeks did not think of the Romans as quite on a par with themselves. Strabo, in the midst of a review of the geography of the whole world, still sees southern Italy outside the remaining Greek enclaves of Tarentum, Naples and Rhegium as barbarian territory, explicitly because it has been taken over by Romans.13 Ironically, this southern region was the area of Italy that had retained its own language until the first century BC, a language known as Oscan to the Romans, Opic to the Greeks. This language, related to Latin but as different from it as German is from English, had once been spoken far more widely than Latin; it had been the language, for example, of the Romans' early rivals, the Sabines (whose women the Romans had famously stolen) and the Samnites.

In fact, when they wanted to put them down, the Greeks liked to refer to their Roman masters as Opikoi. 'They keep calling us barbarians and insult us more foully than others with the name of opics,' the proverbially stiff Marcus Cato complained.14 The point of this slur seems to have been lack of education, since the word was being borrowed back into Latin as a byword for illiteracy. Juvenal talks about a pedantic lady telling off her 'opic' girlfriend for using the wrong word.'15 'Opic' was malapropic. This was another cruel irony. Had they forgotten that the first poet to adapt Greek metrics for use in Roman poetry had himself been an Oscan speaker, Quintus Ennius? Ennius had liked to boast that his three languages gave him three hearts.16 His mother tongue had been Oscan, as he grew up in Calabria, in the heel of Italy; he knew Greek, because his local big city was Tarentum; and he had learnt Latin serving in the Roman army in the war against Hannibal. Two hundred and fifty years later, the last faint echoes of Oscan could still be heard, in the annual mime shows at Rome.17

The Slavs

In a way, trying to get a Greek view of the Romans to compare with their view of the Celts or Germans is unrewarding. The Celts and Germans may have been entertaining strangers, but after the second century BC the relationship between the Greeks and the Romans became more like a marriage (see Chapter 6, 'A Roman welcome: Greek spread through culture', p. 250). The Slavs, on the other hand, became a factor in the language map of Europe only when they forcibly made their presence felt on the Greeks. Understandably, there is little sympathetic insight in the early Greek descriptions, which were in any case written much later, when they were bearing down on the Balkans and Greece itself (see Chapter 6, 'Intimations of decline', p. 262). Prior to this, though, Tacitus (in his Germania, AD 98) has some remarks to make on their ancestors, the Veneti (latterly known as the Wends, or Sorbs) and Fenni (whose name was later given to the Finns, but who may have been Slavs).

The tribes of Peucini, Venethi and Fenni, I hesitate whether to cla.s.sify as Germans or Sarmatians...18 The Venethi have brought many customs from them [the Sarmatians]: they prey on the whole range of woods and mountains between the Peucini [in the south] and the Fenni [in the north]. But they are more like Germans, since they build houses, use shields, and like to move on foot and fast: this is all very different from the Sarmatians who live in wagons and on horseback. The Fenni's savagery is amazing, their poverty appalling: they have no arms, no horses, no homes: they live on gra.s.s, dress in skins, sleep on the ground; their only resource is arrows, sharpened with bone for lack of iron. The same hunting sustains both men and women: they accompany each other everywhere, and claim their share of the prey. The children have no shelter from beasts or showers beyond the covering woven from branches, and this is where youths return, and old people take refuge. But they think this is happier than groaning in fields, working in houses, and trying their and others' fortunes in hope and fear; they have no care for people, no care for G.o.ds, but have achieved something of outstanding difficulty, not even to need to wish for anything.19 The Veneti also appear in the pages of Ptolemy, mid-second century AD, as the Ouenedai, a 'very large nation occupying Sarmatia along the whole Venetic Gulf'. Apparently then they were living along the Baltic sh.o.r.e.20

Run: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts

Run: (a) something hidden or occult, a mystery; hidden meaning; (b) a secret; (c) secret thoughts or wishes, intention, purpose; (d) full consciousness, knowledge; (e) darling, love.

Royal Irish Academy, Dictionary of the Irish Language Celtic origins are obscure, but when first heard of this culture was already seated at the heart of western Europe.

Archaeologically, they are identified with the culture, or rather succession of cultures, typified first by the Hallstatt site in Austria (dated thirteenth to sixth centuries BC), and then by the La Tene site on Lake Neufchstel in Switzerland (from the sixth to the first century BC). Together with comparable sites, these defined the Iron Age way of life as experienced in central Europe. Their material goods, well preserved by salt and by marshland respectively in the two sites, include weapons, bronze and ceramic vessels, jewellery, clothing, wooden tools, pins, buckles, razors and wheeled vehicles. The decorative style with elaborate swirls and spirals, which we still see as Celtic, is very much in evidence.

