READING HALL

THE DOORSOF WISDOM

ANTIGONUS GONATAS

CHAPTER VI.

THE COMING OF THE CELTS

When Ephoros wrote the first universal history, he rounded off the world as he knew it with four blocks of largely unknown peoples: Ethiopians on the south, Indians on the east, Scythians on the north, and on the west, lying along the pathless ocean, Celts. His knowledge of the Celts was of the vaguest, and in the rhetoric of himself and his followers they were posed as people of gentle manners, Philhellenes, devoted to the refining influences of music,—a sort of fourth century counterpart of Homer’s blameless Ethiopians. And more exact information was slow in finding its way to Greece. Dionysius I had used Celtic mercenaries as early as 368, and had allied himself with Celtic stems against the Etruscans; Agathocles of Sicily had also employed Celts; Alexander, before starting for Asia, had received an embassy from some Celtic tribe, men who talked to him a good deal about their own courage, but in whose friendship he may have found, during his absence, a useful counterpoise to the turbulent Illyrians on his frontier. Kassandros is said to have besieged a Celtic clan who had fortified a camp in the Haemus, and another tribe threatened Thrace during Lysimachus’ reign. This about sums up the actual knowledge of the Celtic world which at the beginning of the third century was possessed by the Greek world east of Marseilles. Marseilles no doubt knew a good deal more; but Marseilles was somewhat apart from the main currents of Greek life and thought, and she sometimes knew too much to be readily believed, as the reception given to the narrative of her very great traveller Pytheas shows.

Long before the fourth century, Celtic tribes had outgrown their early homes in the north and had set out southward to win themselves new countries. It had been a wandering of the peoples that took long years to fulfil, but the upshot had been the settlement of races, afterwards known to Greeks and Romans as Celtae, in large parts of Gaul and of the north of Italy, of Spain and of the British Isles, in the valley of the Upper Danube, and over much of Central Europe, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Bohemia. These were the Celts of the first migration. Their more southern tribes, in the valleys of the Po and the Danube, adopted a settled life and made advances in civilization; their state of culture can be seen in that of the period known to archaeologists as that of La Tene. To a large extent they began to amalgamate with the natives of the conquered countries, a process easily traced in the case of Caesar’s Celtae in Gaul and of the Gaelic-speaking peoples of the British Isles. Whether the Celts of the first migration included relatives of the Goidels no less than of the Brythons, q men as well as p men; whether q men can be traced on the continent at all; whether the Celts were indeed divided into q men and p men till a much later date,—these things are matters of controversy, of which the existence alone need be noted here.

In the fourth century the North again became straitened for room. Very vaguely, great migrations can be discerned, initiated perhaps by the tribes afterwards known as Germans, heretofore cooped up at the base of the Schleswig-Holstein peninsula, but already, with a brave and overflowing population, beginning that great expansion which in the course of a few centuries was to break down all the barriers of the civilized world. The Germans seem to have displaced a number of tribes dwelling between the Elbe and the Rhine, and these drove forward upon Central Europe, starting movement after movement in widening circles, like a stone thrown into a pond. Wild fighters, as yet untouched by the civilization of the settled lands, these tribes fell on the settled Celts, here driving them out, here collecting and sweeping them forward on their onward march, here again entering their service as mercenaries against the common foe. The Greeks and Romans were to know them as Belgae or Galatae; they are the Celts of the second migration. Both names, Celtae and Galatae, soon came to be used indiscriminately; it could hardly be otherwise, when the men of the new migration brought with them men of the old. Some of the new-comers conquered and settled Belgium, Northern France, and the south and east of England, even gaining a footing in Ireland; others crossed the Alps and fought hard fights with Rome; others again followed down the ancient highway of the Danube, drawn by the storied treasures of the yet untouched world beyond the Balkans. These presently crossed the Danube and turned southward; a legend remains which perhaps narrates how one of their chief tribes, the Scordisci, was led across the great river by a woman. Their first new conquest, some time in the fourth century, was Pannonia, the country to the north-west of Illyria, comprising the eastern part of Austria and the western part of Hungary. From here they continued to follow the right bank of the Danube, fighting with the Illyrian tribes already in occupation: one body conquered the Autariatae, who occupied Bosnia, Servia, and the northern part of Albania, another the Ardiaei of Dalmatia. These movements brought them fairly within the purview of the Macedonian monarchy.

