At last both princes and people grew weary.  Antiochus, King of Syria, attacked one of the three bands,—­that of the Tectosagians,—­conquered it, and cantoned it in a district of Upper Phrygia.  Later still, about 241 B.C., Eumenes, sovereign of Pergamos, and Attalus, his successor, drove and shut up the other two bands, the Tolistoboians and Troemians, likewise in the same region.  The victories of Attalus over the Gauls excited veritable enthusiasm.  He was celebrated as a special envoy from Zeus.  He took the title of King, which his predecessors had not hitherto borne.  He had his battles showily painted; and that he might triumph at the same time both in Europe and Asia, he sent one of the pictures to Athens, where it was still to be seen three centuries afterwards, hanging upon the wall of the citadel.  Forced to remain stationary, the Gallic hordes became a people,—­the Galatians,—­and the country they occupied was called Galatia.  They lived there some fifty years, aloof from the indigenous population of Greeks and Phrygians, whom they kept in an almost servile condition, preserving their warlike and barbarous habits, resuming sometimes their mercenary service, and becoming once more the bulwark or the terror of neighboring states.  But at the beginning of the second century before our era, the Romans had entered Asia, in pursuit of their great enemy, Hannibal.  They had just beaten, near Magnesia, Antiochus, King of Syria.  In his army they had encountered men of lofty stature, with hair light or dyed red, half naked, marching to the fight with loud cries, and terrible at the first onset.  They recognized the Gauls, and resolved to destroy or subdue them.  The consul, Cn.  Manlius, had the duty and the honor.  Attacked in their strongholds on Mount Olympus and Mount Magaba, 189 B.C., the three Gallic bands, after a short but stout resistance, were conquered and subjugated; and thenceforth losing all national importance, they amalgamated little by little with the Asiatic populations around them.  From time to time they are still seen to reappear with their primitive manners and passions.  Rome humored them; Mithridates had them for allies in his long struggle with the Romans.  He kept by him a Galatian guard; and when he sought death, and poison failed him, it was the captain of the guard, a Gaul named Bituitus, whom he asked to run him through.  That is the last historical event with which the Gallic name is found associated in Asia.

Nevertheless the amalgamation of the Gauls of Galatia with the natives always remained very imperfect; for towards the end of the fourth century of the Christian era they did not speak Greek, as the latter did, but their national tongue, that of the Kymro-Belgians; and St. Jerome testifies that it differed very little from that which was spoken in Belgica itself, in the region of Troves.