CELTIC PEOPLES. Hecatmus of Mile tus and Herodotus (5th century a.c.) are the earliest authors to mention the Celts, and they speak of them in connection with the Danube. The Greek geographers got their information at second or third hand from merchants and sailors and their notions on the subject were very hazy. According to Ephorus (4th cen tury a.c.), of the four peoples who inhabited the extremities of the world, the Celts lived in the west. There are many moot points in the earliest history of this great race, which may be accounted for partly by the vague and indis criminate use of the names by which the Celts and the peoples identified or assimilated with them in western and northern Europe were known to the ancients; e.g., Hyperboreans, Wroit Celtae, Celtici, Cimbri, reihrai, Galatae, Galli, ria24‘, Celto-Ligyes, Celtiberians, Celtillyrians, Celto-Thracians and Celto Scythians, the exact determination of which it may never be possible to decide. It is probable that the name Celt (the meaning of which is unknown; the one most often given is "high, noble') was originally only that of a tribe or fraction—and that not the largest—of the Celtic branch of the Aryan family. The name was never used by the Celts at any time when speaking of themselves. By some authors the Celts were identified with the Germans. There is anthropological reason for believing that, even at the time when they first appear in history, the Celts were a mixed race and in cluded not only other branches of the Aryan family but even non-Aryans as well, the autochthonous inhabitants, Ligurians and Iberians, of the countries to which the Celts came as a superior people, imposing their language and customs upon them. More than 150 Celtic tribes are known to us by name, due, in part, to numerous migrations. The question: Were the Celts and Gauls ethnically one people?, is now definitely answered in the affirmative; but other questions in Celtic ethnology are still debated, though archaeology, linguistics and craniometry have been brought to bear upon them. The view that there, was on the Continent an older group of Celts who preserved the Indo-European sound qu (the so called qu group) and were followed by a con quering group, who changed that sound to p (the so-called p group) is now almost generally discarded. Though we know but little of the language of the ancient Belgae, it is sufficient to class it with that of the Celts and perhaps to identify the Galates and the Belgae. Anyhow it is clear that and Karol are two dis tinct words and that neither of them has any thing to do with the modern names Goidelic and Gad. Though antiquity seems to be almost, if not entirely, unanimous in representing the Celts as tall and blond, there is reason to be lieve that there were two so-called Celtic races, clearly distinct, in ancient Gaul. There, as elsewhere in what is or was Celtic speaking territory, we find short and dark, and tall and fair, longheads and broadheads among them. Hence as an ethnic term is a vague appellation and, as is well known, all those who speak or spoke Celtic do not or did not necessarily belong to the same race. It must have taken many hundreds of years for the Celts to spread all over Europe and their language with them, and they must have mingled with many races. Yet, while we can
not speak strictly of a Celtic race ethnologically, we can speak of a Celtic race philologically and culturally, a race which has preserved and transmitted, as a bond of union, a common speech, mentality, institutions, religion and lore from the days of their origin to the present day. For practical purposes it is well to keep to the traditional division of the Celts, and to speak of the as a generic term for all the branches of this once powerful and wide spread race; to call °Gauls') those who oc cupied Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul, and those who established a small state in Asia Minor. Some would place the ancestral home of the Celts, about 1,000 years before Christ, in northern Gaul and central Europe; others, in northwest Germany, the Danish is lands and the Netherlands, near the Elbe and the German Ocean; others, near the Caspian Sea and in southern Russia. The best received opinion, however, is that their home was in southern Germany, between the upper courses of the Rhine, the Main and the Danube. From this comparatively restricted focus they spread out like a fan in all directions but chiefly toward the fertile fields of the peoples more favorably situated to the south and west of them. As early as the 9th century a.c., some of them crossed the Channel and settled in what is now Great Britain, and others, in Ireland, perhaps in the 6th century. Probably in the 7th century B.C. or earlier they crossed the Rhine and firmly established themselves in Gaul. A century later they crossed the western Pyrenees, reached Spain and occupied most of the Iberian Peninsula. Their domination there lasted until the end of the 3d century with the conquest by the Carthaginians. About 300 years B.C. they entered southeastern Gaul. At the end of the 5th or beginning of the 4th century a.c. other detachments invaded northern Italy and Bohemia, the latter probably through the valley of the Danube. They had previously invaded northern Italy in the 6th century and later they founded a settlement on a large scale north and south of the Po as far as the Alps and broke up the power of the Etruscans. This region afterward became the home of an im portant literary culture, where Virgil, Catullus, the two Plinys and Livy were born. This ex ploit of the Celts is the best known to history and archeology. In 390 B.C. they sacked Rome except the Capitol. Their fame spread rapidly and made a great impression on the imagination of the Greeks and Romans and for a long time the Celtic peril kept Europe in terror. At the other extremity of Europe they are found as mercenaries in the service of foreign princes, fighting in Greece, Africa and Egypt. Alex ander the Great had dealings and made alliance with them. Celtic bands from Thrace and Macedonia in 279 B.C. pillaged Delphi, crossed the Euxine Sea and founded an independent state in Phrygia and Cappadocia, the kingdom of Galatia. To the descendants of these Asiatic Celts it was that Saint Paul addressed his Epistle to the Galatians.