It was unfortunate for Macedonia that her king at the time was Ptolemy Keraunos, a man surrounded by foes, overconfident and rash, and doubly branded as a perjurer and a murderer. It has been conjectured that one of his enemies may even have persuaded the Celts to attack him; but in fact the Celts needed no persuading. Pressure from behind, and the need of a new home, drove them on even more certainly than the desire for plunder. The Illyrian tribes, whose lives for generations had consisted in border warfare with their Macedonian neighbours, recognized that both peoples were involved in a common danger; and the king of the Dardanians offered to Keraunos the aid of 20,000 men, an aid which he is said to have declined in insulting terms, saying that Macedonia would no longer be Macedonia if, after conquering Asia by herself, she could not guard her own marches without help from Dardania. The Dardan king promptly took counsel for his own safety, and joined the invaders.

These swept forward in three bodies, each doubtless led by different tribes. The first host, under a chief named Belgius or Bolgius, was destined to invade Macedonia by way of Illyria and the Aoos pass; the second, under Brennus and Acichorius, was to overrun Paionia, follow up the Axios, and enter Macedonia by way of the Iron Gate; the objective of the third, under Cerethnus, was Thrace. The leaders were followed by a mixed multitude; settled Celts from Austria and the Danube, Illyrians like the Autariatae and the Dardanians, Thracians like the Maedi, slaves of every nationality-armed and unarmed, traders and camp followers, with a long convoy of wagons bearing the women and children, the household goods and the plunder; while at their head marched the half-wild Galatae from the North Sea, men mighty of limb, their strong rough-hewn faces, so strange to Greek eyes, surmounted by huge shocks of red hair, their throats circled by gold torques, men who in action flung away target and plaid and charged half naked with their claymores, as their kinsfolk in Britain were to do later at the Battle of the Standard and on many another field.

Their aim was to find a new land in which to settle. Plunder was by the way; they did not bring their women and children and household goods  with them merely for the sake of plundering. In part too they effected their object. The Scordisci were to succeed in founding a kingdom in Servia, with its capital at Belgrade; an unknown tribe or tribes were to establish in Thrace the realm known as that of Tylis; three other tribes, the Tectosages, Trocmi, and Tolistoagii, were to settle as complete political units in Asia Minor. It is well, in considering Brennus’ campaign in Greece, to bear in mind what the ultimate object of the Galatae was.

What manner of men these Gauls really were is a little difficult to understand. We have only the accounts of enemies—enemies who were at first half mad with terror, and who took a long time to attain to a juster and more sober judgement; and terror is a state of mind which hardly makes for impartiality. An elaborate portrait of the Gaul at large can be put together from the Greek writers, the main lines of which can be summed up in one word, instability; but something seems wanting to a true picture, something that perhaps will have to be supplied, not by the historian, but by the poet. Instability in all its forms may be but the common attribute of all peoples at a certain stage of emergence from barbarism. No enemy ever questioned Gallic courage; and if many of their women resembled Chiomara, they could have taught some of the facile queens of Hellenism a valuable lesson. A people whose war-leader was named ‘Rede-giver’ must have had at any rate a dim idea that there were matters more to the point than mere blows. Their poetry they had already begun to make; they had bards, who chanted lays before the host, lays perhaps akin to those which afterwards, in another land, were to grow into the story of the heroic feats of Cuchulainn or the witching charm of Deirdre; even as, centuries before, other fair-haired Northerners had burst in on an older Greece, with songs of the glorious deeds of their heroes, songs perhaps akin to those from which grew the mighty tale of the wrath of Achilles.

That these Gauls were aggressive and undisciplined, quarrelsome and vain, drunken and passionate,—these things mattered little to the world. But the Greek writers bring against them the definite accusation of cruelty; and the accusation is perhaps true in the main, though it is to be remembered that the literary men of the third century did not confine this reproach to the Gauls. But we do know that their contemporaries were in fact terrified by the idea of their cruelty; a picture of it remains, doubtless not under­coloured. In the horrors of the sack of Kailion; the accusation goes on echoing through the Roman poets till the last days of the Western Empire. We need not accuse the Greek of cant in the matter. It is easy enough, in both Greek and Macedonian history, to pick out cases of what seems to us to be horrible cruelty. But, on the whole, manners were softening in the third century. It was no longer customary, on taking a town, to slay the men and sell the women and children for slaves; though the right of the conqueror to do this was undoubted.  It was no longer customary, even to sell the men into slavery in lieu of death; and when this undoubted right was exercised, as for instance by Antigonus Doson and the Achaean League in the case of Mantineia, it provoked a storm of protest, which we can still hear raging in the pages of Polybius. When we do meet with sheer downright cruelty, such as that of Philip V at Abydos, it strikes us as something monstrous.

