The Celtic expansion of the fourth and third centuries BCE carried Celtic-speaking peoples, Celtic warriors, and Celtic material culture across a vast arc of Europe, from the Atlantic coast of Ireland to the plains of central Anatolia. The eastern limit of this expansion, the farthest point reached by Celtic-speaking peoples in the ancient world, is the subject of some of the most dramatic episodes in the history of the Celtic civilization. To follow the Iron Age Celtic expansion eastward is to trace the route of great war bands through the Balkans, to revisit the famous sack of Delphi, and to follow a portion of the invaders across the Hellespont into Asia Minor, where they established a Celtic-speaking kingdom that endured for more than seven centuries.
The Eastern Celtic Movement
The eastern movement of Celtic-speaking peoples began in the late fourth century BCE, in the wake of the Celtic expansion into the Po Valley of northern Italy and the subsequent migrations of Celtic war bands through the Danube basin and into the Balkans. The motives behind this movement are debated, but they probably include a combination of population pressure in the Celtic heartland, the search for loot and adventure, and the political vacuum created by the breakup of the Macedonian empire after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. The Macedonian Successor Wars had weakened the Greek states of the Balkans, and the Celtic war bands found ready opportunities for plunder and settlement in the unstable landscape of the late fourth century.
The earliest major wave of Celtic movement into the Balkans is associated with a chieftain named Cambaules, who led a great host of Celtic warriors into Thrace and Illyria around 335 BCE. A few years later, in 323 BCE, the Celtic leader Cerethrius led another great host southward into Macedonia, and the Macedonian regent Antipater was forced to negotiate a peace that allowed the Celts to withdraw with their plunder.
The Great Invasion of 279 BCE
The climax of the eastern Celtic movement came in 279 BCE, when a great host of Celtic warriors, variously estimated by ancient sources at tens of thousands of fighting men, pushed south into Greece. The Greek sources, written long after the event, give a confused and partly mythologized account of the invasion, but the broad outlines are clear. The Celts divided into three groups. One group, under a chieftain named Cerethrius, turned west into Illyria. A second group, under chieftains named Leonnorius and Lutarius, moved east into Thrace. The third group marched south into Greece itself.
The Greek city-states, weakened by decades of warfare and the upheavals of the Macedonian period, were unable to stop the invasion. The Celts attacked Macedonia, defeating and killing the Macedonian king Ptolemy Keraunos, one of the few Macedonian kings ever to die in combat against external enemies. They then moved south into central Greece, sacking the towns of the Boeotian countryside and threatening the great sanctuaries of Olympia and Delphi. The Aetolian League, a confederation of Greek tribes in central Greece, organized the defense of the region, and the famous Celtic battle tactics of the era were matched against the phalanx of the Greek infantry.
The Sack of Delphi
The climax of the Greek campaign came in 279 BCE, when a force of Celtic warriors attacked the sanctuary of Delphi. The Delphic accounts, written long after the event, claim that the god Apollo himself defended his sanctuary with an earthquake and a snowstorm, and that the Celts were driven back in confusion. The Greek historian Pausanias, writing in the second century CE, preserved the story that the Celts were terrified by the supernatural defense of the shrine. Modern scholars are skeptical of this account, and it is possible that the attack on Delphi never actually took place in the form the tradition suggests, or that it was a smaller raid than the later sources claim.
What is clear is that the Celtic presence in Greece was short-lived, and that the main body of the invaders soon moved on. The reason for the Celtic withdrawal is debated, but it may have had as much to do with the onset of winter, the lack of provisions, and the difficulty of the terrain as with any Greek military success. The aftermath of the Delphi campaign saw the Celtic war bands scatter across the Greek world as mercenaries, some of them eventually making their way into the service of the Hellenistic kings of the east.
The Crossing into Asia Minor
The most consequential result of the eastern Celtic movement was the crossing of a portion of the invaders into Asia Minor. According to the ancient sources, the chieftains Leonnorius and Lutarius led their war band into Thrace after the Greek campaign, and from there they were hired as mercenaries by Nicomedes I of Bithynia, a Hellenistic king ruling in northwest Asia Minor. In 275 BCE, the Celtic mercenaries played a decisive role in Nicomedes’ victory over his brother Zipoetes II, and as a reward, Nicomedes granted them a territory in central Anatolia, in the region of modern Ankara.
This territory became the kingdom of Galatia, and the Celtic-speaking settlers became known as the Galatians. The grant of land to the Galatians is recorded in the Greek historian Memnon of Heraclea, and the foundation of the Galatian state is one of the better-attested episodes of the Celtic eastern expansion. The Galatians, who numbered perhaps twenty thousand fighting men and their families at the time of the settlement, established a loose confederation of three tribal groupings: the Tolistobogii, the Trocmi, and the Tectosages, all names of clearly Celtic origin. The Tectosages in particular shared their name with a powerful Gaulish tribe of the Toulouse region, and the tradition that they had migrated together was preserved in later Galatian and Greek sources.
The Galatian Kingdom in Anatolia
The Galatians maintained a distinct Celtic identity in central Anatolia for more than seven centuries, an extraordinary example of cultural and linguistic survival in a region surrounded by Greek, Phrygian, Cappaciocian, and later Roman populations. The Galatians fought on both sides in the wars of the Hellenistic successors, served as mercenaries in the armies of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, and gradually developed a hybrid culture that combined Celtic, Phrygian, and Greek elements.
The Galatian kingdom reached its greatest extent in the third century BCE, when the Galatians controlled much of central Anatolia and raided the surrounding regions with impunity. By the second century BCE, however, the Galatians had been contained by the expanding power of the Attalid kingdom of Pergamon and later by the Roman Republic. In 25 BCE the region was incorporated into the Roman Empire as the province of Galatia.
The Galatians in the New Testament
The Galatians appear in the New Testament as the recipients of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, written probably in the 50s CE. Paul’s letters to the Galatians, addressed to a community of Christians in central Anatolia, were sent to churches in cities such as Derbe, Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch-in-Pisidia, where Celtic personal names such as Eposoronnos and other Galatian names still appear in the epigraphic record of the period. The famous statement that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female” was addressed to a community in which Celtic personal names were still in everyday use. The Galatian community of the first century CE was a remarkable survival of the Celtic presence in the eastern Mediterranean.
The Survival of the Galatian Language
The survival of the Galatian language into the early Christian era remarkable cases of linguistic persistence in the ancient world. Inscriptions in the Galatian language, written in a Celtic tongue closely related to Gaulish, survive from as late as the fourth century CE, and it is likely that the language continued to be spoken in the rural hinterland of central Anatolia for some time afterward. Saint Jerome, writing in the late fourth century, claimed that the Galatians of his day still spoke a language that was essentially the same as that of the Treveri of Gaul, an extraordinary testimony to the durability of the Celtic linguistic heritage in Asia Minor. The disappearance of the Galatian language marked the end of the easternmost Celtic-speaking community of the ancient world, and its full story is told in the Celtic settlement of Galatia.
Related Topics
- The Celtic settlement of Galatia
- The Iron Age Celtic expansion
- The Celtic battle tactics used in the Balkans and at Delphi
- The famous Celtic warriors and leaders of the eastern expansion
- The Celtic encounter with Rome