Anyone looking for the Tectosages finds them in three places thousands of kilometres apart: in Tolosa, today's Toulouse, in the highlands around Ancyra, today's Ankara, and, if Caesar is to be believed, around the Hercynian Forest north of the Alps. Ancient authors tied these three places into a single story of migration, complete with a treasure, a plague and a curse. This article pulls the threads apart again, shows who says what in which source, and separates what is certain from what is interpretation and what is legend.
“Tectosages” (Latin Tectosages, also Tectosagi) is the name of a Celtic tribe. A tribe here means a community with its own name and territory, not a state with fixed borders. In the ancient sources the name turns up in three places, and the risk of confusion is high. First there are the Volcae Tectosages in southern Gaul, with Tolosa as their chief town. The Volcae are a larger Celtic group of peoples; we told their story, and the origin of the word “Welsh”, in our article on the Volcae and do not repeat it here. Second there are the Tectosages in Galatia, a region in the interior of Asia Minor around the city of Ancyra. They belonged to the Galatians, the Celts in Anatolia. Third, Caesar speaks of Volcae Tectosages who settled “across the Rhine” around the Hercynian Forest. To these comes a marginal note in Justin about Tectosages in Pannonia.
Popular literature likes to merge these three groups into a single people who supposedly marched east from Toulouse. The sources support that only in part. Strabo, who wrote around the turn of the era, tells of such a migration; Caesar speaks only of a settlement east of the Rhine; Livy knows the Tectosages solely as one of the three peoples of Galatia. Where an ancient source links two places, that is the author's statement, not a finding. This article therefore sets a different focus from the two neighbouring texts: it asks less about the history of the Volcae or the Galatians as a whole and more about which passages the talk of “the Tectosages” actually rests on, and how sturdy each one is.
The name is Gaulish; the Latin form that has come down to us is an adaptation. According to a widely held reconstruction it was originally something like Textosagioi; the Latin alphabet had no sign of its own for the Gaulish sound. Two components are considered recognizable: a word meaning “goods, property” and a word for “seekers”. That yields two proposed translations, “those who seek a roof over their heads” and “those who seek possessions”; the interpretations come from Pierre-Yves Lambert and Xavier Delamarre, and we know them only through secondary literature. An Old Irish legal term for asserting a claim to land is cited as a comparison; that is a comparison, not proof. So it remains a conjecture, one that would suit a migrating or land-seeking group. It says nothing about whether the bearers of the name in Gaul, on the Danube and in Anatolia actually descend from the same ancestors. A thought from a French teaching resource goes further and considers “Tectosages” a name that may originally have denoted newcomers rather than a fixed people. That is a reflection, not a finding, and we merely pass it on.
Strabo (XII, 5, 1) also knows the question of the name. He writes that the Trocmi and the Tolistobogii took their names from their leaders, but the Tectosages from a tribe in Celtica. That is an ancient explanation, not linguistics, but it shows that Greeks and Romans already read the name as a clue to origin.
The first setting is the best attested. Strabo (IV, 1, 13) describes the Tectosages as living near the Pyrenees, their territory reaching in part onto the northern side of the Cevennes, in a land rich in gold. In Caesar the Tolosates, the inhabitants of Tolosa, appear only in passing. When he learns in 58 BC that the Helvetii want to march through the lands of the Aedui and Sequani towards the Santones, he notes that these lie not far from the borders of the Tolosates, a community that lies “in the province” (Gallic War I, 10: quae civitas est in provincia). Tolosa thus already belonged to the Roman province in the south of Gaul, later called Gallia Narbonensis. Caesar says no more at this point; in particular he does not call them “Tectosages” here. That the Tolosates are Volcae Tectosages we infer from Strabo and later passages; it is the usual reading, but a synthesis of several authors.
For the Helvetii, who are drawn into that sentence, it is worth a look at our article on the Helvetii. It shows why Caesar watched the south-western corner of Gaul so closely.
How Tolosa entered the Roman system of alliances can be grasped in the ancient texts only in hints. According to an account by the French education authority (Odysseum), the city around 120 BC was rich, trade-minded and an allied, largely self-governing place with a small Roman garrison. That such a garrison existed fits a report in Cassius Dio that we know only through summaries: the citizens put the Roman garrison in chains and let troops into the city by night. Cassius Dio lived some 300 years after the events and drew on older literature that has not survived.