The tendency of the age was in another direction. It can be seen in the number of asyliai that begin to grow, places inviolable, immune from the operations and cruelties of warfare; a movement into which Delphi, always ready to use her influence to humanize war, heartily threw herself. It can be seen in the innumerable boundary-arbitrations that appear in the inscriptions of this time. Nothing had caused more fighting between city states than disputed territory; and every one of the numerous arbitration awards now met with is a strangled war. It can be seen again in a new note of chivalry in war, largely due to the great Macedonians. The conduct of Philip II in liberating his Athenian prisoners without ransom; the conduct of Alexander to the family of Darius; the courtesies of Demetrios toward the Rhodians during the great siege; Pyrrhus’ treatment of his Roman prisoners; Antigonus’ treatment of Pyrrhus’ son; these things all tended to make war somewhat less dreadful. Even the universal employment of mercenaries was in the nature of a gain; they fought hard, but without the personal hate and bitterness that citizen troops had used to import into their fighting. In particular, it is difficult to see how far the movement in favour of arbitration might not have gone in the Greek world, had it not been swamped, with so much else, in the monstrous wake of Rome. We can see, in fact, that the insistence of the Greek writers on the cruelty of the Gaul means, not that there was anything very specially cruel about the Gaul, but that Greece resented the phenomenon of the natural man again obtruding himself on a society that was beginning to outgrow his ways.

Belgius was the first of the Gallic leaders to enter Macedonia, in the spring of 279, after feeling his way with an offer of peace for cash down, an offer which Keraunos naturally rejected with scorn. But Keraunos had not the patience to wait for his levies; he met the Gauls at the head of a few troops, was defeated and slain, and his army cut to pieces. Panic ruled in Macedonia; men flocked into the towns, and the towns closed their gates; the barbarians at any rate would not understand siege works. Keraunos’ brother, or uncle, Meleagros, was made king by the army, and deposed by it after two months as incompetent; it thereon offered the crown to Kassandros’ nephew Antipatros, who met the same fate for the same reason after forty-five days, having gained nothing but the scornful title of Etesias, king of the Dog-days—the period for which his rule had lasted. Thereupon one Sosthenes, a Macedonian, who was of humble birth but had perhaps been one of Lysimachus’ generals, took command of the army; he succeeded in reorganizing it, and inflicted a check upon the second Celtic host under Brennus, now attempting to enter the country. The army would have made him king; but he refused the perilous title, and had the troops take the oath to him merely as general de facto. He seems to have been an able man, and for more than a year he held Macedonia together as far as possible; but he could not keep back Brennus, or prevent the outlying parts of the country breaking off. Paionia was in Brennus’ hands, Kassandreia and perhaps other cities were virtually independent; and in a second battle Sosthenes was defeated by Brennus and compelled for a time to abandon the open country. Belgius now drops out of the story; according to one account, he left Macedonia with his plunder; Brennus henceforth appears to hold undivided command. It appears, however, that he had lost a good many men in his battles with Sosthenes, and perhaps considered that to attempt to maintain himself in Macedonia was too expensive; anyhow, in the autumn of 279 he passed south through Thessaly, on his way to invade Greece. Some Thessalian nobles and Ainianian chieftains are said to have joined him.

Of the numbers with him we cannot pretend to form any kind of an estimate. The Greek writers give impossible figures; and it is hopeless to deduce the number of the fighting-men in an army from a total which is not only uncertain in itself, but must obviously have included the women and children, the old men and dependants, the slaves and the camp followers, and all the unwarlike apparatus of a nation shifting its home. It is not in the least likely that Brennus had anything even remotely approaching the 160,000 fighting­men of tradition; but to attempt to analyse the traditional numbers is waste of time. The statement, however, that every horseman was accompanied by two armed and mounted slaves4 may well be true, as it suits a conquering aristocracy. The arms of the Galatae were sword and shield only; and though the more settled Celts had some defensive armour, such as greaves, none seem to have adopted the cuirass. That their swords were long sweeping blades, two-handed and double-edged, adapted for cutting only and not for thrusting, seems beyond question. It is true that the Pergamene sculptors of a later day invariably represent the Gauls of Asia with a short, one-handed, thrusting sword; but it must be supposed that this weapon was adopted by them after their arrival there. Their equipment was not of a nature to render them a match, individually, for the heavy-armed Greek.

The Greek resistance to Brennus took its place, in the Greek national consciousness, with the Greek resistance to Xerxes two centuries earlier; these were the two great deeds of Hellas against the barbarian. Unfortunately, later Greek writers were quite aware of this, and indulged in a conscious parallelism which makes it uncertain whether some recorded incidents have any foundation whatever in fact. The main lines of what happened are, however, tolerably certain; and the contemporary inscriptions not only afford great help in winnowing afray those parts of the story that are valueless, but bear witness to the merits of portions of the detailed account left by Pausanias.

