collect a greater multitude. They cannot, therefore, have been at so great a distance from it as Livy supposed. According to that historian, the Gauls separated into two great bodies: the fate of Brennus and his followers, who invaded Greece, is well known; the other division, under Lomnorius and Lutarius, after many adventures, passed the Hellespont into Asia, and seated themselves finally in Phrygia, in the neighbourhood of the river Halys, after dividing Asia Minor by lot into three parts, and rendering each part tributary to one of their three clans. These clans were the Tolistoboii, Trocmi, and Tectosagi. Strabo gives them nearly the same denominations. They retained their power till the war between Antiochus and the Romans. It may be observed that Polybius and Pausanias term these Gauls, KEλ70 or Celts; other writers call them Galatæ, Galli, and Gallo-Græci. Not one ancient historian or geographer has expressed a doubt that they were true Celtic Gauls; and certainly nothing can be more improbable than the supposition that a Belgic tribe had acquired in early times a settlement in the most remote region of Celtica, where, although they were well known to the Massilians and to the Romans who built the city of Narbo on the lands of the Volca, they were never suspected to be other than genuine Celts.

• M. Thierry has maintained that the Volca were Belgæ, and not Celts. The only proofs he brings forward are the following. In some copies of Cicero's Oration pro M. Fonteio, Belgarum is read instead of Volcarum. But this reading was totally rejected by Grævius, and probably arose from the blunder of some ignorant copyist who had never heard of such a people as the Volcæ, and supposed that the author must have alluded to the Belga. Ausonius terms the Tectosagi “primævo nomine Bolgas." But Ausonius being himself a Gaul would not have made a mistake in the name of a Gaulish people, and would have termed them Belgas, had he intended to identify them with the Belgæ so well known. Pausanias mentions that one of the tribes of Galatæ had a chieftain named Bolgius. The principal prop of M. Thierry's argument is St. Jerom's assertion, which we shall hereafter cite and comment upon, that the Galatians spoke nearly the same language as the Treviri, who were a Belgic tribe. This would be a good argument if it could be proved in the first place that the language of the Celta was not nearly the same as that of the Belgæ. I shall endeavour to show that the contrary was the fact, and that the difference between these dialects was very slight. On the whole we have no reason to doubt, what all the ancients uniformly testify, that the Volca were a tribe of the Celtæ properly so termed.

VOL. III.

H

SECTION VIII. Of the Cimbri.

The Cimbri were the ancient inhabitants of Denmark, from them called the Cimbric Chersonesus. They first became known to the rest of the world on the occasion of their celebrated invasion of Southern Germany, Gaul, and Italy, in the time of Caius Marius. This was the first on record of those great migrations from the northern parts of Europe, by which the southern and more cultivated regions were laid waste, for the conquest of Italy by the Gauls cannot, though in other respects a similar event, be so termed, since that people originated or at least came into Italy from a different quarter. These movements continued to be repeated from time to time until the northern parts of the continent were finally subdued and civilized by Charlemagne and his successors, after which period we hear only of the maritime aggressions of the Northmen, whose piracies in like manner had their termination only when Scandinavia was christianized, and its inhabitants exchanged the habits of wandering freebooters for the industry of agriculture and commerce. The invasion of the Cimbri, like many later enterprises of the same description, was not the solitary expedition of a particular horde: it seems to have been a simultaneous movement among many different nations near the shores of the Baltic. The Teutones, who, next to the Cimbri, had been the most powerful and conspicuous among these tribes, came from the northern part of Germany bordering on the Elbe. A third body appears to have been formed by a people termed Ambrones, of whom, if they were a distinct tribe, we know nothing but their name. It was reported that all these nations were driven out of their country by a deluge which overwhelmed it, but this opinion was rejected by Strabo, on the ground of its supposed physical impossibility, and the want of room for the support of a vast multitude is assigned as the most probable incentive. Cæsar informs us that the Cimbri and Teutones were repulsed by the Belgæ in Gaul, in their attempt to pass the Rhine into the country inhabited by that people; they were likewise resisted by the Boii in the Hercynian Forest, but succeeded in making

their way into Celtic Gaul, which they overran, and whence they invaded Italy, taking with them in their train armies from the Tectosages, and from several Ligurian tribes. The Cimbri here separated from the other nations, and, as it appears, entered Italy through Noricum and by the passes of the Tyrolese, while the Teutones and Ambrones, with their Celtic and Ligurian allies, approached it by the coast on the western side. Little reliance can be placed on the accounts left us as to the number of these hordes. The army of the Cimbri and Teutones was reported to have consisted of three hundred thousand well-armed warriors, besides a more numerous crowd of followers, and Plutarch supposes that this estimate was much below their actual numbers. It appears that the power of the Cimbri was greatly weakened by this migration, since they are ever afterwards mentioned as an inconsiderable state, and in the time of Tacitus were almost extinct. It is therefore probable that nearly the whole nation emigrated.