The Celtic city did not lie where the centre of Toulouse stands today. According to the excavations, settlement was spread over several sites a few kilometres apart; the most important lay on the heights of Vieille-Toulouse south of the Garonne. A fortified chief town, an oppidum, is attested there. An oppidum is a large, usually fortified Celtic settlement of the last two centuries BC that served as a centre of trade, craft and power. For Vieille-Toulouse the literature gives 90 to 100 hectares of settled area, plus an earthen rampart almost eight kilometres long that supposedly encloses some 300 hectares; both figures come from an encyclopaedia summary and cannot be reconciled with one another there. We therefore give them only as an order of magnitude: a very large site, probably one of the largest in southern Gaul.
The excavations at the foot of the oppidum, reported by the French institute for preventive archaeology (Inrap), are telling. On a plot of 1,800 square metres at Borde-Basse, several roughly square shafts of about 1.10 to 1.30 metres on a side were found. They were filled in at different times, the earliest shaft at the end of the 2nd century BC with fragments of wine amphorae, others around 100 BC and towards the end of the 1st century BC. The fill contained bricks, roof tiles (about 960 kilograms from a single shaft) and hollow heating tiles, tubuli, of the kind used in Roman baths. That shows Italian building methods taking hold early for Gaul, in the excavators' estimate by about the middle of the 1st century BC. Fitting this are a mount from a wooden bucket used for serving wine and a Gaulish road paved with sherds and tiles. The find is a craft quarter, not a residential one; the shafts are not pools for a ritual act but presumably wells or pits whose purpose is not certain.
What becomes visible here is a prosperous society tied into Mediterranean trade, buying Italian wine and gradually settling into Roman ways. Coins from the western Mediterranean and large quantities of amphora sherds from Vieille-Toulouse and from the river port of Saint-Roch confirm it. According to that account the wealth of this city came above all from trade on the land bridge between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Around 10 to 7 BC Augustus founded the Roman city on today's site on the Garonne; Vieille-Toulouse was abandoned afterwards. The French account suspects a sanctuary in which gold and silver were dedicated, perhaps with a sacred pond; that is expressly a possibility. Of a treasure like the one Strabo and Justin describe, archaeology has so far found nothing.
The second chapter is the most famous and the most delicate. In the years after 113 BC Rome was at war with the Cimbri and Teutones (see Cimbri and Teutones), and in southern Gaul a good deal went wrong. In 107 BC the consul Lucius Cassius Longinus was defeated and killed by the Tigurini, a Helvetian sub-tribe, in south-western Gaul. The next year, 106 BC, the consul Quintus Servilius Caepio marched on Tolosa, which had fallen away after the Roman setback, and took it. That the city had previously been an ally is mentioned by Cassius Dio; the summary we could consult names the entanglements after the defeat of 107 as the trigger.
In the sacking, so the tradition runs, an enormous treasure fell into Roman hands. The figures vary widely. Orosius, a Christian historian of the early 5th century, gives 100,000 pounds of gold and 110,000 pounds of silver from the temple of Apollo (V, 15). Justin (32, 3), in the version we could consult, gives 110,000 pounds of silver and gold amounting to quinquies decies centum milia pounds, that is fifteen times a hundred thousand, 1.5 million. By our own conversion with the Roman pound of about 327 grams, that would be some 490 tonnes of gold, an amount no Celtic temple can ever have hoarded. Whether this is a copying error, whether Justin used another source or whether the number simply exaggerates, we do not know. Strabo, following the philosopher Posidonius, gives the value as about 15,000 talents. We thus have three figures that do not support one another and can say only: it must have been a great deal of precious metal, but how much cannot be determined.
It is also certain that the treasure never reached Rome. According to Orosius Caepio had the booty taken under guard to Massilia (Marseille), the guards were killed in secret, and Caepio was accused of having stolen everything by a crime (cuncta per scelus furatus fuisse narratur). A great inquiry followed in Rome, says Orosius. The summary of Cassius Dio blames the soldiers. The oldest surviving evidence is Cicero's remark in De natura deorum (III, 74), who around the middle of the 40s BC mentions in a list of criminal trials the case auri Tolossani next to the conspiracy of Catiline: a case of gold theft that went to court, without Cicero giving a place or an amount there. According to the usual account, Caepio lost a heavy battle against the Cimbri at Arausio (Orange) in 105 BC, in which he is said to have refused to cooperate with the other commander, and was condemned afterwards. We have not checked the details of that account in a primary source.