Brennus, with Acichorius as his second in command, passed south through Thessaly, where his men are said to have committed the usual acts of lawlessness; but as he gained the adherence of some of the Thessalian nobles, it may be supposed that Brennus, who is called an understanding man, was putting pressure upon them to join him so as to exempt their lands from plunder. He directed his march toward Thermopylai, where a Greek army had assembled to guard the pass; outmanoeuvred its advance guard, which was holding the line of the Spercheios; succeeded in crossing the river; compelled the natives to build him a bridge, and left his Thessalian allies to guard it; and, advancing, sat down before Herakleia. He had, however, no chance against the walls of the town, which had recently joined the Aetolian League, and into which the Aetolians had thrown a garrison; he therefore masked it and moved on to the pass.

The burden of the defence of the pass had fallen entirely on north and central Greece, the countries most immediately threatened. Antiochus and Antigonus had indeed each sent a small force of 500 mercenaries, and it seems that Antigonus’ general in the Piraeus equipped a few Athenian triremes to cooperate; but Egypt held aloof altogether, as did the states of the Peloponnese. In part this was due to their natural jealousies; Messene and Megalopolis were afterwards at pains to explain that they had not been able to move because Sparta had refused to give them an undertaking not to invade their territories while their men were absent. Another reason given, that the Peloponnesians in general trusted to the fortifications  of the Isthmus, sounds like reasoning of the days of Xerxes; but it is not so absurd as it sounds. What they trusted to was not their own fortifying of the Isthmus; it was not theirs to fortify. But they knew that Antigonus could and must hold Corinth, and that the Gauls could neither storm it nor (without a fleet) turn it; they were absolutely secure. It would need an Aristophanes to do justice to the spectacle of the Peloponnesians, who were actually in the middle of an attempt to turn Antigonus out of Greece, sheltering in comfort behind his lines. Antigonus must have stiffened the garrison at Corinth and perhaps drawn his lines right across the Isthmus; it may be that in the winter of 279/8 he was there in person.

Pausanias gives the Greek roll of honour, the defenders of the pass. The list unfortunately contains a mistake at the one point where it can be checked; the Athenians did not, as Pausanias says they did, send a fleet. Otherwise the list is probable enough; the names and the numbers suit with facts otherwise ascertained; and the chances are of course that such a catalogue would be correctly preserved. Boeotia sent her full levy, 10,000 hoplites and 500 horse, under four Boeotarchs. Phocis sent 3,000 foot and 500 horse; Locris 700 foot; the Megarians 400 and a few horse. Athens sent 1,000 picked hoplites under Kallippos, and 500 horse. Aetolia sent the largest contingent of all; it cannot well have been under 12,000 men, of whom 7,000 were hoplites; and it may have been more. There was an obvious difficulty in Aetolians commanding Boeotians, or vice versa; the supreme command was therefore given to the Athenian Kallippos.

Brennus is said to have made a frontal attack on the pass, and to have been beaten back. He must have seen at once that under such conditions his half-armed warriors had no chance against an adequate force of heavy-armed Greeks: and he reasoned that if he could remove the most dangerous force, the Aetolians, his task would be more feasible. He thereupon detached a body of men under Orestorius and Combutis, who retired across the Spercheios bridge into the friendly Phthiotis, and thence invaded Aetolia. Their objective was the little town of Kallion; their, orders, presumably, were to make such an example as should draw off the Aetolians to defend their homes. Their orders were carried out only too well. Kallion was taken, every living creature butchered with outrages inconceivable, if true, and the town fired. For the moment, Brennus achieved his purpose. The Aetolians at Thermopylae left their post and hurried home; and with them the whole of Aetolia, old and young, men and women, rose as one to avenge their country­men. Laden with plunder, the Gauls had turned northward again, after severely handling a little band of hoplites from Achaea who had crossed over to assist their neighbours, and who made the mistake of attacking in formal order. The Aetolians fought differently. Every path in that land of mountain and forest was beset, every tree hid its man; the Gauls, with no defensive armour but targets, were helpless against arrows and javelins; if they pursued, the foe’s knowledge of the country bore him off; as they left pursuing, he returned once more to the attack, urged on by the women, who fought even more bitterly than the men. Less than half of the Gauls struggled back to the main body. Kallion was well avenged, and the Aetolians had, of their necessity, made the discovery, to be made later by the Romans, that the Gaul was only formidable if permitted to come to close quarters.

