A People Apart

A People Apart
A potted history of Scottish clans ended its Wallace entry by saying that this name came “from Volcae, a tribe in North [sic] Gaul”. They appeared, after much of my rooting around meagre sources, to be a people apart, powerful, innovative and far roving.
In a wave of migration around 450 BC came Celtic peoples from headwaters of the Continent Europe’s major rivers. Some spread down the Danube and Rhine rivers while our Volcae went down the Rhone. Their progress was rapid being a horse culture whose iron weaponry gave them a fighting edge as well as bringing with them the famed phalanx battle formation.of Greece and Macedonia. They lodged themselves on Pyrenees mountain slopes overlooking the Garonne River that flowed their trade over to the Bay of Biscay on the Atlantic side. Their hub was Tolosa [now Toulouse, fourth largest city of France]. They also concentrated where the Rhone emptied into the Mediterranean and Volcae Arecomici set up around healing springs of Nemausis [now the city of Nimes]. Massalia, Greek colony since circa 600 BC, is today the major port of Marseilles.
These Celts expanded manyfold that port’s wine trade deep into the interior for their brethren to the north had great thirst for this raw product. The proof is in their soil still for ploughs today turn up fragments of their amphorae. Wine was sent north in these containers of slim neck with handle to either side. Unlike Romans who watered down their wine, Celts knocked back fermented concoctions neat with additives intentional or oaccidental. Like other Celts the Volcae affected long hair and mustaches that started fat and grew long and floppy. They bleached both with lime. Drooping over the upper lip their mustaches were known as “wine strainers”. This wisecrack, mind you, harks back two thousand years. From ancient Greek and Rome a handful of English words survive than stem from the handy amphora. For example, blowing into any large vessel today having a small mouth to make a tootle is downright amphoric.
Successful farmers and traders, Volcae remained warlike. Many set off with Vol-cae Tectosages, “migrant seekers after wealth”. They journeyed to the Balkans joining one of three Celtic armies pointed at Greece and took part in the plundering of Delphi 279 BC. Tectosages and two other tribes split off and went on to Anatolia, whole families accompanying warriors who settled down there as hired mercenaries. They became the Galatians that St. Paul made conversions among and who around AD 55 sent them a reassuring epistle: don’t bother with circumcision, that’s for converts closer to Jerusalem. Tectosages around Ancyra later Ankara retained identity and culture. St. Jerome in the fourth century found their language sounded like that of a tribe in southern France.
What about Volcae left behind in Greece? Desecrating Celtic invaders withdrew in difficulty but good order [in spite of what angered Greeks wrote]. These Volcae headed via what may have been their original homeland in the upper Danube and/or then, by torrent and trickle, back to the littoral from whence they had started. Volcae maintained an uneasy relationship with expanding Roman power, not helped by the latter’s rapacious officials. As Hannibal invaded from Carthage via the mountains he gathered up Celtic tribes as allies until they formed half his military strength. However Romans pressured Volcae to oppose the Carthaginian’s progress across the Rhone 218 BC. That was ironic. While an array of defenders waited to oppose him on the far shore, other Volcae were feverishly helping to gather and build boats for Hannibal to cross over. Above all both these Celtic groups were only trying to cope with somebody else’s war anyway they could by passing the invader though as fast as they could. As it turned out, Hannibal’s cavalry outflanked widely Volcae soldiers waiting across the river to oppose him..
Ancestral memory of Greek hoplite formations had encouraged Volcae to muster heavily armed infantry in addition to light cavalry usual to Celtic armies. They were known as powerful and long association with Greeks of Massalia raised their style of living. Rich archaeological finds tell us so, and indicate that they had also continued in touch with those far off Celts of that earlier great expansion east to Galatia in Asia Minor. Volcae continued sharing some things in common with Galatians.
Shifting alliances increased with population pressures whereby Celt fought Celt. Harsh Roman governance provoked widespread uprisings that swallowed one Roman army whole. In 106 BC Consul Quintilius Servilius Caepio went further. He plundered 50 tons of gold and even more of silver from Volcae sacred enclosures and waters. These confiscated offerings disappeared, suspiciously, on Caepio’s way back to Rome. Widely understood was that Volcae Delphi loot was included in that treasure gone “missing”.
Germanic peoples were widely astir, the Roman Empire barely holding them at bay on the far shore of the Rhine. Volcae instead breasted this great tide of humanity by going against the current; crossing the Rhine to re-establish themselves in a great forest, later Bohemia. In 60 BC an estimated 6,500,000 Celts were dwelling in Gaul. In 10 years a million of them were cut down and a similar number sold into slavery by Roman invaders. All Gaul was now a province of Rome yet relentless conqueror Julius Caesar wrote well of the Volcae; finding them different [as did others] from most Gauls.
Author’s Note: In this rough time frame another Celtic tribe, the Boii, made Bohemia their own. That event may be largely unrelated to our story I assembled with difficulty from cryptic, scarce and at times contradictory sources. By the way, I find that non-British authors make things clearer for us on this side of the Atlantic because they take less for granted in the telling than those schooled in the Old Country.
Stephen Oppenheimer of Oxford University who tracks migrations by DNA and other means reckons Celts more likely originated in southern France than at sources of the major rivers of Europe. Does this mean that a mighty pile of historical bricks has been knocked down? On the one hand such waterways still reflect their original Celtic names. On the other, we know from earlier in A People Apart that those Anatolian Tectosages on the eastern side of the Mediterranean Sea remained in touch with the Volcae almost at the other end of the Med. And St. Jerome linked their languages. Here’s something else. The expanding Roman Empire ensured sons of ruling families in client states like Volcaes and later the Kingdom of Strathclyde north of occupied Britain were educated in Rome. That became a habit later of the British Empire & Commonwealth. For clues about our family name and significance see the Catalogue’s Section 4 entry on Wallace. HCW