From here on begins the story that made the case famous. The Roman writer Aulus Gellius says in the 2nd century AD (Noctes Atticae III, 9) that the proverb aurum Tolosanum was familiar to him. Caepio had plundered Tolosa, much gold had been carried off from the temples, and whoever touched it perished miserably. Gellius names no written source; he reports what people said. In his hands a historical robbery turns into a curse.
The fullest ancient version is in Justin, who in the 2nd or 3rd century excerpted the history of Pompeius Trogus from the Augustan age. According to his account (32, 3), after the failed attack on Delphi the Tectosages returned to their “old homeland” Tolosa and were struck by a deadly epidemic. They recovered only when, following the advice of soothsayers, they sank the gold and silver they had “acquired through war and temple robbery” into the lake of Tolosa (in Tolosensem lacum mergerent). Much later, the consul Caepio seized this treasure, and this sacrilege was the cause of his downfall and that of his army. At the same time the Cimbrian war came upon Rome like an avenger of the sacred money (Romanos quoque Cimbrici belli tumultus velut ultor sacrae pecuniae insecutus est). That is the core of the legend: a treasure from Delphi, a plague as divine punishment, a curse on all who touch it, and a Roman catastrophe as its execution.
Even ancient authors did not all believe it. Strabo (IV, 1, 13) reports that on one reading the treasure was supposed to come from Delphi, and cites Timagenes as his authority, who portrayed Caepio as a temple robber whose daughters later fell into disgrace. Strabo himself, however, follows Posidonius: the treasure amounted to some 15,000 talents, partly kept in sacred lakes, and Delphi had long since been plundered by the Phocians, so that the Tectosages could hardly have carried anything home. Moreover, lakes were the safest place for votive offerings in the Celtic world, and when the Romans later sold the lakes the buyers found silver millstones. With Posidonius we have a voice that explains the treasure from Celtic gold and votive custom. That is a counter-draft to the Delphi myth and, by today's judgement, more probable. That the gold came from Delphi thus stands against an author with local knowledge.
For the overall picture Pausanias helps (X, 19–23), who describes the Celtic attack on Delphi in 279 BC at length. In his account the attackers under Brennus fail through storm, rockfalls and nocturnal panic; he gives losses of nearly 6,000 men in the fighting, over 10,000 in the storm and panic, and as many again who starved. Whether the temple was plundered is disputed between Strabo and Pausanias, and Pausanias names neither the Tectosages nor Tolosa. The link between the Delphi expedition and the Tolosa treasure is therefore found at its core only in Strabo, Justin and Cassius Dio; no primary source of the 3rd century attests it.
Strabo (IV, 1, 13) explains the migration thus: the Tectosages had once been so numerous and strong that after an internal uprising they expelled part of their population. Other peoples joined the expelled, and some of them settled in a part of Phrygia bordering on Cappadocia and Paphlagonia. That three Galatian tribes in Phrygia bear the same names as in Gaul he sees as proof. The Tectosages live around Ancyra, next to them the Trocmi and the Tolistobogii. He adds that the Tectosages, so it was said, took part in the expedition against Delphi; the second Brennus, who attacked Delphi, might have been a Prausos. That is a scholar's conjecture from around the time of Christ, resting on the sameness of names.
Modern researchers are sceptical. We know the arguments only from summaries: Altay Coşkun calls Strabo's derivation a deliberate simplification; Venceslas Kruta and Karl Strobel assume that the Volcae arose in central Europe and that Gaul, the Danube and Anatolia are each offshoots of a common core. That is an interpretation, no less weighty than the ancient one, but it too remains an interpretation. The lowest common denominator reads: the name turns up in several places, and neither the ancient nor the modern explanation is proven.
The route across the Balkans is certain. Justin (32, 3, 6) says that after the loss of their leader Brennus parts of the Gauls fled to Asia, others to Thrace. Pausanias (X, 23, 8) reports that in the year after the attack on Delphi, under the Athenian archon Democles, “the Celts crossed over into Asia”. Livy (38, 16) in retrospect divides the spoils among three peoples: the Trocmi received, in his account, the coast of the Hellespont, the Tolistobogii Aeolis and Ionia, the Tectosages the interior. The date of the decisive battle against the invaders on the plain of Sardis varies between 275 and 269 BC. Anyone who names a single year goes beyond what the sources give. The Tectosages were thus in Anatolia by the middle of the 3rd century BC at the latest, and from the following period their history is attested, if patchily.
