Helmets

I am copying ancient artifacts in order to get a feel for the design side of the world of War in Gaul. If I am going to make a comic of this story rather than to tell it in novel form, as was my original plan, I have to exploit the visual side of things, and preferably remedy that which annoys me so terribly in most visual renditions of the Celts in comics and films: the almost total neglect of their concern for appearance. I have to try and do justice to their fine workmanship - the beautifully decorated weapons, the fine fabrics, the colours, the refined jewellery, the elaborate hairstyles. It's going to take a lot of exercise!

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The bronze helmet on the left was found in northern Italy; it dates back to the third century BC. The thingy on the top used to have a crest attached to it. All other helmets are from the first century BC, which is the epoch in which my story takes place. By that time, helmet-makers had apparently dispensed with crests and the smooth bowler hat-style was all the rage. The helmets of Roman legionaries were inspired on this type.

The large helmet with the bird decoration on the cheek pieces was found in former Yugoslavia. I'm very fond of it, and it's the only one for which I have found a definite owner in the story: on account of the bird, I'm giving it to Catuvolcos. Catu-volcos apparently translates as battle-falcon, and though the bird on the helmet is most obviously not a falcon, I think it sort of fitting :-).

A note on the medium:
I used graphite and colour pencil, and made the drawings in my brandnew Moleskine reporter notebook. The paper is very smooth and light, and I believe it is to this that I owe my pleasing results with the colour. I tend to be not very accomplished working with colour pencils, but on this paper they glide and blend so nicely; it makes the notebook a good buy :D.

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Most of the time when you see Celts on the screen, they are dirty, with wild masses of hair and dressed in dark and/or drab colours (Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves), single bits of animal skin (the first Astérix film), or in the case of Keira Knightly in King Arthur, a few leather strings *g*. The costume designer on Vercingétorix (released elsewhere as Druids) could be heard to claim that Celtic clothing was ragged because these peoples were lazy and not strong on finishings. What a funny thing to say, when most of the few bits of Celtic fabric we have left are seams and pieces of embroidery. If real Celts had seen what the dear lady made of Vercingetorix, they'd have assumed him to be a beggar rather than a prince.

Many people seem to assume that because we are talking about the ancients, their notion of what was beautiful must be entirely different from ours - but surely they, too, distinguished between scruffy and neat, dirty and clean. They, too, preferred combed and shiny hair to a tangled mess; we have recovered quite a few combs and hair ornaments, bog women with complex plaited hairdos, and in Celtic literature it is a sign of hospitality and affection to comb and cut another person's hair. They, too, valued cleanliness; Caesar reports that the Celts washed every morning (he seems to find that worth remarking on), and they are the people who invented soap (something the Romans didn't use). Celtic women used make-up, and some sources claim that men depilated their body hair. There are classical authors who assert that Celtic men would get fined if they were overweight - but of course that may be one of the stories they told to show what freaky foreigners these Celts were :-).

While watching the BBC series Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome recently, I paid special attention to the fabrics of the costumes, and to my surprise, the Romans did not receive a much better treatment than the Celts tend to get, though they were allowed a little more colour. I saw Nero, and just about every other rich Roman aristocrat, dressed in rough, stiff fabrics that I wouldn't have expected to see worn by such lovers of luxury. Either the costume designer had a small budget and was forced to make do with cheap stuff, or I was meant to believe that the ancients were incapable of weaving finer fabrics than that. Now - I know that the Celts' small sheep, at any rate, were half-wild and their wool not very soft. But lo: in the salt mines of Salzburg were found several samples of Celtic woollen fabric, and they are beautifully woven and smooth! With my untrained eyes I can't distinguish them in any way from samples of modern fabrics. Now, if a Celtic miner could have clothes made of smooth stuff, I bet Nero could too :D. We have such a weird way of looking at the past... I am bound to conclude that all in all we seem to think very, very highly of our modern selves *g*.