The exact details of what meanwhile took place at Thermopylae are not particularly trustworthy, but the main outline is clear. Brennus’ object was to clear Thermopylae and let his people through. Even without the Aetolians, the Greeks could perhaps still have held their position against a direct assault ; but they could now spare but few men to guard against a flank attack, and Brennus at once resolved to try the effect of turning the pass in the traditional manner. He himself led the turning force, an unencumbered body of warriors, whose strength is given by Pausanias as somewhat less than one-fifth of the available fighting-men, as he conceived them. It was in fact a comparatively small flying column; the bulk of the army, on Pausanias’ own showing, remained with Acichorius. The story runs that the Herakleots and Ainianes guided Brennus over the path by which Flydarnes had once marched to surprise Leonidas; that, like Hydarnes, he drove off the Phocians who held the path; and that the Greeks at Thermopylae were warned in time to avoid being surrounded, were taken off by the fleet, and scattered to their homes. The resemblances to Herodotus’ story are patent; but the differences are no less patent; without affirming or denying details, it is sufficient to say that the pass was undoubtedly turned. Unlike Hydarnes, however, Brennus was unable to take the defenders in the rear; he may have been too late, or he may not have been in sufficient force. But the news that the position was turned was enough; the Greek contingents that were still at Thermopylae retired to defend their homes, and the pass lay open to Acichorius and the host. Brennus had achieved his purpose.

Whether Brennus had always intended to sack Delphi, or whether his raid was unpremeditated, must remain doubtful. Perhaps the former is the more likely view; for unless his intention was known or suspected, it is impossible to see how Magnesians came from Asia, (if indeed they did come from Asia), in time to aid in the defence. The idea that Delphi was no longer worth sacking may be dismissed. Two generations had elapsed since the Phocians had plundered it; and quite apart from the natural increment in the way of gifts from persons and cities, the damages assessed on Phocis had been regularly paid, and the temple had also received some very large sums of money from other sources. Delphi was not of course the main object of the Gallic invasion, in any case, that object was settlement. It was now open to Brennus to rejoin Acichorius and continue the invasion of Greece in full force; and in deciding instead to raid Delphi, it appears that the Gallic leader, who had hitherto displayed capacity and resource, was carried away by the mere desire of plunder and committed a most serious error; both tradition and analysis point to the conclusion that he started on his raid in ignorance of the whereabouts of the largest body of the enemy, the Aetolians. According to tradition, he turned Thermopylae at the same time that the Aetolians were defeating Orestorius and Combutis; consequently it appears that he must have set out for Delphi before hearing of the defeat of this division of his men, and in the belief that the Aetolians were fully occupied at home.

Meanwhile the victorious Aetolians, following up the beaten enemy, learnt that the pass was turned, and that Brennus with a flying column had entered Phocis, presumably making for Delphi, while nothing remained to bar the advance southward of the main body of the Gauls. The Aetolian leaders were faced with the responsibility of a tremendous decision; were they to attempt to save Greece or the temple of their god? To their honour they chose rightly; they detached a handful of men to help organize resistance at Delphi, and with their main body set out in pursuit of Acichorius. That leader, leaving his Thessalian allies to hold the Spercheios bridge, came rolling slowly through Thermopylae with his unwieldy train of women and children, baggage and wagons, guarded in front and behind by the warriors of the host. The Aetolians, wise in their recent experience, had no intention of risking a pitched battle; but they clung to his flanks and rear, pelting him with missiles, cutting off all stragglers and foragers, breaking off parts of the chain of wagons, absolutely preventing any provisioning, and killing whenever they had the chance. In these circumstances Acichorius had made but little progress by the time that the decision had fallen at Delphi.

The defence of Delphi, as formally narrated by later Greek writers, becomes a poetical duplication of the similar story in Herodotus; the stars in their courses fight against the impious invader, the crags of Parnassos fall on him and crush him, gods and heroes take the shape and the arms of men and hurl him back from the sanctuary. The main lines of what did happen were perhaps somewhat as follows.

Brennus made for Delphi by forced marches. Beside the Delphians, there had assembled for the defence of the sanctuary a handful of Aetolians, 400 Locrian hoplites from Amphissa, and some part—how large we do not know—of the Phocian levies. With them were a little body of men from Magnesia on the Maeander, who had perhaps crossed from Asia to aid in the defence, even as one trireme had come from Italy to fight against Xerxes. A battle was fought outside or on the walls, in which the Phocian leader Aleximachos fell; but his death was not in vain, for the Gauls were checked. Dark storm-clouds gathered over Delphi during the battle at the wall; the priests from the temple came down to the warriors as the storm burst, declaring that Apollo was with them; perhaps, among the excited defenders of the sanctuary, there were some who claimed that they themselves had seen the son of Leto manifest to his worshippers, riding the whirlwind and directing the arrows of his lightning against the impious invaders. Whether the Gauls actually entered Delphi or not must remain obscure; it is known that Apollo’s own temple remained untouched and inviolate. However it may have been, Brennus could not hold any footing he may have gained; he withdrew and formed a camp for the night outside the town.