The land the Tectosages took in Anatolia was later called Galatia. Strabo describes in XII, 5, 1–2 a remarkable order: each of the three tribes was divided into four parts, the tetrarchies, led each by a tetrarch (“ruler of a quarter”), a judge, a military commander and two subordinate commanders. Twelve tetrarchs with a total of 300 men formed a council that met at a place called Drynemeton and judged cases of murder. The name Drynemeton contains the Celtic word nemeton for a sacred place or grove, a linguistic proof that the newcomers brought their words with them. The Tectosages held as their fortress Ancyra, today's Ankara. According to Strabo the three peoples spoke the same language and differed little from one another.
Rome first met the Tectosages in 189 BC. In that year the consul Gnaeus Manlius Vulso led a campaign against the Galatians, which Livy tells at length in Book 38. He advanced via Gordion to Ancyra, the city he calls “notable in those parts” (38, 24: Ancyram, nobilem in illis locis urbem); the camp of the Tectosages lay little more than ten Roman miles away. In the ensuing fight, says Livy (38, 26), the Tectosages and Trocmi, the sturdiest part of the Galatian army, held the centre (Hostium quod roboris erat, Tectosagi et Trocmi, mediam tenebant aciem). Roman missiles made the Galatians give way, after which they sued for peace. Figures for army strengths and losses that Livy gives are rarely reliable in such accounts and cannot be checked. In the same narrative Livy has the Roman commander call the Galatians “Gallograeci” (38, 17), Gauls degenerate through mixing with their surroundings. That is a speech in a history book, formulated by an author who shaped the scene generations later.
In the following period the tetrarchies lost weight. According to Strabo power passed from three rulers to two and finally to Deiotarus, the later king, then to Amyntas. After the latter's death in 25 BC Augustus made Galatia a Roman province, as the standard accounts agree. Ancyra became one of its chief towns. There stood a temple of Augustus on whose walls the emperor's account of his deeds, the Res Gestae, was carved in stone; today this text is called the Monumentum Ancyranum, after its findspot. That the Tectosages' town holds the best-preserved copy of this imperial text is a quirk of transmission and says nothing about them.
The language held on surprisingly long. Jerome writes in the late 4th century AD in the preface to his commentary on Galatians (Book II), in the 19th-century translation, that the Galatians, like the whole East, speak Greek, but that their own language is almost the same as that of the Treveri. The Treveri are the people around Trier on the Moselle, and we shall return to them. No coherent text of this language survives, only personal names such as Deiotaros or Brogimaros, tribal names and words like the nemeton in the name Drynemeton. Grammar and pronunciation cannot be derived from them, and Jerome does not say whether he himself had heard both languages.
Archaeologically, Galatian Anatolia is surprisingly hard to grasp. An older work by Lucia Nixon (1977), which we know only from a summary, concluded that only one burial site, Karalar near Ankara, can be considered securely Galatian through a Greek inscription, and that its tombs are built in Hellenistic style. Individual torcs and brooches from Karalar, Bolu and Boğazköy are probably Celtic, but so rare that according to that work they were imports rather than local production. “Galatian” pottery is disputed. More recent surveys around Ankara have recorded fortifications and settlement patterns, but no Celtic material culture of its own. In Anatolia the Tectosages are thus above all a figure of the written sources, and it would be wrong to appeal to excavation pictures that do not exist.
The third passage is the most puzzling. In the sixth book of his Gallic War Caesar describes the Germans and inserts a flashback to how the Gauls were once stronger. The passage (VI, 24) reads in our translation, abridged from the Latin text via thelatinlibrary.com:
There was a time when the Gauls surpassed the Germans in valour, made war on them of their own accord, and, because of the number of their people and the lack of land, sent colonies across the Rhine. So the Volcae Tectosages seized the most fertile parts of Germany around the Hercynian Forest […] and settled there.Caesar, Gallic War VI, 24 (abridged; omission after “Forest” in the original); Latin text after thelatinlibrary.com, our own translation
Two things stand out. Caesar says “Volcae Tectosages”, not simply “Tectosages”, and he sets them in the past, in a time for which he names no source. He adds that this tribe holds to those seats to this day and enjoys the highest reputation for justice and martial glory; the Latin phrase is summamque habet iustitiae et bellicae laudis opinionem. Whether Caesar saw this himself or heard it from informants, he does not say. He names Eratosthenes and other Greeks as witnesses for the existence of the forest, not for the Tectosages. In the next chapter (VI, 25) he describes the Hercynian Forest as so large that one measures its breadth in nine days' journey and does not reach its end in sixty days. It begins at the borders of the Helvetii, Nemetes and Rauraci and runs along the Danube as far as the Dacians and Anartes. It is a name for a wide upland and forest country north of the Danube, not for a precisely outlined wood.
