Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/140

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
116
HORSE-SHOES AND HORSE-SHOEING.

their ancient expeditions bear witness to an organization already powerful, and to an ardent spirit of enterprise. Not to speak of migrations which date back perhaps nine or ten centuries before our era, we see at the moment when Rome was beginning to aim at greatness, the Celts spreading themselves beyond their frontiers. In the time of Tarquin the Elder (Years of Rome, 138 to 176), two expeditions started from Celtic Gaul: one proceeded across the Rhine and Southern Germany, to descend upon Illyria and Pannonia (now Western Hungary); the other, scaling the Alps, established itself in Italy, in the country lying between those mountains and the Po. The invaders soon transferred themselves to the right bank of that river, and nearly the whole of the territory comprised between the Alps and the Apennines took the name of Cisalpine Gaul. More than two centuries afterwards, the descendants of those Gauls marched upon Rome and burnt it all but the Capitol. Still a century later (475), we see new bands issuing from Gaul, reaching Thrace by the valley of the Danube, ravaging Northern Greece, and bringing back to Toulouse the gold plundered from the Temple of Delphi. Others, arriving at Byzantium, pass into Asia, establish their dominions over the whole region on this side Mount Taurus, since called Gallo-Græcia, or Galatia, and maintain in it a sort of military feudalism until the time of the war of Antiochus.

'These facts, obscure as they may be in history, prove the spirit of adventure and the warlike genius of the Gaulish race, which thus, in fact, inspired a general terror. During nearly two centuries, from 364 to 531, Rome struggled against the Cisalpine Gauls, and more than