- Chapter Thirty-One -
nationales ne sauraient etre etudiees isolement .... Ce n' est plus seulement en Gaule
et dans les lIes Britanniques, mais au dela du Rhin et des Alpes fran~aises que la
culture celtique sollicite l'attention des archeologues'.
The oppida culture that in the Late La Tene period (La Tene III) subsisted
throughout Gaul was rudely shattered by Caesar's invasion, and it is to Caesar's
account that we must now turn to try to clarify the cultural and ethnic situation
that he found along the Rhine when he got there in the 50S. Caesar, a political
propagandist, not a trained ethnographer, uses three terms to refer to tribal group-
ings, namely 'Celts', also called 'Gauls' in Latin,9 'Germans', and 'Belgae', and any
discussion of ethnicity involves us in trying to understand these terms. Caesar in the
very first chapter of his work defines the Germans quite specifically as those 'who
dwell across the Rhine', that is, east of the river, and seems to be trying to suggest as
a result that the Rhine is a natural boundary.lo He also emphasizes the difference
between Celts and Germans, and insists upon the terror which the Germans inspire,
'by the huge size of their bodies, by their incredible courage and skill in arms' .11
He argues, as it suits his political purpose, that if the Germans who had already
invaded Gaul before he himself got there had not been checked and driven back
across the Rhine where he claims they belonged, they might have overrun all Gaul
and threatened Italy, 'as previously the Cimbri and Teutoni had done'.12 The Cimbri
and Teutoni had been turned back by Marius less than half a century before, so that
there were Romans who could still remember the terror that they had inspired. It
was a potent parallel.
Now in Caesar's account, it is clear that one way, and perhaps the most significant
way, of distinguishing the Germans from the Celts is by the language they speak.
This is most clearly shown in the case of Ariovistus, described as 'king of the
Germans', rex Germanorum, who appears to belong to the Suebi, 'a people ... by
far the greatest and most warlike of all the Germans'. His Suebic origin is inferred
from the fact that he had a Suebic wife 'whom he had brought with him from home',
and he is said to speak Celtic only as the result of long practice in the language.^13 The
name Ariovistus appears to be Celtic and turns up elsewhere belonging to a chieftain
of the Insubrian Gauls, but this may only mean, as Rudolf Much argued, that it was
transmitted to Caesar by Gaulish informants in a Celticized form.^14 Note too that
the Cimbri, originally from Denmark, the Cimbric peninsula, are certainly not Celts,
though their personal names too are transmitted through classical writers in a Celtic
form. For Tacitus also, language was the prime distinguishing mark: the Cotini and
the Osi, he argues, cannot be German, because the former speak a Gaulish and the
latter a Pannonian language. IS The Roman army must have been aware of this: even
if other cultural distinctions that might interest a modern ethnographer escaped
them, they could hardly have failed to notice when it was necessary to change the
interpreter.
Now if the cultural differences between Celts and Germans were as great as Caesar
suggests, and if the Rhine indeed formed the ethnic frontier, we are entitled to expect
corresponding differences in material culture to show up in the archaeological record,
thus making the Rhine the archaeological frontier also. The fact is that they do not:
I Right across central Gaul and south Germany through Bohemia and into
Yugoslavia we find, as Dechelette recognized, oppida such as those described by