Celtiberians

“ The Celtiberians, accustomed to rapid evolutions, found their agility useless on the broken ground, but the Romans, who were used to stationary fighting, found no inconvenience from it beyond the fact that their ranks were sometimes broken when moving through narrow places or patches of brushwood. ”

“ It is a matter of theory and debate. We find the Graeco-Latin peoples on the south, the more central nations of Celtic speech, the more northern Teutons, and in the north-east the Slavonians. But how all these Aryan branches are mutually related, and of the order and path of their prehistoric migrations, little is definitely known. The Celts were evidently preceded by non-Aryan inhabitants, of whom the Basques in Spain and France are a relic. The Celtiberians in Spain, as the name implies, were a mixture of the Celts with the native non-Aryan Iberians. ”

“ On the other hand a large mixed race, afterwards called the Celtiberians, grew up in what is to-day Old Castile, and brought into subjection the neighbouring Iberian tribes who were more cultured and less warlike than the dwellers in the mountains. ”

“ Between 500 and 400 B.C. they spread south-westward into Spain, apparently more as conquerors than as colonists, for the resultant of the Celtic occupation of the Spanish Peninsula was the formation of a mixed people, partly Celts and partly Iberians, whom ancient writers distinguish from the Celts by giving them what we may call a hyphenated name, Celtiberians. We are not to imagine from this that Celtic conquests elsewhere were of an exterminating character, or that they did not result in a fusion of peoples. ”

“ He therefore called upon his neighbors, the Celtiberians, for help; and on their demanding two hundred talents for their assistance, everybody else thought it intolerable, that ever the Romans should promise barbarians a reward for their aid; but Cato said, there was no discredit or harm in it; for if they overcame, they would pay them out of the enemy's purse, and not out of their own ”

“ The Belli and Titthi became allies of Rome, and the Arevacae at least thought it worth while to ask for a truce to enable them to send envoys to Rome to arrange peace.—Appian, Hispan. 44-50.
1. The war between the Romans and Celtiberians was called the “fiery war;” for it was of a peculiarlyB.C. 153-151. The war with the Celtiberian Arevacae conducted by Q. Fulvius Nobilior and M. Claudius Marcellus. fierce kind and remarkable for the frequency of its battles. The wars in Greece and Asia were as a rule settled by one battle, or in rare cases by two ”

“ The whole war, and its series of pitched battles, was at length interrupted for a time by the winter. One therefore could hardly conceive a war more nearly answering to our notion of a “fiery war” than this....
2. The Celtiberians, after making a truce with the consul M. Claudius Marcellus, had sent ambassadorsM. Claudius Marcellus winters at Cordova. B.C. 152-151. to Rome who remained there quietly waiting for the answer of the Senate. Meanwhile M. Claudius went on an expedition against the Lusitani, took Nercobrica by assault, and then went into winter quarters at Corduba. ”

“ CELTIBERIA, a term used by Greek and Roman writers to denote, sometimes the whole north-east of Spain, and sometimes the north-east part of the central plateau of the peninsula. The latter was probably the correct use. The Celtiberi, in this narrower sense, were not so much one tribe as a group of cantons—Arevaci, Pelendones, Berones and four or five others. They were the most warlike people in Spain, and for a long time offered a stubborn resistance to the Romans. ”

“ At the dawn of recorded history, we find the Celt already occupying a vast area of Western Europe, and exercising a wide ascendancy. We know of no period during which he is not in possession; we find him always in the stream of history, never in the fountain. From low down the Danube, along by the ridges of the Alps, we discern his tribes entrenched; and the topography of Western and Middle Europe, in so far as its river names and mountain names are concerned, rests on a Celtic basis, and is unintelligible, unless from Celtic roots, even in regions from which the Celtic race has long retired. ”

“ Many races have imagined a happy Other-world, but no other race has so filled it with magic beauty, or so persistently recurred to it as the Celts. They stood on the cliffs which faced the west, and as the pageant of sunset passed before them, or as at midday the light shimmered on the far horizon and on shadowy islands, they gazed with wistful eyes as if to catch a glimpse of Elysium beyond the fountains of the deep and the halls of the setting sun. In all this we see the Celtic version of a primitive and instinctive human belief. ”

