And for several days they did stop them; and instead of three hundred heroes, as of yore in the case of Leonidas and his Spartans, only forty Greeks, they say, fell in the first engagement. ‘Amongst them was a young Athenian, Cydias by name, whose shield was hung in the temple of Zeus the savior, at Athens, with this inscription:—
THIS SHIELD, DEDICATED TO ZEUS, IS THAT OF A VALIANT MAN,
CYDIAS. IT STILL BEWAILS ITS
YOUNG MASTER. FOR THE FIRST TIME
HE BARE IT ON HIS LEFT ARM
WHEN TERRIBLE ARES CRUSHED
THE GAULS.
But soon, just as in the case of the Persians, traitors guided Brennus and his Gauls across the mountain-paths; the position of Thermopylae was turned; the Greek army owed its safety to the Athenian galleys; and by evening of the same day the barbarians appeared in sight of Delphi.
Brennus would have led them at once to the assault. He showed them, to excite them, the statues, vases, cars, monuments of every kind, laden with gold, which adorned the approaches of the town and of the temple: “‘Tis pure gold—massive gold,” was the news he had spread in every direction. But the very cupidity he provoked was against his plan; for the Gauls fell out to plunder. He had to put off the assault until the morrow. The night was passed in irregularities and orgies.
The Greeks, on the contrary, prepared with ardor for the fight. Their enthusiasm was intense. Those barbarians, with their half-nakedness, their grossness, their ferocity, their ignorance, and their impiety, were revolting. They committed murder and devastation like dolts. They left their dead on the field, without burial. They engaged in battle without consulting priest or augur. It was not only their goods, but their families, their life, the honor of their country, and the sanctuary of their religion, that the Greeks were defending, and they might rely on the protection of the gods. The oracle of Apollo had answered, “I and the white virgins will provide for this matter.” The people surrounded the temple, and the priests supported and encouraged the people. During the night small bodies of AEtolians, Amphisseans, and Phocidians arrived one after another. Four thousand men had joined within Delphi, when the Gallic bands, in the morning, began to mount the narrow and rough incline which led up to the town. The Greeks rained down from above a deluge of stones and other missiles. The Gauls recoiled, but recovered themselves. The besieged fell back on the nearest streets of the town, leaving open the approach to the temple, upon which the barbarians threw themselves. The pillage of the shrines had just commenced when the sky looked threatening; a storm burst forth, the thunder echoed, the rain fell, the hail rattled. Readily taking advantage of this incident, the priests and the augurs sallied from the temple clothed in their sacred garments, with hair dishevelled and sparkling eyes, proclaiming the advent of the god: “‘Tis he! we saw him shoot athwart the temple’s vault, which opened under his feet; and with him were two virgins, who issued from the temples of Artemis and Athena. We saw them with our eyes. We heard the twang of their bows, and the clash of their armor.” Hearing these cries and the roar of the tempest, the Greeks dash on—the Gauls are panic-stricken, and rush headlong down the bill. The Greeks push on in pursuit. Rumors of fresh apparitions are spread; three heroes, Hyperochus, Laodocus, and Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, have issued from their tombs hard by the temple, and are thrusting at the Gauls with their lances. The rout was speedy and general; the barbarians rushed to the cover of their camp; but the camp was attacked next morning by the Greeks from the town and by re-enforcements from the country places. Brennus and the picked warriors about him made a gallant resistance, but defeat was a foregone conclusion. Brennus was wounded, and his comrades bore him off the field. The barbarian army passed the whole day in flight. During the ensuing night a new access of terror seized them they again took to flight, and four days after the passage of Thermopylae some scattered bands, forming scarcely a third of those who had marched on Delphi, rejoined the division which had remained behind, some leagues from the town, in the plains watered by the Cephissus. Brennus summoned his comrades “Kill all the wounded and me,” said he; “burn your cars; make Cichor king; and away at full speed.” Then he called for wine, drank himself drunk, and stabbed himself. Cichor did cut the throats of the wounded, and traversed, flying and fighting, Thessaly and Macedonia; and on returning whence they had set out, the Gauls dispersed, some to settle at the foot of a neighboring mountain under the command of a chieftain named Bathanat or Baedhannatt, i.e., son of the wild boar; others to march back towards their own country; the greatest part to resume the same life of incursion and adventure. But they changed the scene of operations. Greece, Macedonia, and Thrace were exhausted by pillage, and made a league to resist. About 278 B.C. the Gauls crossed the Hellespont and passed into Asia Minor. There, at one time in the pay of the kings of Bithynia, Pergamos, Cappadocia, and Syria, or of the free commercial cities which were struggling against the kings, at another carrying on wars on their own account, they wandered for more than thirty years, divided into three great hordes, which parcelled out the territories among themselves, overran and plundered them during the fine weather, intrenched themselves during winter in their camp of cars, or in some fortified place, sold their services to the highest bidder, changed masters according to interest or inclination, and by their bravery became the terror of these effeminate populations and the arbiters of these petty states.
