History of the Irish state to 1014 - National Library of Scotland

"II THE CELTIC-SPEAKING INVADERS 25and destroyed Rome. It was in this new tide of dispersalthat warriors from Gaul crossed the sea to Britain andIreland, reaching Ireland perhaps in the fourth centuryB.C. A century later there was again a doublemovement of conquering hosts ; the first turning eastwardalong the Danube to the Balkan peninsula, spreadingover Greece and as far as Galatia in Asia Minor; thesecond going westward to a new invasion of Gaul.Germans east of the Rhine—a mixed population ofinvaders and Germans speaking a Celtic dialect—weredriven by the hostile pressure of the German-speakingGermans west of the river, and in their turn drovebefore them the earHer Celtic-speaking settlers, andthemselves occupied the country between the Rhine andthe Marne. They were known to Caesar as the Belgae,a people whom he held to be of German origin, ruder,less civiHzed, and more warHke than the Celticized Galliwho lay to west and south of them in middle Gaul.Three groups of Celticized peoples now occupied Gaul,differing in language, culture, and institutions—theAquitani bordering on Spain, mainly Celtic in language,otherwise mainly Iberian ; the Celts proper, accordingto Caesar, in Gaul ; and the Belgae^ Celtic in languageand mainly Germanic in race. On the other hand,peoples reckoned to be Celtic still continued to inhabitcountries east of the Rhine, where Celts and Germansconfounded together were united, not by race, but bylanguage.We do not know by what way, somewhere about350 B.C., the first iron-armed invaders came to Ireland,not from Spain certainly, but from " sunny Gaulwhere Caesar in his time recognized the people as Celts.They carried easy victory in their new weapons. Theiriron crashed through every obstacle. But of the plantingof the new race in Ireland we know nothing. Theirnumbers were probably small. Only one historic factsurvives—the coming of a second wave of invaders.There is an ancient tradition of Labraid Loingsech the