- Celts and Germans in the Rhineland -
Caesar at Bibracte, Alesia, and Avaricum. Examples include Tarodunum,
Manching, Kelheim, Stradonice, Magdalensberg and Zidovar.16 All share a similar
Late La Tene culture, and use the Celtic language.
2 Across Frisia and north Germany and into Scandinavia, we find the land covered
with heavy forest, inhabited by people with a semi-nomadic way of life, different
artefacts from those of the La Tene culture, no wheel-made pottery, and different
burial rites: these people, whom we may call the 'northerners', correspond to what
we should expect from Caesar's 'Germans'.
3 Between the two lies an intermediate zone, inhabited by people who can be called,
as in the title of the seminal work on the subject, Volker zwischen Germanen und
Kelten, with elements of both, so that it can be said that 'neither the Belgae west
of the river nor the tribes east of it were fully German or Celtic in the normal
sense'.17
The Belgae are either the key to the situation, or a confusing anomaly. In Caesar's
usage, they are a group of tribes living in the northern part of Gaul, in the area west
of the Rhine, bounded to the south by the Seine and the Marne.^18 In some contexts,
they can be regarded as Gauls, but at the same time Caesar preserves a tradition that
most of them originated east of the Rhine and were of German origin.^19 Five tribes
in the north-east of the area inhabited collectively by the Belgae are also grouped
together under the designation of 'left-bank Germans', Germani cisrhenani.2o
Philologists agree that the Belgae, like their neighbours to the south, such as the
Treveri, spoke Celtic dialects, although there is some evidence for a substratum
that is neither Celtic nor German, linguistically speaking, though allied to both.^21
North of the Belgae, amongst the low-lying swamps and the wandering channels of
the lower Rhine, the Meuse and the Waal, there were certainly 'northerners',
speaking German rather than Celtic dialects, but whether they were already there in
Caesar's day, or came in during the warfare of the next thirty or forty years, discussed
below, is unclear. The one reference in Caesar to the Batavi, who in Augustan
times lived around Nijmegen (Oppidum Batavorum or Noviomagus) and whom
Tacitus identifies as true 'northerners', formerly a branch of the Chatti, is unfortu-
nately in a passage which may well be a later interpolation.^22 The same passage
also mentions the Waal (Vacalus), later spelt Vahalis, in which form it is Germanic,
or germanicized.^23
So far on the middle Rhine we have largely confined ourselves to the left bank.
But on the east bank there are also tribes whose names appear to be Celtic rather than
German, and whose way of life is very different from that of the Suebi, who are
archetypally 'German' in the later sense of the term. Such for instance were the
Mattiaci, whom we find in the Augustan period on the lower Main and in the
Wetterau, across from the Roman legionary base at Mainz (Mogontiacum), with their
tribal capital in the first century AD at Wiesbaden (Aquae Mattiacorum). In the
pre-Roman period, the La Tene culture extended throughout this area, although the
further north one goes, the more impoverished it becomes, and there are some
linguistic differences.^24 This was in fact a border zone, but the area has more cultural
affinities with the Hunsriick-Eifel area on the opposite bank of the Rhine than it has
with regions still further north. The Wetterau region is of great historical importance,