Note 43 — ARRIAN ON COURSING.

Ἄγνωστα γὰρ ἦν τὰ ἔθνη τῆς Εὐρώπης. The Greeks, in the elder Xenophon’s days, appear to have known very little of the western countries of Europe, and scarce any thing even of Italy itself. It is true that there were, at that time, many Grecian colonies westward, and through them a knowledge of the productions of the more north-western interior might have reached the mother-country. But there was no particular inducement for the Greek merchants to penetrate far inland: and the Celts had not as yet crossed the Alps, nor even arrived at any part of the coast of the Mediterranean—any well-known country. The very distance at which the father of history places the Celts, viz. as Geography of Herodotus.“the most remote people in Europe, after the Cynetes,” is an indication of this fact. It is the opinion of Niebuhr that the navigators of Greece rarely visited the unexplored coasts of the occidental seas. Indeed, the interior of Gaul was unknown even to the Romans before the time of Julius Cæsar. Although they were masters of Romana Provincia, a tract on the sea-coast contiguous to Italy, they knew nothing of the multitudinous tribes spread over the country between the Rhine and the Ocean; which latter were not thoroughly known, nor their manners and natural productions ascertained, till the visit of Augustus Cæsar; when probably the Romans first became acquainted with the native hound of the interior.

It is impossible to speak with any degree of certainty of the origin and distribution of the ancient Celtæ, or ătæ, or Galli, as they were variously called by the Greeks and Romans. Whether derived from Ashkenez, the grandson of Noah; or from Celtus, Gallus, and Illyricus, sons of Polyphemus; or from Celtes, a king of Gaul,—matters not. Leaving these knotty points of genealogy to others, let it suffice that the Celts, at an early period, occupied a large portion of Western Europe. Herodotus mentions them in Melpomene s. 49. οἳ ἔσχατοι πρὸς ἡλίου δυσμέων μετὰ Κύνητας οἰκέουσι τῶν ἐν τῇ Εὐρώπῃ: and our author states that Celtic legates came to Alexander from the shores of the Ionian sea, Expedit. Alexandri, L. i. c. iv.παρὰ Κελτῶν τῶν ἐπὶ τῷ Ἰονίῳ κόλπῳ ᾠκισμένων ἧκον. Extensive as the name must have been at that time, it was subsequently confined to fewer tribes; and, in the days of Julius Cæsar, was appropriated to the inhabitants of Gallia Celtica, a territory between the Loire and Seine, which at a later period borrowed a new denomination from the celebrated colony of Lugdunum, or Lyons. Cæsar. de Bell. Gall. L. i. c. i.“Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres: quarum unam incolunt Belgæ; aliam Aquitani; tertiam, qui ipsorum linguâ Celtæ, nostrâ Galli appellantur.” But I think it probable that Arrian did not intend to use the term Celtic in its limited sense, as having reference exclusively to the district of Gaul so denominated by Cæsar, but as comprehending also the more southern parts of the country. So also Silius Italicus, L. iii.

And Oppian, in the conclusion of his third Halieutic:

Indeed Strabo, L. i., Plutarch, in Cæsare, in Crasso; Appian, Bell. Civil. 2., and others, call the Gauls in general by the name of Celtæ; and the ancient Greek geographers knew of only two nations in Europe besides themselves, the Celtæ and the Scythæ, the former in the West, the latter in the North.