For more than four centuries, the Celtic and Roman worlds confronted each other in a long, complex, and often violent encounter that transformed both civilizations. From the first shocks of the Iron Age Celtic expansion into the Italian peninsula to the final incorporation of Celtic Britain into the Roman province system, the relationship between the two peoples shaped the political, cultural, and linguistic map of Europe. To follow the Celtic encounter with Rome is to trace the end of independent Celtic political life on the continent and the beginning of the long transformation that would eventually produce the medieval Celtic-speaking societies of the British Isles, as part of the broader history of the Celtic civilization.
The encounter was not a single event but a long process of war, trade, cultural exchange, accommodation, and resistance. The Romans did not conquer the Celtic world in a single blow; they chipped away at it over centuries, exploiting Celtic divisions, intervening in Celtic politics, and gradually extending their control over a continent that had previously been dominated by Celtic-speaking peoples.
The Celtic Sack of Rome
The most famous early episode of the Celtic-Roman encounter was the Celtic sack of Rome in 390 or 387 BCE. The traditional Roman account describes a great horde of Celtic warriors from the Senones tribe, led by a chieftain named Brennus, who swept down into central Italy. The Romans sent an army to meet them at the Allia, a small river about eleven kilometers north of the city, and were disastrously defeated. The Celts entered an almost empty Rome and occupied it for several months. According to tradition, they besieged the Capitol, where a small Roman garrison held out, and the famous geese of the Capitol, sacred to the goddess Juno, cackled a warning that saved the garrison from a nocturnal surprise attack. Eventually, the Celts agreed to withdraw on payment of a ransom of one thousand pounds of gold, and when the Roman tribunes objected that the weights used by the Celts were false, Brennus threw his sword onto the scales with the famous words Vae victis (“Woe to the conquered”). The historical reality behind these stories is debated, but there is no doubt that the event was traumatic for the Roman psyche, and the figure of the wild, golden-haired, broad-shouldered Gallic warrior became one of the most enduring of Roman bogeymen.
The Celtic sack of Rome was not an isolated event. Throughout the fourth and third centuries BCE, Celtic war bands raided repeatedly into central Italy, reaching as far south as Apulia and the Adriatic coast. The decisive Roman victory at the Battle of Lake Vadimo in 283 BCE marked the beginning of a more assertive Roman response, and the gradual subjugation of the Po Valley in the following century effectively ended the threat of Celtic invasion of central Italy.
Roman Expansion into the Celtic World
While the Romans were consolidating their control of the Italian peninsula, they were also extending their reach into the western Mediterranean. The Roman conquest of the Po Valley Celtic tribes, completed by the early second century BCE, brought the Romans into direct contact with the Celtic world north of the Alps. The province of Gallia Cisalpina, established in the late third century, served as a base for further Roman expansion into the heart of the Celtic world.
The decisive phase of Roman expansion into the Celtic world came in the second century BCE, with the conquest of the Celtic-speaking regions of the Iberian Peninsula. The Roman presence in Iberia, originally established in response to Carthaginian interests, brought the Romans into direct conflict with the Celtiberian tribes of the central and northern highlands. The Numantine War of 143 to 133 BCE, in which the Roman consul Scipio Aemilianus finally broke the resistance of the Celtiberian city of Numantia after a long and bloody siege, was one of the most celebrated events of the second century BCE, and it opened the way for the Roman conquest of the rest of the peninsula.
The Romans also moved into the southern Gaulish coast in the second century, establishing a foothold in the region around modern Provence. The Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis, formally constituted in 121 BCE, was the first Roman province in what is now France, and it served as a staging ground for the conquest of the rest of Gaul. The province was thoroughly Romanized within a generation, with new cities such as Narbo Martius and Nemausus founded as Roman colonial settlements.
The Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar
The conquest of the rest of Gaul was the work of a single man and a single decade. Between 58 and 51 BCE, the proconsul Julius Caesar, in a series of brilliant and brutal campaigns documented in his own Commentarii de Bello Gallico, reduced the independent Celtic world of Gaul to a network of Roman provinces. The campaigns began in 58 BCE with Caesar’s intervention against the Helvetii, a Celtic people who were attempting to migrate from Switzerland into western Gaul, and continued with wars against the Germanic king Ariovistus, the Belgic tribes of northern Gaul, the maritime Veneti of Brittany, and a host of other peoples.
The Gallic Wars were fought with a combination of military genius, ruthless exploitation of tribal divisions, and overwhelming force. Caesar had at his disposal the veteran legions of the Roman army, supplemented by allied Celtic cavalry and auxiliaries. He was an exceptional strategist, and he exploited the political divisions among the Celtic tribes to the full, playing off the Aedui and the Arverni, the Remi and the Bellovaci, against one another in a series of shifting alliances. He also showed little hesitation in using terror, mass executions, and the enslavement of defeated populations as instruments of policy, methods that have made his wars a byword for imperial brutality.
The high point of Celtic resistance came in 52 BCE, when a great coalition of Gaulish tribes, led by the young Arvernian nobleman Vercingetorix, rose in revolt against Roman rule. Vercingetorix attempted to wage a scorched-earth campaign against the Roman invaders, withdrawing his people from the towns and villages that the Romans could use as bases and seeking battle only when the conditions favored him. The strategy was brilliant, and it very nearly succeeded. Caesar suffered several reverses, including a humiliating defeat at Gergovia, before he was able to trap Vercingetorix and his army in the hilltop fortress of Alesia.