Two things follow from the passage, and only one is certain. It is certain that Caesar knew, or believed he knew, a group of this name east of the Rhine. It is uncertain whether it descended from the Tolosa Tectosages at all, and equally whether Caesar perhaps pieced the name together from a learned source. Karl Strobel, as far as we know, reads the expression “Hercynia silva” as a loose collective term for wooded uplands. He places the group in north-eastern Bavaria and Thuringia and assigns the interior of the forest to the Boii; Kruta thinks of the plains of Bohemia and Moravia. Both positions are taken from summaries. What archaeology can contribute to this question we have not examined.
Tacitus knows Caesar's passage and relays it in the Germania (28): the Gauls were once stronger than the Germans, and so it is credible that Gauls crossed into Germany. But he does not name the Tectosages; he speaks of the Helvetii and the Boii who settled “between the Hercynian Forest and the rivers Rhine and Main”, and of the name Boihaemum that still recalls the Boii. Anyone who claims that Tacitus attests the Tectosages in Germany reads something into the text. More on the Boii is in our article on the Boii.
Livy (V, 34) also describes a division, but without the Tectosages: the Bituriges king Ambigatus sends his nephews Bellovesus and Segovesus out to seek new lands; by lot Segovesus receives “the Hercynian forest ranges” (Hercynei saltus), Bellovesus the road to Italy. The Volcae are entirely absent here. That Segovesus had anything to do with the Tectosages is a conjecture of modern authors that we do not find in the text. The last note comes again from Justin (32, 3, 12): “a not insignificant people of the Tectosages” was drawn by the prospect of booty back to Illyria, plundered the Histri and settled in Pannonia (in Pannonia consedit). Here stands a third part of the migration, without our knowing how it fits with the others. For the peoples on the Danube, a look at our article on the Scordisci is worthwhile.
For the Eifel, the Aachen region or Alsdorf no ancient source we know names Tectosages, and we therefore invent no regional connection. Two traces do show how densely the Celtic-Germanic zone on the Rhine was imagined. Caesar speaks of Gauls sending settlers across the Rhine, and Tacitus (Germania 28) writes that the Treveri and the Nervii eagerly claim Germanic descent. For us the Treveri on the Moselle are the only neighbours from our region who are compared directly with the Galatians in the sources, namely through Jerome's sentence about a related language. That does not mean the Treveri were Tectosages; it means that an author of the 4th century who knew both countries, or believed he did, took Galatian and Treverian to be almost the same. We have articles of our own on the Treveri and on the tribes of our homeland, the Ubii and Eburones, as well as the overview Germanic peoples in the Rhineland.
Certain are Tolosa as the place of the Tolosates in the Roman province, Caepio's capture in 106 BC and the loss of the treasure, the Galatian Tectosages with Ancyra as their fortress, Manlius' campaign of 189 BC and the formation of the province in 25 BC. Plausible is that the Tolosa Tectosages and the Hercynia group are linked through the name, and that part of the Celtic warrior movements of the 3rd century BC led across the Balkans into Asia Minor. Interpretation remains the origin of the name, the exact location of the Tectosages at the Hercynian Forest, the size of the treasure and the question whether the Galatian Tectosages really came from Gaul. Legend are the Delphi origin of the gold, the plague as punishment and the curse on the treasure. The proverb aurum Tolosanum nevertheless stayed alive and named unlawful possessions that bring misfortune. Behind it stands no magic but a story about greed that Rome told itself.
In our family workshop in Alsdorf we make laser-engraved slate plaques with Norse-Germanic and Celtic motifs. For the Tectosages there is no handed-down sign we could prove to be their own, and so we invent none. For the overall picture of Celtic Europe see Celts; how far Celtic names and people travelled is also shown by the Norici in the Eastern Alps and the Arverni in Gaul.
The Volcae · The Galatians · The Boii · The Treveri · Cimbri & Teutones.
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