That night the Greeks were strongly reinforced, for the entire Phocian people were rising to wipe out the stain of the Sacred War and fight their way back into the good graces of Hellas; there also came 1,200 Aetolians under Philomelos. Morning broke on a raging blizzard of snow and sleet, in the midst of which the Greeks attacked Brennus’ camp, avoiding close quarters as usual, while some of the Phocians, secure in their local knowledge, worked along the flanks of Parnassos to take him in the rear. Suffering horribly under the hail of missiles, to which they could make no reply, the Gauls nevertheless held firm till Brennus himself was struck down; then they broke ground, slew all the wounded who could not follow, and set out on their backward path, carrying their fainting leader and struggling on through an endless running fight with the whole Phocian nation. Something of the horror of that retreat for the strangers, who could neither see their way nor retaliate on their foe­men, may still be gathered from the triumphant words of the Delphic hymn to Apollo, which celebrates their death ‘in the drift of the wet snow’. A remnant only reached Acichorius; but the news had travelled faster than they; the Athenians and Boeotians were already in the field again, and Acichorius turned back. The Aetolians, who had borne the burden of the campaign against him, now hung triumphantly on his rear, and chased him to his base camp outside Herakleia and thence north to the Spercheios, inflicting great damage; Brennus, it is said, slew himself in despair, while the Thessalians at the Spercheios changed sides and themselves fell on their barbarian allies. The Gauls who got through retreated northward, and Greece was saved.

As to who was her saviour, there were no two opinions. Most of the fighting had fallen upon the Aetolians; they had held back the main body of the enemy single-handed; theirs had been the first victory, theirs the tactics of every victory; and at the end they had followed up the routed foe till his last wagon recrossed the Spercheios. Phocis had fought well, and she received the reward she coveted, readmission to the Amphictyonic League; and she dedicated a statue of Aleximachos at Delphi. But Aetolia, as was just, gained most from the war. She started forthwith on a new career. Her influence and the territory of her League steadily increased; her control of Delphi was no longer questioned, and to it she added the control of the Amphictyonic Assembly. At Delphi she set up many memorials of the repulse of the great invasion. Statues of the gods, two of Apollo, one of Artemis, and one of Athene; statues of the Aetolian leader Eurydamos and her other generals; a great statue of Aetolia herself, as an armed woman seated on a pile of Gallic shields; chiefest of all, the actual shields of the vanquished Gauls, which, with a suitable dedication, balanced on the temple the Persian shields which the Athenians had taken from other vanquished barbarians at Marathon. But Aetolia went further than this. She had saved Greece, and she knew it; and it was she who instituted at Delphi the festival in memory of the Deliverance of Greece, the Soteria. The Greek states adjudged its contests to be of equal importance with those of the Nemea in the athletic and of the Pythia in the non athletic events; and theoroi were sent out all over the Greek world bearing invitations to the gathering which was to commemorate the victory gained over the barbarians who had attacked the Greeks and the temple of Apollo, the common possession of Hellas.

It is time to return to the affairs of Macedonia. That unhappy country, invaded, plundered, and reduced almost to anarchy, was perhaps getting some relief under the rule of Sosthenes; but Sosthenes was not uniformly successful in his contest with the barbarians, and he could not hold the whole country together; his refusal of the perilous crown left the way open for many intrigues. Antipatros, king of the dog-days, seems to have had a following in one part of the country; there were partisans of Pyrrhus, of Ptolemaios son of Lysimachus, perhaps of Antiochus; while the great city of Kassandreia had broken off from the kingdom altogether. It had been founded by Kassandros to replace Potidaia, and settled by the inhabitants of several Greek towns, including (it appears) many of the surviving Olynthians. Ptolemy Keraunos had assigned it as a residence to his mother, Eurydice, sister of Kassandros and divorced wife of Ptolemy I; and in the troubles that followed on Keraunos’ death, she, supported by mercenaries who garrisoned the citadel in her interest, ruled the town for her own hand. How long her rule lasted is not known; but after a time she disappears from the scene, and one Apollodorus stands forward as champion of the democracy and prevails on Eurydice’s mercenaries to hand over the citadel and join the popular cause. Apollodorus travels the usual course toward a tyranny; he institutes a festival in honour of Eurydice, who had given ‘liberty’ to Kassandreia, refuses a bodyguard, pays court to Eurydice’s mercenaries, and in the fullness of time raises a revolt of slaves and artisans and seizes the supreme power. He enlists a bodyguard of Gauls, attracts mercenaries by raising the standard rate of pay, and begins to consider an ambitious foreign policy; it may be that his dream was, that Kassandreia should play the part once played by Olynthus.