The siege of Alesia in the autumn of 52 BCE was one of the most extraordinary military operations of the ancient world. Caesar surrounded the hilltop town with massive circumvallation works, including a wall and ditch system that stretched for more than twenty kilometers, and then, when a great relief force of Gaulish warriors approached, he built an additional line of fortifications facing outward to protect his besiegers from the threat of attack from the rear. Trapped between the two walls, the army of Vercingetorix was finally forced to surrender. The chief himself was taken, displayed in Caesar’s triumph in Rome, and executed six years later. The fall of Alesia marked the effective end of independent Celtic political life on the continent.
The Roman Conquest of Britain
The last great conquest of the Celtic world was that of Britain. The Romans had known of Britain since the campaigns of Caesar in 55 and 54 BCE, but the actual conquest of the island was not undertaken until more than ninety years later. In 43 CE, the emperor Claudius, anxious for military glory at the beginning of his reign, dispatched an invasion force of some forty thousand men under the command of the senator Aulus Plautius. The Romans landed in southeastern Britain, defeated the Catuvellaunian king Caratacus and his brother Togodumnus at the battles of the Medway and the Thames, and within a few months had established their control over most of the lowland south and east.
The conquest of highland Britain proved much more difficult. Wales, the Lake District, the Pennines, and most of Scotland remained unconquered for decades, and the Roman military frontier in the north, marked by the building of Hadrian’s Wall in the second century CE and the Antonine Wall shortly afterward, was a constant zone of military pressure and contact. The Brigantes of northern England, the Silures of southern Wales, the Ordovices of central Wales, and the Caledonians of what is now Scotland all fought tenacious resistance campaigns against Roman rule, and the Roman army in Britain was one of the largest and most expensive military establishments of the empire.
The Roman province of Britannia, as it came to be called, was the westernmost and most remote of the major Roman provinces, and its Celtic-speaking population, the Britons, would eventually give their name to the entire island. The conquest of Britain, in the long run, was less successful than that of Gaul, and the Roman presence in the province was confined primarily to the lowland south and east.
The Gallo-Roman World
The Roman conquest of Gaul did not mean the end of Celtic culture. On the contrary, the four centuries of Roman rule in Gaul saw the development of a vibrant Gallo-Roman civilization that blended Celtic and classical elements in complex and often surprising ways. The Celtic language of Gaul, known as Gaulish, continued to be spoken throughout the Roman period, and it did not finally die out until the fifth or sixth century CE. The Celtic gods, far from being suppressed by the Roman authorities, were typically equated with Roman gods in a process known as interpretatio Romana, and the great Celtic deities of Gaul, including Lugus, Belenus, Teutates, Taranis, Epona, and Cernunnos, continued to be worshipped in Roman Gaul under their own names or under their Roman equivalents.
The material culture of Roman Gaul shows a similar mixture of Celtic and classical elements. The great Gallo-Roman cities of Arles, Nîmes, Lyon, Autun, and Paris were built in the classical style, with temples, theaters, amphitheaters, and aqueducts, but the religion, the personal names, the place names, and many of the customs of their inhabitants remained recognizably Celtic. The famous Pilier des Nautes, a monument from the early first century CE found in Paris, is decorated with images of Celtic deities, including Cernunnos, the horned god, and the three-headed figure often identified as the tricephalic god.
The transformation of Gaul from a Celtic-speaking to a Latin-speaking region was a long and gradual process. Latin became the language of administration, of the army, of the cities, and of the upper classes, while Celtic survived in the countryside, in the household, and in the religious life of the people. By the fifth century, when the Roman administration in Gaul was collapsing under the pressure of Germanic invasions, the Celtic and Latin languages were competing for the allegiance of the population, and the eventual triumph of Latin in northern Gaul was by no means inevitable at that point.
Roman Britain and Its Celtic Fringe
The Roman province of Britannia was less thoroughly Romanized than Gaul, and the Celtic-speaking peoples of highland Britain retained much more of their traditional culture throughout the Roman period. The lowland south and east of Britain became thoroughly Roman, with cities, villas, a road network, and a Latin-speaking population, but the highland west and north remained Celtic in language, in custom, and in political organization. The great hill forts of the British Iron Age, including Cadbury Castle, Maiden Castle, and Yeavering Bell, may have continued to serve as centers of Celtic power into the Roman period, and the Roman military frontier in the north was never fully secure.
By the early fifth century, the Roman province of Britannia was in steep decline, and the Roman military, which had been the foundation of provincial security, was withdrawn to defend the empire’s continental core. The departure of the Roman army in 410 CE, recorded by the historian Zosimus, marked the end of Roman rule in Britain and the beginning of a new phase in the history of the Celtic-speaking peoples of the island, one that would eventually lead to the medieval kingdoms of Wales, Cornwall, Strathclyde, and the early medieval flowering of Celtic civilization in the British Isles.
The Legacy of the Encounter
The long history of the Celtic-Roman encounter, is less a story of conquest and destruction than a story of transformation and survival. The Roman conquest of the continental Celtic world did not eliminate Celtic culture but mixed Celtic and classical elements into the Gallo-Roman civilization that would eventually produce the medieval cultures of France, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Rhineland. The Celtic languages of Gaul died out over the centuries of Roman rule, but they left a profound mark on the French language, on the place names of the region, and on the rural culture of the French countryside.
Related Topics
- The origins and emergence of the Celts and Iron Age Celtic expansion provide the background to the Celtic-Roman encounter.
- The Celtic presence in the British Isles follows the story of the unconquered Celtic fringe of Roman Britain.
- The post-Roman Celtic survival traces the development of Celtic-speaking societies in the centuries after the Roman withdrawal.
- The famous Celtic warriors and leaders of the resistance to Rome are examined in detail, including Vercingetorix, Caratacus, and Boudicca.
- The Celtic religion survived the Roman conquest in the form of syncretic Gallo-Roman cults and in the saints and folklore of medieval France.