This, then, defined the home life of our Celts. What of their linguistic existence?

Traces of Celtic languages

The longest-lasting, and most widely broadcast, evidence of the spread of Celtic languages is given by their place names: Celtic place names have a certain feel to them. Towns set up by Celts would often have suffixes such as -dunum, 'fort', -briga, 'hill', -magus, 'plain', -briva, 'crossing', -bona, 'settlement' or 'spring'. There is also a recognisably Celtic tendency to self-congratulation: sego-, 'powerful', uxello-, 'high'. Such names can be found from the north of Britain (Uxellodunum to Segedunum at either end of Hadrian's Wall) to the very south of Iberia (Caetobriga-Setubal, just south of Lisbon), and from the English Channel (Rotomagus-Rouen) to the Danube (Vindobona-Vienna, Singidunum-Belgrade). The snag is that such etymologising is so easy it may even have led to some towns being given a Celtic name for purely sentimental reasons. It is noticeable that many of them were created under Roman rule: Iuliobona, Augustodurum, Caesaromagus in Gaul, Flaviobriga, Augustobriga, Iuliobriga in Spain. A single place name is hardly evidence that the language from which it is drawn was spoken when the name was given.

It is also possible just to take the testimony of people, usually Greeks or Romans, who met or knew of Celts in different parts of Europe. Strabo records that three tribes of Gauls, the Boii,* Taurisci and Scordisci, were mixed up with the Thracians, which would place them towards the Balkans. He also says that the Scordisci lived near where the Noaros, the river swelled by the Kolapis, flows into the Danube.21 Now a look at the map shows that the river swelled by the Ku(l)pa is in fact the Sava, and it flows into the Danube at Singidunum, modern Belgrade. Strabo is quite careful to distinguish Gauls from other races, for example noting that the Bastarnae may be considered Germans (vii.3.17), and that the Dacians and Getai speak the same language (vii.3.13). Although he makes no explicit reference to the language of these Gauls, it would seem that in the first century AD some form of Gaulish would have been spoken not just in southern Germany, but down into what is now Croatia and Serbia.

Finally, there is the evidence of what languages are spoken where today. The Celtic languages spoken in the British Isles up to the present day are the direct descendants of the indigenous tongues that the Romans heard about them over the four hundred years when Britain was occupied, and Ireland was visited occasionally. There is also a continuing Celtic-language tradition in the Breton corner in the north-west of France, even if it remains unclear whether this has been strictly unbroken; i.e. whether Breton is a continuation of Gaulish, or a reimport of the language from Cornwall in the first millennium AD. Perhaps it is both, remixed.

* The Boii were well known as a far-flung tribe of Gauls, having connections with Bohemia (etymologically 'Boii-home', though in Germanic not Celtic) and having a major settlement in north-eastern Italy (around such modern cities as Bologna, Parma and Modena). Somehow they also showed up as allies of the Helvetii in southern Gaul, and were defeated by Caesar at Bibracte in 58 BC. The name means 'hitters', according to Lambert (1997: 44).

How they were related to the Celts in western Europe is quite unclear. Yugoslavia and Hungary are in fact the heart of the so-called Urnfield culture, dated by archaeologists to the first half of the first millennium BC, and so preceding the high points of Hallstatt and La Tene. The Urnfield culture had been on the path of the spread of Iron Age civilisation from the Aegean; and so it is quite possible that Celts had been in this area even longer than in western Europe. But as historians of Celtic-language speakers, we can only be agnostic about the link to these prehistoric material cultures.

Whatever the travels that took them there by the third century BC, we therefore have evidence of a variety of peoples most likely speaking Celtic, predominating in western Europe and its islands but extending right round the Alps north and south, and on into Dalmatia. They were predominantly settled populations, living in farming villages with roads linking them. Latin has shown up one characteristic of contemporary Gaul by (quite consciously, it seems) borrowing from Gaulish so many words for wheeled vehicles: benna, 'buggy', carrus, 'hand-cart', cisiwn, 'cabriolet', carpentum, 'carriage', essedum, 'war chariot', raeda, 'coach'. Indeed, magnificent four-wheeled carriages are significant grave-goods in many of the La Tene graves. So although basically settled, Gaulish society could also be very mobile when it chose.