At last both princes and people grew weary. Antiochus, King of Syria, attacked one of the three bands,—that of the Tectosagians,—conquered it, and cantoned it in a district of Upper Phrygia. Later still, about 241 B.C., Eumenes, sovereign of Pergamos, and Attalus, his successor, drove and shut up the other two bands, the Tolistoboians and Troemians, likewise in the same region. The victories of Attalus over the Gauls excited veritable enthusiasm. He was celebrated as a special envoy from Zeus. He took the title of King, which his predecessors had not hitherto borne. He had his battles showily painted; and that he might triumph at the same time both in Europe and Asia, he sent one of the pictures to Athens, where it was still to be seen three centuries afterwards, hanging upon the wall of the citadel. Forced to remain stationary, the Gallic hordes became a people,—the Galatians,—and the country they occupied was called Galatia. They lived there some fifty years, aloof from the indigenous population of Greeks and Phrygians, whom they kept in an almost servile condition, preserving their warlike and barbarous habits, resuming sometimes their mercenary service, and becoming once more the bulwark or the terror of neighboring states. But at the beginning of the second century before our era, the Romans had entered Asia, in pursuit of their great enemy, Hannibal. They had just beaten, near Magnesia, Antiochus, King of Syria. In his army they had encountered men of lofty stature, with hair light or dyed red, half naked, marching to the fight with loud cries, and terrible at the first onset. They recognized the Gauls, and resolved to destroy or subdue them. The consul, Cn. Manlius, had the duty and the honor. Attacked in their strongholds on Mount Olympus and Mount Magaba, 189 B.C., the three Gallic bands, after a short but stout resistance, were conquered and subjugated; and thenceforth losing all national importance, they amalgamated little by little with the Asiatic populations around them. From time to time they are still seen to reappear with their primitive manners and passions. Rome humored them; Mithridates had them for allies in his long struggle with the Romans. He kept by him a Galatian guard; and when he sought death, and poison failed him, it was the captain of the guard, a Gaul named Bituitus, whom he asked to run him through. That is the last historical event with which the Gallic name is found associated in Asia.
Nevertheless the amalgamation of the Gauls of Galatia with the natives always remained very imperfect; for towards the end of the fourth century of the Christian era they did not speak Greek, as the latter did, but their national tongue, that of the Kymro-Belgians; and St. Jerome testifies that it differed very little from that which was spoken in Belgica itself, in the region of Troves.
The Romans had good ground for keeping a watchful eye, from the time they met them, upon the Gauls, and for dreading them particularly. At the time when they determined to pursue them into the mountains of Asia Minor, they were just at the close of a desperate struggle, maintained against them for four hundred years, in Italy itself; “a struggle,” says Sallust, “in which it was a question not of glory, but of existence, for Rome.” It was but just now remarked that at the beginning of the sixth century before our era, whilst, under their chieftain Sigovesus, the Gallic bands whose history has occupied the last few pages were crossing the Rhine and entering Germany, other bands, under the command of Bellovesus, were traversing the Alps and swarming into Italy. From 587 to 521 B.C. five Gallic expeditions, formed of Gallic, Kymric, and Ligurian tribes, followed the same route and invaded successively the two banks of the Po—the bottomless river, as they called it. The Etruscans, who had long before, it will be remembered, themselves wrested that country from a people of Gallic origin, the Umbrians or Ambrons, could not make head against the new conquerors, aided, may be, by the remains of the old population. The well-built towns, the cultivation of the country, the ports and canals that had been dug, nearly all these labors of Etruscan civilization disappeared beneath the footsteps of these barbarous hordes that knew only how to destroy, and one of which gave its chieftain the name of Hurricane (Elitorius, Ele-Dov). Scarcely five Etruscan towns, Mantua and Ravenna amongst others, escaped disaster. The Gauls also founded towns, such as Mediolanum (Milan), Brixia (Brescia), Verona, Bononia (Bologna), Sena-Gallica (Sinigaglia), &c. But for a long while they were no more than intrenched camps, fortified places, where the population shut themselves up in case of necessity. “They, as a general rule, straggled about the country,” says Polybius, the most correct and clear-sighted of the ancient historians, “sleeping on grass or straw, living on nothing but meat, busying themselves about nothing but war and a little husbandry, and counting as riches nothing but flocks and gold, the only goods that can be carried away at pleasure and on every occasion.”
During nearly thirty years the Gauls thus scoured not only Upper Italy, which they had almost to themselves, but all the eastern coast, and up to the head of the peninsula, encountering along the Adriatic, and in the rich and effeminate cities of Magna Graecia, Sybaris, Tarentum, Crotona, and Locri, no enemy capable of resisting them. But in the year 391 B.C., finding themselves cooped up in their territory, a strong band of Gauls crossed the Apennines, and went to demand from the Etruscans of Clusium the cession of a portion of their lands. The only answer Clusium made was to close her gates. The Gauls formed up around the walls. Clusium asked help from Rome, with whom, notwithstanding the rivalry between the Etruscan and Roman nations, she had lately been on good terms. The Romans promised first their good offices with the Gauls, afterwards material support; and thus were brought face to face those two peoples, fated to continue for four centuries a struggle which was to be ended only by the complete subjection of Gaul.
The details of that struggle belong specially to Roman history; they have been transmitted to us only by Roman historians; and the Romans it was who were left ultimately in possession of the battle-field, that is, of Italy. It will suffice here to make known the general march of events and the most characteristic incidents.