Celtic Warfare - Celts As Barbarians

Celts As Barbarians

Later Greek and early Roman civilization faced major threats from Celtic invaders. Later, the situation was reversed as the expanding Roman Empire gradually conquered most of the Celts. Greek and Roman writers tend to focus much on the savage ferocity of the Celtic warrior, creating an image which has persisted ever since. To the Ancient Greeks and Romans the Celtic warrior was the archetypal barbarian, stereotypically presented as massive, powerful, and malicious. In the 5th century BC a Greek writer Ephoros described the Celts as one of the four great barbarian peoples, along with the Persians, the Scythians and the Libyans. They were called Keltoi or Galatae by the Greeks and Celtae or Galli by the Romans. Aristotle comments that their courage had an element of passion like that of all barbarians. Diodorus Siculus writes that they were extremely addicted to wine and that one could exchange a mere jar of wine for a slave.

The Celts were described by classical writers such as Strabo, Livy, Pausanias, and Florus as fighting like "wild beasts", and as hordes. Dionysius said that their "manner of fighting, being in large measure that of wild beasts and frenzied, was an erratic procedure, quite lacking in military science. Thus, at one moment they would raise their swords aloft and smite after the manner of wild boars, throwing the whole weight of their bodies into the blow like hewers of wood or men digging with mattocks, and again they would deliver crosswise blows aimed at no target, as if they intended to cut to pieces the entire bodies of their adversaries, protective armour and all". Such descriptions have been challenged by contemporary historians.