Stage of Development of the Celtic Civilization

If we survey the whole condition of the Celts as Caesar found it in the Transalpine regions, there is an unmistakeable advance in civilization, as compared with the stage of culture at which the Celts came before us a century and a half previously in the valley of the Po.  Then the militia, excellent of its kind, thoroughly preponderated in their armies;(23) now the cavalry occupies the first place.  Then the Celts dwelt in open villages; now well-constructed walls surrounded their townships.  The objects too found in the tombs of Lombardy are, especially as respects articles of copper and glass, far inferior to those of northern Gaul.  Perhaps the most trustworthy measure of the increase of culture is the sense of a common relationship in the nation; so little of it comes to light in the Celtic battles fought on the soil of what is now Lombardy, while it strikingly appears in the struggles against Caesar.  To all appearance the Celtic nation, when Caesar encountered it, had already reached the maximum of the culture allotted to it, and was even now on the decline.  The civilization of the Transalpine Celts in Caesar’s time presents, even for us who are but very imperfectly informed regarding it, several aspects that are estimable, and yet more that are interesting; in some respects it is more akin to the modern than to the Hellenic-Roman culture, with its sailing vessels, its knighthood, its ecclesiastical constitution, above all with its attempts, however imperfect, to build the state not on the city, but on the tribe and in a higher degree on the nation.  But just because we here meet the Celtic nation at the culminating point of its development, its lesser degree of moral endowment or, which is the same thing, its lesser capacity of culture, comes more distinctly into view.  It was unable to produce from its own resources either a national art or a national state; it attained at the utmost a national theology and a peculiar type of nobility.  The original simple valour was no more; the military courage based on higher morality and judicious organization, which comes in the train of increased civilization, had only made its appearance in a very stunted form among the knights.  Barbarism in the strict sense was doubtless outlived; the times had gone by, when in Gaul the fat haunch was assigned to the bravest of the guests, but each of his fellow-guests who thought himself offended thereby was at liberty to challenge the receiver on that score to combat, and when the most faithful retainers of a deceased chief were burnt along with him.  But human sacrifices still continued, and the maxim of law, that torture was inadmissible in the case of the free man but allowable in that of the free woman as well as of slaves, throws a far from pleasing light on the position which the female sex held among the Celts even in their period of culture.  The Celts had lost the advantages which specially belong to the primitive epoch of nations, but had not acquired those which civilization brings with it when it intimately and thoroughly pervades a people.