On the Gauls, and their Immigration into Italy

Summary

The persons who carried intelligence to Athens of Rome's destruction by the Gauls, related, as Heraclides soon after wrote, that Rome had been taken by a great host of Hyperboreans, that is to say, a people who came over the icy mountains from the unknown regions of the north. Herodotus, writing about the year 330, only knew of the Celts as dwelling in the extreme west of Europe, at so vast a distance that he conceives them to have been seated beyond the pillars of Hercules. He does not place the Celts, but the Umbrians, at the foot of the mountains in which the Drave and the Inn take their rise: nor does he name them among the nations out of which the army led by Hamilcar against Gelo and Thero was raised,—Phœnicians, Libyans, Iberians, Ligurians, Volscians, Sardinians, Corsicans: in aftertimes on the other hand the Gauls always made up a large part of the Carthaginian armies, having already served in those of Dionysius the Elder: so that in the time of Gelo they were still at a distance from those parts where the Carthaginian recruiters might have engaged them and taken them on board ship.

Wherever we have the means of comparing Appian with Dionysius, he has built upon him, so far as Dionysius goes: and as he is not a writer likely to have taken the trouble of seeking for information in more books than one at the same time, we may look upon his express statement, that the Gallic invasion took place in the ninetyseventh Olympiad, as borrowed from Dionysius.