Of those who had some claim to the vacant throne of Macedonia, far the most favourably situated appeared to be Antiochus. He had the resources off an empire at his back, and he had prepared his ground rather carefully. Perhaps he treated his accommodation with Keraunos as a personal matter only, a thing at an end with Keraunos’ death; at any rate in 279 he was doing more than feel his way. How much he was doing it is impossible to say. It is possible that he had, or acquired, an actual footing in some part of Macedonia, as a city Antiocheia appears there, apparently near Arethousa : it is not, however; possible to say from what period it dates. Certainly he had partisans in the country, and he struck coins with Macedonian types and cultivated good relations with Aetolia. Nor was Aetolia the only Greek power whose friendship he affected. He sought to win the favour of Athens; it is almost certain that he did win the favour of Sparta. Whether any power at all, either Ptolemy or Antiochus, had stood behind the upheaval of Greece in 280 is uncertain; it may have been a purely spontaneous conflagration. But by 279 it seems that Antiochus was supporting Sparta, and that this was one of the reasons why Greece took fright at Spartan ambition and refused to follow Areus on a second campaign that year. The common ground uniting Sparta and Antiochus was enmity to Antigonus.

The reason of the most obscure war which broke out in 279 between Antigonus and Antiochus thus becomes fairly clear.

Each claimed Macedonia; each thought the other his most dangerous rival. Whether Seleucus had been king of Macedonia de iure or not, Antiochus considered that he had; consequently he himself, in his own eyes, was king of Macedonia. Antigonus always had his eyes firmly fixed on his father’s kingdom, and no explanation of this war can be satisfactory which does not take account of this fact. Why Antigonus did not invade Macedonia itself on Keraunos’ death it is hard to conjecture; it seems certain that he did not. He cannot have had much of a following there; and we may suppose that he thought that a man just beaten out of Greece stood little chance in Macedonia, and that it was best first to attempt to dispose of Antiochus’ claims and incidentally regain some prestige. It is just possible that, in the course of the ensuing war, he did attempt to get a footing in Macedonia, and failed; but it is certain that sometime in 279 he commenced operations by sailing to Asia Minor to attack Antiochus. The two kings seem to have suspended hostilities in the autumn of 279 in order to send each a small force to Thermopylae; but with the spring of 278 the war blazed out afresh.

Antiochus apparently occupied a strong position. He allied himself with Apollodorus, the ambitious tyrant of Kassandreia; and as Apollodorus also allied himself with Sparta,—(an alliance which Sparta’s enemies insinuated had been shamefully sold by her for money down),—and Sparta had the following of a number of Peloponnesian states, Antiochus appeared to be at the head of a strong combination of powers, with a good gateway into Macedonia. But there was no real basis of union and the want of sufficient sea-power definitely sundered Antiochus from Sparta and both from Apollodorus, while the latter meant to work for his own interests. And even by land Antiochus could not reach his allies.

Antiochus in fact was hemmed in by enemies. He could not cope at once with all the revolts in his great scattered kingdom; and the new king of Bithynia, Nicomedes, barred his passage to Europe. Bithynia was fighting for her separate existence as a nation; and while her people were still uncivilized enough to cling passionately to their national independence, their king was sufficiently inclined to the ideas of Greece to add to the national resistance such strength as the sciences of civilization could give. The Bithynians had already cut up one army sent by Antiochus; and Nicomedes had secured the friendship of the powerful Northern League, formed by Herakleia, Byzantion and their friends. This combination against Antiochus naturally attracted Antigonus; the Byzantines were his hereditary friends, and he had not so many friends that he could afford to neglect any of them. One of the reasons for his crossing to Asia in 279 was, no doubt, the invitation of the Northern League, and the perception of the fact that, if he were going to fight Antiochus, he must co-operate with those of his friends who we real ready making head against him. Between them, as against Antiochus, they undoubtedly controlled the sea.

The actual events of the year 278 are extraordinarily obscure. It may have been at this time that the Spartan Kleonymos drove Antigonus’ garrison out of Troizen. Cyzicus in some way was damaged. The fleets of Antiochus and Nicomedes met, but did not fight. This statement, however, shows that Antigonus’ fleet was not co-operating with his allies, but was elsewhere; and possibly with this fact should be connected the persistent tradition which associates Antigonus with Macedonia prior to 277. That he did not become king of Macedonia till after his victory at Lysimacheia in 277 is the one quite certain fact of this time; we may perhaps conclude, therefore, that the mystery of his movements in 278 conceals an attempt to get a footing in Macedonia, possibly in connexion with operations against Apollodorus. If so, it was an attempt that failed; that is, if by Macedonia we are to understand Macedonia proper rather than Thrace. Sosthenes may have had a firm hold of the army while he lived; and it is very possible that the strange phenomenon of a non-monarchic government in Macedonia was attracting the powerful friendship of the democratic Aetolians who, though recently friendly to Pyrrhus and Antigonus, considered (as the event was to show) that of the two it was Pyrrhus who had the first claim on them. At any rate a city bearing Sosthenes’ name appears soon after among the Aetolian towns, a fair proof of their sympathies at this time.