So there, I feel that I should try and show an approximation of the visual opulence of the Celtic aristocracy. That means lots of bright colours, ornament, jewellery, and decorated props. I am not usually inclined to draw such detail, but the Celts do deserve it :-). The nice thing is that I found, when I started drawing these helmets, that I enjoyed myself; that surprised me, because normally I am not interested in drawing objects - I prefer people. As I copied them, the beauty of these helmets dawned on me as never before; the Celtic craftsmen had such an eye for detail and balance that it is a true joy to try and render them in pictures. I am not sure how feasible it will prove to be in the long run, because I am very slow and my usual style is not very elaborate, but I am certainly determined to do my best with the clothes, the attributes, the houses and so on.

I don't know about colour yet. On the one hand it seems necessary. On the other, I'm not good at colouring :/. I guess much will depend on how much I manage to learn about colour and techniques while preparing the project.

More character sketches...

One of the more problematic elements of War in Gaul for me is - you'll laugh - the fact that a host of characters will have to have facial hair. Commios is the most important of them. I am not used to drawing beards or moustaches, and I had to study reference photos; otherwise it looked as if the beard had been glued on :-).

You may have noticed that in the image I posted to go with his character description, Commios has a scar over his left eye, the result of an assassination attempt. I rather like how it looks, but I have to find another place for it nevertheless. It has been pointed out to me that Miller's Leonidas in 300 has a scar like that, and I also noticed that it makes Comm bear a striking likeness to King Arthur in Chauvel and Lereculey’s Arthur. I think I will make it come out of his hair, or something. It is less decorative, but I don't want him to look as if I copied him from someone else.

This is a page of particularly bad Rigantonas. The picture that went with her character description is much, much better, but it was done after these and I already had a better grip of the character. The difficulty with her is that she is supposed to be very attractive, which means I need to train on how to draw beautiful women. I don't feel as if I have been doing a particularly good job so far.

Finally, Volca. Since she is the newest addition to the cast, she is probably the one to change most often. Her character is developing nicely; I have a few recent sketches that I will post as soon as I get them scanned. Volca is the most ordinary of my characters, visually and story-wise, but I have grown rather fond of her.

War in Gaul: the cast (4)

It is an annoying fact, but despite my ardent feminism my creative work invariably tends to centre on male characters. In this particular case, Caesar isn’t helpful at all: De Bello Gallico doesn’t mention a single woman by name. That means that if I want female characters, I am forced to invent them all. This is a tricky business since elsewhere, too, Celtic women’s lives are much less documented than men’s, and in fiction this more than once gives rise to detestable Mary-Sueism and Marion Zimmer Bradleyism, both of which I am rather desperate to avoid. Celtic women seem to have had higher status than their Roman sisters, in that they could, among other things, inherit and be political leaders. But their rights remain a misty issue, and much though I would like to write them as men’s equals, I think that the more realistic thing is to guard against too much ancient girlpower. The famous Boudicca only gained power over her people because her husband Prasutagus died; and though Irish legends mention women like Scathach who train warriors for battle, there is no trace to be found of warrior women in the texts of ancient historians or archaeology – women were buried with mirrors and needles and such, not with weapons. I suppose it is possible to question whether the graves are identified as female on the basis of the gifts alone, but still: no hard evidence. Caesar certainly doesn’t seem to have negotiated with women, and war in Gaul was a man’s affair.

I’m doing my best, though :-). Just – I can’t say too much about the women’s plots, because you can’t find them anywhere and so, unlike the men’s storylines, they have the potential of holding surprises. I mean, not that the men’s stories won’t have any, but – you know what I mean, right? ^_^


4. Rigantona



Rigantona used to be called Brigantia (Briga for short), but I recently decided that as Vercingetorix’s sister, she should have a name with ‘queen’ in it. Rigantona is the same as the Welsh Rhiannon and means “great queen”. Briga/Rigantona long vied with Vercingetorix, then Commios, for the position of overall main character of the story. When I was still in the novel phase, my drafts alternated between her and Vercingetorix as the first person narrator. Then, when Commios entered the scene, she fell in love with him, much against her brother’s wishes. At this moment, she still functions as a link between Vercingetorix and the Belgic characters, but has receded a little in importance due to Ambiorix’s arrival. At this moment I do think I will let her end the story; I have cooked up a nice storyline for her involving … -no, I rather think I should keep that a surprise :P.