“ The Celtic invaders of Aryan stock brought their gods with them to the lands they conquered just as much as the ancestors of the English brought with them theirs to the Christian land of Roman Britain; and the former continued to be in the main the great figures of the Celtic pantheon until that rude edifice crumbled to dust under the attacks of Christianity; but as to the innumerable divinities attached, so to say, to the soil, the great majority of them were very possibly the creations of the peoples here before the Celts. ”

“ It is the practice to speak of the dark-complexioned people of France, Great Britain and Ireland as “black Celts,” although the ancient writers never applied the term “Celt” to any dark-complexioned person. To them great stature, fair hair, and blue or grey eyes were the characteristics of the Celt. The philologists have added to the confusion by classing as “Celtic” the speeches of the dark-complexioned races of the west of Scotland and the west of Ireland. But, though usage has made it convenient in this work to employ the term, “Celtic” cannot be properly applied to what is really “Gaelic.” ”

“ Even the extravagance and exaggeration of the sentimental Celtic nature has often something romantic and attractive about it, something which has a sort of smack of misdirected good. The Celt, undisciplinable, anarchical, and turbulent by nature, but out of affection and admiration giving himself body and soul to some leader, that is not a promising political temperament, it is just the opposite of the Anglo-Saxon temperament, disciplinable and steadily obedient within certain limits, but retaining an inalienable part of freedom and self-dependence ”

“ Some of them became the greater gods, while others assumed a darker character, perhaps because they were associated with sinister aspects of nature or with the dead. The Celts knew all these, and some still linger on in folk-belief. Fairy-like or semi-divine women seen by streams or fountains, or in forests, or living in lakes or rivers, are survivals of spirits and goddesses of river, lake, or earth; and they abound in Celtic folk-story as bonnes dames, dames blanches, fées, or the Irish Bé Find. ”

“ When the stronger and more civilised Celt came he drove before him these little dark men, he enslaved their survivors or wedded their women, and in his turn fell into slavery to the cruel Druidic religion of his subjects. To these Iberians, and to the Celtic dread of them, we probably owe all the stories of dwarfs, goblins, elves, and earth-gnomes which fill our fairy-tale books; and if we examine carefully the descriptions of the abodes of these beings we shall find them not inconsistent with the earth-dwellings, caves, circle huts, or even with the burial mounds, of the Iberian race. ”

“ Where a warlike nation of superior development settled amongst them, as the Franks amongst the Gaels of Gaul, they have finally become fused with their conquerors. And, at the present day, nineteen-twentieths of the population of France are of almost pure Celtic descent. Although the French Celts have adopted the language of ancient Rome, even now but slightly changed through climate, barbarism, and the lapse of 1,500 years—although they adopted, down to the first French revolution, the Feudalism of Germany—the spirit and temperament of the Celtic races pervades all France. ”

“ No trace remains behind to tell us now by what fierce onslaught the Celtic invaders—for the bronze-age folk were presumably Celts—swept through the little Ogbury valley, and brained the men of the older race, while they made slaves of the younger women and serviceable children. Nothing now stands to tell us anything of the long years of Celtic domination, except the round barrow on the bare down, just as green and as grass-grown nowadays as its far earlier and more primitive neighbour. ”

“ That is just the expansive, eager Celtic nature; the head in the air, snuffing and snorting; a proud look and a high stomach, as the Psalmist says, but without any such settled savage temper as the Psalmist seems to impute by those words. For good and for bad, the Celtic genius is more airy and unsubstantial, goes less near the ground, than the German. The Celt is often called sensual; but it is not so much the vulgar satisfactions of sense that attract him as emotion and excitement ”