It may be, however, that the tradition as to Macedonia means no more than that Antigonus obtained a footing in Thrace, a country recently part of Macedonia, but which cannot have been claimed or held by Sosthenes, and was completely cut off from Antiochus, who did claim it. Certainly Antigonus was operating there in the spring of 277; it was clear by then that Antiochus could not hope to conquer the Northern League, and by attempting to occupy Thrace Antigonus could both aid his allies and do something for himself. Then, once more, the Celts intervened.

One body of them had already come upon the scene in 278. After Brennus’ host had withdrawn northward, a band of Gauls, composed either wholly or in part of those who had originally entered Macedonia with Brennus, began to pass eastward along the Thracian coast. They were 20,000 strong, but of these only 10,000 were armed; their leaders were Leonnorius and Lutarius. Naturally they did much damage; by one account, perhaps exaggerated, they even managed to enter, and plundered, Lysimacheia; ultimately they descended on the Hellespont, and began to bargain with Antiochus’ governor for a crossing. The details are variously given; but Nicomedes forestalled Antiochus, and secured the promise of their aid if he brought them over. He brought them over; and they proceeded to aid him in a manner that may be understood from the inscriptions of the terrified towns of Asia. With them we have no further concern.

Of the three bodies into which the Gallic invasion had divided itself, two—those of Belgius and Brennus—had now ceased to be a menace to civilization in the Balkan peninsula. Many had been slain, and the survivors had crossed to Asia or withdrawn into Servia, though possibly some scattered bands still ranged Macedonia for plunder. But there still remained the third body, the men who under Cerethrius had invaded Thrace; they seem, after the winter of 279/8, to have received an accession of strength, perhaps from some of Brennus’ people. These overran Thrace, conquered the independent Thracian tribes of the interior, who had never yielded to Lysimachus or any other Macedonian king, and by the spring of 277 were rolling seaward, threatening the Greek cities of the Chersonese.

Somewhere near Lysimacheia lay Antigonus, his fleet drawn ashore, his army of mercenaries landed for the defence of the city. Whether he was there by accident or design, whether he had been seeking a footing in Thrace for himself, or whether the cities, terrified by the passage of the Gauls in 278, had sought from the one organized force at hand protection against this new danger, cannot be said. It is probable enough that in a combination of both reasons lies the cause of Antigonus barring the Celtic advance. The leader of the Gauls, whose strength is given as 18,000 men, commenced operations, as Belgius had done against Keraunos, by throwing out a feeler in the shape of an embassy. The story—a quite untrustworthy one in its details—runs that Antigonus received the envoys courteously, invited them to dinner, and showed them everything they wished to see, before dismissing them to their folk. Next night he abandoned his camp, and posted his army out of sight, leaving his fleet still ashore as a bait; for he felt certain that the Gauls would attack him, and that speedily. He was not deceived; the first onslaught of the barbarians wasted itself on the empty camp; laden with plunder, they proceeded to attack the ships, and found themselves trapped between the sea in front and Antigonus behind. Antigonus won a great and a bloody victory.

Its effects were far-reaching. The least of them was, that it stopped the advance of the Gauls towards the Aegean, and turned the energies of the remainder in a new direction, the foundation of the inland kingdom of Tylis. For it did much more than this. The Aetolians had indeed already defeated Gauls more than once, but in their own way and by their own guerrilla tactics, tactics which contained within themselves the confession that it was best not to let the barbarians get to close quarters in open field. But now an army of Gauls had been fairly met and cut to pieces. Antigonus had won more than a victory; he had won unique and invaluable prestige. The fear of him now was not only in the hearts of the Gauls; it was in the hearts of his neighbours. Greek cities passed him decrees of thanks; pictures of his exploits against the barbarians were dedicated at Athens to Athene the Giver of Victory: he too was of those who had brought deliverance to men of Hellenic race.

Whether he now invaded Macedonia, or received an invitation to come, is nowhere told: but Sosthenes was dead, the country in absolute anarchy, and the Macedonian farmers were ready to welcome any man strong enough to hold the gates of the land against the barbarian. One way or the other, in the expressive words of his old teacher Menedemos, he ‘came into his own’; the exile returned home; he became, at last, king of the Macedonians.

CHAPTER VII

ANTIGONUS AND MACEDONIA

ANTIGONUS GONATAS