Galatia
For the Greek name for Gaul, see Gaul |
Galatia as a Roman province. |
Ancient
Galatia was an area in the highlands of central
Anatolia in modern
Turkey. Galatia was bounded on the north by
Bithynia and
Paphlagonia, on the east by
Pontus, on the south by
Lycaonia and
Cappadocia, and on the west by the remainder of
Phrygia, the eastern part of which the
Gauls had invaded. The modern capital of Turkey,
Ankara lies in ancient Galatia.
Galatia was named for the immigrant Gauls from
Thrace, who became its ruling caste in the
3rd century BCE. It has been called the "Gallia" of the East, Roman writers calling its inhabitants
Galli. They were an intermixture of Gauls and Greeks, and hence
Francis Bacon and other Renaissance writers called them "Gallo-Graeci," and the country "Gallo-Graecia".
The Galatians were in their origin a part of that great
Celtic migration which invaded
Macedon, led by the 'second'
Brennus, a Gaulish chief. He invaded Greece in
281 BCE with a huge warband and was turned back in the nick of time from plundering the temple of Apollo at
Delphi. At the same time, another Gaulish group were migrating with their women and children through Thrace. They had split off from Brennus' Gauls in
279 BCE, and had migrated into Thrace under their leaders Leonnorius and Lutarius. These Gaulish invaders appeared in Asia Minor in
278–
277 BCE; others invaded Macedon, killed the
Ptolemaic king
Ptolemy Ceraunus but were eventually ousted by
Antigonus Gonatas, the grandson of the defeated
diadoch Antigonus the One-Eyed.
As so often happens in cases of invasion, the invaders came at the express invitation of
Nicomedes I of Bithynia, who required help in a dynastic struggle against his brother. Three tribes of Gauls crossed over from Thrace to Asia Minor. They numbered about 10,000 fighting men and about the same number of women and children, divided into three tribes, Trocmi, Tolistobogii and Tectosages. They were eventually defeated by the
Seleucid king
Antiochus I, in a battle where the Seleucid war elephants shocked the Celts. While breaking the momentum of the invasion, the Galatians were by no means exterminated.
Instead, the migration led to the establishment of a long-lived Gaulish territory in central
Anatolia, which included the eastern part of ancient
Phrygia, a territory that became known as
Galatia. There they ultimately settled, and being strengthened by fresh accessions of the same clan from Europe, they overran Bithynia, and supported themselves by plundering neighbouring countries.
The constitution of the Galatian state is described by
Strabo: conformably to Gaulish custom, each tribe was divided into cantons, each governed by a chief ('tetrarch') of its own with a judge under him, whose powers were unlimited except in cases of murder, which were tried before a council of 300 drawn from the twelve cantons and meeting at a holy place, twenty miles southwest of Ancyra, which was likely to have been a sacred oak grove, for it was called 'Drynemeton' the "temple of the oaks"
drys +
nemed "temple". The local population of Cappadocians were left in control of the towns and most of the land, paying tithes to their new overlords, who formed a military aristocracy and kept aloof in fortified farmsteads, surrounded by their bands.
The Gauls were great warriors, respected by Greeks and Romans (
illustration, right). They hired themselves out as mercenary soldiers, sometimes fighting on both sides in the great battles of the times. For years the Gaulish chieftains and their warbands ravaged the western half of Asia Minor, as allies of one or other of the warring princes, without any serious check, until they sided with the renegade Seleucid prince
Antiochus Hierax, who reigned in
Asia Minor. Hierax tried to defeat king
Attalus I of Pergamum (
241–
197 BCE), but instead, the hellenised cities united under his banner, and his armies inflicted several severe defeats upon them, about 232 forcing them to settle permanently and to confine themselves to the region to which they had already given their name. The theme of the
Dying Gaul (a famous statue displayed in Pergamon) remained a favorite in Hellenistic art for a generation. Their right to the district was formally recognized. The three Gaulish tribes were settled where they afterwards remained, the Tectosages round Ancyra, the Tolistobogii round
Pessinus, sacred to
Cybele, and the Trocmi round Tavium.
But the power of the Gauls was not yet broken. The Pergamene king himself soon employed their services in the increasingly devastating wars of Asia Minor; another band deserted from their Egyptian overlord
Ptolemy IV after a
solar eclipse had broken their spirits.
In the early 2nd century BCE they proved terrible allies of
Antiochus the Great, the last Seleucid king trying to regain suzerainity over Asia Minor, but after the defeat of the Seleucid king to the Romans, Rome at last proved a worthy protection against them. In
189 BCE an expedition was sent against them under Ca. Manlius Vulso, who defeated them. Henceforward their military power declined and they fell at times under
Pontic ascendancy, from which they were finally freed by the
Mithridatic Wars, in which they heartily supported Rome.
In the settlement of
64 BCE Galatia became a client-state of the empire, the old constitution disappeared, and three chiefs (wrongly styled "tetrarchs ") were appointed, one for each tribe. But this arrangement soon gave way before the ambition of one of these tetrarchs,
Deiotarus, the contemporary of Cicero and Caesar, who made himself master of the other two tetrarchies and was finally recognized by the Romans as
'king' of Galatia. On the death of the third king
Amyntas in
25 BCE, however, Galatia was incorporated by Augustus in the
Roman empire, though near his capital Ancyra (
Ankara) Pylamenes, the king's heir, rebuilt a temple of the Phrygian goddess
Men to venerate Augustus, as a sign of fidelity. It was in a temple carving in Galatia that the major source for the
Res Gestae of Augustus were preserved for modernity. Few of the provinces proved more enthusiastically loyal to Rome. The Galatians also practiced a form of Romano-Celtic polytheism, common in Celtic lands.
During his second missionary journey
Paul, accompanied by Silas and Timothy (Acts 16:6), visited the "region of Galatia," where he was detained by sickness (
Epistle to Galatians 4:13), and had thus the longer opportunity of preaching to them the gospel. On his third journey he went over "all the country of Galatia and
Phrygia in order" (Acts 18:23). During the journeys of Paul he was received with enthusiasm in Galatia. In
Acts, xvi, 6 and xviii, 23:"And they went through the Phrygian and Galatian region" (
ten phrygian kai Galatiken choran) and "he departed and went through the Galatian region and Phrygia" (
ten Galatiken choran kai phrygian). The Galatians were fickle; at Lystra the multitude could scarcely be restrained from sacrificing to Paul (because they assumed he was a god); shortly afterwards they stoned him and left him for dead. Crescens was sent thither by Paul toward the close of his life (
2 Timothy 4:10).
Josephus related the biblical figure
Gomer to Galatia. "For Gomer founded those whom the Greeks now call Galatians, [Galls,] but were then called Gomerites."
Antiquities of the Jews, I:6. Although others have related Gomer to
Cimmerians.
The Galatians were still speaking the
Celtic Galatian language in the time of Jerome (
347–
420 CE), who wrote that the Galatians of
Ancyra and the
Treveri of
Trier (in what is now the
German Rhineland) spoke the same
language. The final fate of the Galatian people is a subject of some uncertainty, but they seem ultimately to have been absorbed into the
Greek- and/or
Turkish-speaking populations of west-central Anatolia.
*
A detailed map of Celtic settlements in Galatia