But for linguists, the hardest evidence of where and when the language was used comes from writing. Since none of the Celts had a written literary tradition until fifth-century AD Ireland, this means that we are largely reliant on inscriptions. These come from many different places. Celts appear to have been literate only where they had neighbours who could teach them. And the places where this happened are far flung indeed, though naturally they tend to be on the margins of Celtic-speaking areas. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, they do not include sites equated with the Hallstatt or La Tene cultures.

How to recognise Celtic

Recognising an inscription as Celtic means knowing something about the properties of ancient Celtic languages. It turns out that an important characteristic of Celtic was the loss of the sound [p]. Such Latin basic words as pater, piscis, plenus, super, pro (translated by their English relatives father, fish, full, over, before) turn up still in modern Irish Gaelic as athair, iasc, lan, for, roimh. The same phenomenon can be seen in some of the remaining vestiges of Gaulish or British: Cambo-ritum, the British name of Lackford in Suffolk, seems to mean 'Crooked Ford', the last element, like rhyd in Welsh, meaning 'ford' (cf. Greek poros, Latin portus). And it is conjectured that the source for the name of the notorious 'Hercynian forest' mentioned by Caesar and Tacitus (now the Black Forest, but extending all the way across the German highlands to modern Leipzig) must have been a Celtic speaker who dropped his Ps: if its real name were Perkun this would make it the same as some Germanic words for mountain (Gothic fairguni, Old English firgen), but also allow a nice tie-up with the origin of the old Latin word quercus, 'oak'. It is natural to derive this from *perquus (cf. known parallels such as quinque, 'five', from *penque, coquo, 'cook', from *pequo). And then it looks very like the name of the Lithuanian G.o.d Perkunas, known for his a.s.sociation with oak trees!*

In other ways, Celtic languages of the period are remarkably like Latin. The system of inflexion for Gaulish nouns was just a little more complex than the Latin one, with seven cases to Latin's six, but tantalisingly close to it. So, for example, the noun EQVOS, 'horse', has the genitive EQVI, 'horse's'-the very same words in Latin and Gaulish. 'He has given to the mothers of Nimes' comes out as DEDE MATREBO NAMAUSIKABO; in Latin it could be *DEDIT MATRIBUS NEMAUSICABUS. An everyday piece of authentic Gaulish could be very close to its Latin equivalent: take for examples two typically frisky inscriptions on spindle whorls: MONI GNATHA GABI BVVTON IMON and NATA VIMPI CURMI DA would translate to MEA NATA, CAPE MENTVLAM MEAM and NATA BELLA, CERVISIAM DA: 'my girl, take my todger' and 'pretty girl, give some ale'.22 On a modern estimate, these divergences would represent something like one and a half millennia of separate development, or sixty generations. Although both were speaking variants of what had once been the same language, this was enough time for very different traditions to have developed in each variant.

Celtic literacy

The earliest known Celtic inscriptions (from c.575 to 1 BC) are found in the southern foothills of the Alps near Lakes Como and Maggiore. This was the home of the Lepontii. Their language is hence known as Lepontic, and is written in a script, the 'Lugano' alphabet, evidently borrowed from the Etruscans, who were the dominant literate people in northern Italy.* The texts are usually only two or three words long, which can make interpretation difficult, and it is likely that most of the words are proper names.

No cla.s.sical author characterised the Lepontii as Celts (despite vague rumours of a very early Gallic settlement of this region in Polybius and Livy).23 Nevertheless, there are grounds for viewing Lepontic as a form of Celtic. It seems to have lost P, having uer- and latu- in place of Indo-European uper-, 'over', and platu-, 'flat'; it also has some proper names very reminiscent of Gauls, for example alKouinos, like Alkovindos, which would contain the root windo-, 'white', seen also in Winchester (once more clearly called Vin-dobona) and Guinevere.

Over four hundred years later, from about 150 BC, the same Lugano alphabet was used in mirror image (now left to right), a little farther south round Novara, to record a more clearly Gaulish language. This would be the written footprint of the Insubrians, who had invaded the north of Italy in the historic period. Livy (v.34) remarks that the city of Mediolanum (Milan-Gaulish for 'mid-plain') was founded by Gaulish incomers, pleased to find that the name Insubrian (familiar to them as a cantonal name in their homeland across the Alps) was already established in the neighbourhood.

This typical inscription reads: TANOTALIKNOI Dannotalos-son

KUITOS Quintos

LEKATOS the legate

ANOKOPOKIOS Andocombogios

SETUPOKIOS Setubogios

ESANEKOTI (sons) of Essandecotos

ANAREUIZEOS Andareuiseos

TANOTALOS Dannotalos