Writers of the Augustan and the succeeding age, the historical period of Rome, have given us conjectures respecting the Cimbri, who were too distant to be within the reach of accurate inquiry. They were generally supposed to have been a German tribe, from the situation of their country: Cæsar, Strabo, and Tacitus considered them as such. Strabo informs us that among the Northern German tribes, whose country he defines as reaching from the mouths of the Rhine to those of the Albis or Elbe, the most remarkable are the Cimbri and the Sugambri. "Beyond the Albis," he adds, "all is unknown to us, for we do not hear that any navigator has sailed along the coast eastward towards the entrance of the Caspian Sea,' -supposed to join the eastern extremity of the Baltic-" and the Romans have not gained access to the parts beyond the Elbe, nor have travellers penetrated into those countries by land journeys." The Sugambri of Strabo are the Sican bri of Latin writers, and it might be suspected that their name is a modification of that of the Cimbri.

The notion entertained by the geographers of Strabo's time, that the coast of the Baltic turned towards the south-east and was continuous with that of the Caspian Sea, seems to have connected in their minds the north of Europe with Scythia.

Hence the countries on the Baltic came in later times to be termed Scythia, of which we find an instance in Bede. The same mistake accounts for the notion, admitted by many ancient writers on the ground of a mere resemblance of names, that the Cimbri were the Cimmerii of Homer and Herodotus. Cimmeria was the dark and unknown coast of an imaginary ocean, supposed to reach from the Atlantic through the Codan or Baltic Sea to the Caspian, and thence to the utmost East. It was enveloped in perpetual fogs, and never visited by the solar rays. The lines in which it is mentioned by Homer afford a curious specimen of ancient cosmography.*

Posidonius appears first to have conjectured that the Cimbri were the same people as the Cimmerii. His opinion, which was approved by Strabo as a probable conjecture, became very prevalent among the Romans, as we learn from Plutarch. Undoubtedly it had no other foundation than the resemblance of the two names and the geographical error of the ancients, who believed the coast of the Cimbri to be continuous with that which the Cimmerii were supposed to have inhabited. The same notion has been adopted by modern writers, as by Karamsin, the historian of the Russian empire, and it has been often stated as a fact established by adequate testimony. On this account it will be worth while to collect, in a short compass, the sum of the information extant respecting the Cimmerii.

The history of the Cimmerii, so far as the account respecting them is really historical and not mythical, rests entirely on Herodotus, who collected his information respecting them in the course of his journeys in Asia Minor and on the coast of the Euxine, where the memory of their abode was still recent in his time. According to Herodotus, the country then in the possession of the Scythians had been occupied in earlier times by the Cimmerians. The extent of their territory cannot be defined it appears to have been on both sides of the Palus Mæotis, or the Sea of Asov, and the Bosphorus, termed from them Cimmerian. The peninsula termed afterwards the Tauric Chersonesus, now Crim Tartary, was likewise sometimes named Cimmerian. On this peninsula we are informed by Strabo that there was formerly a Cimmerian city, adjoining to which * Odyss. xi. in initio.

were fortifications, enclosing the isthmus by an earthen wall. As vestiges of the Cimmerians still remaining in his time, Herodotus mentions an earthen monument near the river Tyras, under which had been interred a great multitude of that nation, as well as the names of several places in the Scythian country there were the Cimmerian walls, the Cimmerian passage or ferry-Top0unia,-and the territory itself was termed Cimmerian. The people had been driven out by the Scythians, who had been expelled from their country further towards the east by the Massagetæ, and entered Cimmeria after passing the Araxes. The Cimmerians, or perhaps only a part of them, living on the southern part of their country, as we may collect from the narrative of Aristeas related in another passage of Herodotus, escaped from the invaders by passing along the eastern shore of the Euxine: the Scythians are said to have pursued them, but passing to the eastward of the Caucasus, entered Media, and thus began the celebrated expedition of that people into Upper Asia, on which occasion they were said to have penetrated as far as the cities of Phonice. The Cimmerians, taking a more western route, came down upon the coast of Asia Minor, which they appear to have overrun as far as Bithynia, since Strabo enumerates Cimmerians among the early inhabitants of that country. Herodotus says that they founded a colony in the Asiatic Chersonesus, where the Greek city of Sinope was afterwards built, near the promontory and river of that name. They likewise invaded Lydia in the reign of Ardys, B.C. 634, and kept possession of a part of it till they were expelled from Asia by Alyattes B.C. 613. Herodotus represents their conquest of that country as the immediate sequel of their entrance into Asia Minor, and not as a subsequent attack made by the Cimmerian colonists of the northern coast. But Strabo supposed the first incursion of the Cimmerians into Asia to have happened at a much earlier period, and thought even that some obscure notices of such an event had reached Greece before the time of Homer.

After the conquest of Cimmeria by the Scythians, it appears that the Tauric Chersonesus or Crim Tartary continued to be the abode of a peculiar people, termed Tauri, who are conjectured, with probability, to have been remains of the old