“ The main characteristics indeed of the Celt are all hers disinter- estedness, melancholy, wildness, a way ward force and passion, for ever wooed by sounds and sights to which other natures are insensible by murmurs from the earth, by colours in the sky, by tones and accents of the soul, that speak to the Celtic sense as to no other. ' We shall never build the Parthenon,' said Renan of his own Breton race ; ' marble is not for us ; but we know how to grip the heart and the soul ; we have an art of piercing that belongs to us alone ”

“ The culture of the tribes who spoke Celtic dialects was veined with Ægean and Asiatic influences. In time Continental Druidism imbibed ideas regarding the Transmigration of Souls and the custom of cremation from an area in the East which had influenced the Aryan invaders of India.
The origin of the Celts is obscure. Greek writers refer to them as a tall, fair people. They were evidently a branch of the fair Northern race, but whether they came from Northern Europe or Northern Asia is uncertain. In Western Europe they intruded themselves as conquerors and formed military aristocracies. ”

“ The True Celtic Race
To begin with, we must dismiss the idea that Celtica was ever inhabited by a single pure and homogeneous race. The true Celts, if we accept on this point the carefully studied and elaborately argued conclusion of [pg 19] Dr. T. Rice Holmes,4 supported by the unanimous voice of antiquity, were a tall, fair race, warlike and masterful,5 whose place of origin (as far as we can trace them) was somewhere about the sources of the Danube, and who spread their dominion both by conquest and by peaceful [pg 20] infiltration over Mid-Europe, Gaul, Spain, and the British Islands. ”

“ It may also be more or less generally known that Celtic, with all its dialects, is an Aryan or Indo-European language, closely allied to Latin, Greek, German, Slavonic, and Sanskrit, and that the Celts, therefore, were not mere barbarians, or people to be classed together with Finns and Lapps, but heralds of true civilization wherever they settled in their worldwide migrations, the equals of Saxons and Romans and Greeks, whether in physical beauty or in intellectual vigor. ”

“ After having exercised all the godly and worldly chivalries, sought with Pérédur the Holy Graal and the Beautiful, dreamed with Saint Brandan of mystical Atlantides, who knows what the Celtic genius would produce in the domain of the intelligence if it should embolden itself to make its entrance into the world, and if it subjected its rich and profound nature to the conditions of modern thought? Few races have had a poetical infancy as complete as the Celtic—mythology, lyricism, epic, romanesque imagination, religious enthusiasm, nothing have they lacked. ”

“ Few races of which the world has ever heard are as imaginative as that of the Celt, and at this time the imagination of every Celt must have been largely exercised in the direction of the malevolent and the terrible. Even now, after fourteen hundred years of Christianity, the Connaught or Kerry peasant still hears the shriek of his early gods in the sob of the waves or the howling of the autumn storms. Fish demons gleam out of the sides of the mountains, and the black bog-holes are the haunts of slimy monsters of inconceivable horror. ”

“ Such a difference of temper is often regretted, but nobody can deny its existence; and whatever explanation details the history of many centuries has to offer, the contrast may be said to be as great now as it was in the time of Julius Caesar. But evident as is its persistence, its origin is by no means easy to define. On the one hand, it may be said that the Celts, who delivered religious matters over to their druids, that is, to their magicians and medicine-men acting as priests, showed themselves proner to superstition and lent themselves more readily to spiritual thraldom ”

“ Let them consider that they are inextricably bound up with us, and that, if the suggestions in the following pages have any truth, we English, alien and uncongenial to our Celtic partners as we may have hitherto shown ourselves, have notwithstanding, beyond perhaps any other nation, a thousand latent springs of possible sympathy with them. Let them consider that new ideas and forces are stirring in England, that day by day these new ideas and forces gain in power, and that almost every one of them is the friend of the Celt and not his enemy. ”

“ This brings us to say a word on the kindred theme of the religious sentiment of the Celtic race, their inborn reverential feeling, one of their most prominent and honourable characteristics. Like the romantic sentiment we have just been considering, which has drawn the Celtic mind toward the mystery of Nature, it is a plant rooted and grounded in the same soil, nurtured by the dews of the same Idealism. ”