The bronze age and the Celtic world - Universal History Library

CONCLUSION 169
such positive evidence. A few of the Gaels may have reached Ireland from the mouth
of the Loire, in fact it seems probable that some such movement took place, though
positive archaeological evidence from the French side is for the present lacking.
Lastly there is an idea prevalent in some quarters that at one time there was in
Europe a great Celtic empire. Some writers speak of this as though it had been a Gaelic
empire. I have been unable as yet to trace this superstition to its source. I suspect
that the chapters on Brennius in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Britons' are the
real foundation for this strange behef , though naturally no-one to-day would base a serious
hypothesis upon so shifty a foundation. M. d'Arbois de Jubainville' seems to rely mainly
on a passage from Livy^ in which the writer states that Bellovesus and Sigovesus, nephews
of Ambigatus, king of the Bituriges, were sent simultaneously on two expeditions. Livy
says nothing of an empire, and the movements which he dates at 600 B.C. seem to have
occurred 300 years later. Dechelette"* had dealt with this absurd notion according to
its deserts.
The empire of Ambigatus, if such a thing existed, must have been a Kimric not
a Gaelic power. But empires, if we are to understand the word in the sense in which
it is ordinarily used, need settled conditions, such as did not prevail in north or north-
west Europe until the arrival in the latter region of the pax Romana. It is conceivably
possible that among the Kimri the tribal chiefs paid some form of loose allegiance to
a super-chief, just as the Dorians, and to some extent the Hellenic world, recognised,
very occasionally the hegemony of Sparta ; but the evidence which we possess from
classical sources does not even imply the existence of any such over-lordship among the
Celts. In any case such vague hegemony could only have existed among the Kimric
tribes, who for a thousand years harried the people of Celtic lands and the Celtic
cradle, Gaelic lords or non-Wiro subjects ahke. Before their arrival the Gaelic chiefs
ruled only in the mountain zone, and the estabhshment of an empire in a mountainous
country, draining into four rivers and four seas, would have been more impossible
than in the open steppe.
I Geoflrey of Monmouth, ifwi. Byfi. iii. 8-10. 3 Liv. v. 34.
' Jubainville (1904) 80. ! D6chelette (1908-14) ii. 572, 573.