Notes for Book II Chapter IV

1.  I. X. Phoenicians and Italians in Opposition to the Hellenes

2. —­Fiaron o Deinomeneos kai toi Surakosioi toi Di Turan apo Kumas.—­

3.  I. X. Home of the Greek Immigrants

4.  Hecataeus (after 257 u. c.) and Herodotus also (270-after 345) only know Hatrias as the delta of the Po and the sea that washes its shores (O.  Muller, Etrusker, i. p. 140; Geogr.  Graeci min. ed.  C. Muller, i. p. 23).  The appellation of Adriatic sea, in its more extended sense, first occurs in the so-called Scylax about 418 U. C.

5.  II.  II.  Coriolanus

6. -Pleraque Gallia duas res industriosissime persequitur:  rem militarem et argute loqui- (Cato, Orig, l. ii. fr. 2.  Jordan).

7.  It has recently been maintained by expert philologists that there is a closer affinity between the Celts and Italians than there is even between the latter and the Hellenes.  In other words they hold that the branch of the great tree, from which the peoples of Indo-Germanic extraction in the west and south of Europe have sprung, divided itself in the first instance into Greeks and Italo-Celts, and that the latter at a considerably later period became subdivided into Italians and Celts.  This hypothesis commends itself much to acceptance in a geographical point of view, and the facts which history presents may perhaps be likewise brought into harmony with it, because what has hitherto been regarded as Graeco-Italian civilization may very well have been Graeco-Celto-Italian—­in fact we know nothing of the earliest stage of Celtic culture.  Linguistic investigation, however, seems not to have made as yet such progress as to warrant the insertion of its results in the primitive history of the peoples.

8.  The legend is related by Livy, v. 34, and Justin, xxiv. 4, and Caesar also has had it in view (B.  G. vi. 24).  But the association of the migration of Bellovesus with the founding of Massilia, by which the former is chronologically fixed down to the middle of the second century of Rome, undoubtedly belongs not to the native legend, which of course did not specify dates, but to later chronologizing research; and it deserves no credit.  Isolated incursions and immigrations may have taken place at a very early period; but the great overflowing of northern Italy by the Celts cannot be placed before the age of the decay of the Etruscan power, that is, not before the second half of the third century of the city.

In like manner, after the judicious investigations of Wickham and Cramer, we cannot doubt that the line of march of Bellovesus, like that of Hannibal, lay not over the Cottian Alps (Mont Genevre) and through the territory of the Taurini, but over the Graian Alps (the Little St. Bernard) and through the territory of the Salassi.  The name of the mountain is given by Livy doubtless not on the authority of the legend, but on his own conjecture.