Rigantona is a female druid-in-training – yes, despite my reservations. I want her to be as closely involved in the war as can be, namely, as her brother’s advisor. That is a bit of a classic role for a woman, so I hope that brings some sort of balance to the fact that female druids are barely attested… I would like to use her unusual position to point at the differences between the Celtic peoples, and to show the influence of the proximity of Rome to the south of Gaul. Women are rather prominent in Irish literature and British politics, whereas they seem to have lost some privileges in the east. As Rigantona is the daughter of a conservative usurper who tried to reintroduce kingship to a republic, I thought her family might well have looked around to see how they could give her extra high status, and that they wouldn’t have been put off by the fact that a custom or notion they deemed useful was considered outdated. Britain was decidedly old-fashioned in the first century BC; British warriors still fought from chariots, for one thing, a practice that had become obsolete in Gaul; and as I mentioned when talking about Commios, coins were not yet in use there either. If the equal status of women has become history in Gaul, it might well survive in Britain for a while longer. So that is where Riga will be going. When she returns to her people, called back by her brother, you can bet that her exertion of authority will cause some of the gentlemen to grumble…


5. Volca



Volca is the most recent of all my characters, which means she still has the most room for development – she’s not entirely stable yet. In fact she has taken the place of several other female characters I had been considering for a larger part in the story; on Volca’s arrival, most of them have faded entirely. My original idea was to have a woman warrior; instead I have ended up with a young princess, which may not sound like an improvement (?), but I’m happy that she’s there. She’s nice. She is perhaps more conventional than Rigantona, but she represents another side of the story of the Gaulish war that deserves some attention too – that of the people who don’t take an active part in the battles and schemes, but get to bear the consequences of the actions of their kings. Volca’s plot will have little to do with politics (though there will be some) but rather play out on a personal level.

Volca is the daughter of Catuvolcos. I guess I invented her when I started thinking about the other characters’ households. Actually I don’t find it easy to estimate how large families were and how many people lived in one house. Should all my interior scenes be crowded with family and servants? How much privacy should people have? Nowadays in the West we tend to have rather a lot, because we live in very small units, but I suppose it was rare for people in ancient times to live alone. I still haven’t found answers to these questions. What I have done is given Catuvolcos a son and a daughter, Catutigirnios and Volca (as you can see, he isn’t very imaginative and has given his children bits of his own name – which isn’t nearly as bad as Comm’s family, which contains no less than three Comms *g*), and to Ambiorix four sisters, Avitoriga, Allicia, Abesa and Aia (with Ambiorix as the middle child). I’m afraid that so far, many mothers are dying in childbirth and fathers get killed defending their cattle and crops from raiders, because seriously, how on earth am I going to keep the cast in hand :/?

Because Volca is so new to my repertory, she is still undergoing changes. Basically she is supposed to look young – mid teens at the start of the story – and grow up to be … well, fine-looking but not stunning. I need to learn to draw a nice, complicated hairdo on her, though :-).

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Romans. I haven’t even started on those yet. Caesar, Labienus, Volusenus, Mark Antony, Sabinus, Cotta and my very own Quintus Tullius Veridicus – here I come … one day … :D

War in Gaul: the cast (3)

3. Commios, king of the Atrebates, the Morines and the Menapians



Alas, poor Commios. He has been so utterly forgotten that I haven’t been able to find a single portrait of him, real or imaginary! No nation adopted him in the throes of Romanticism, even though he was a very clever strategist, and the king who held out longest of all against the Roman occupation.

Actually, in the case of Commios, it is not even clear what his name really is. He is one more victim of the near-incomprehensibility of Gallic today – for Commios, I’ve found “crow”, “equal”, and “he who strikes”… Quite apart from the meaning, what is Commios – his first name or his patronymic? The ending –ios could well indicate a genitive, which would make the nominative form “Comm”. There are coins of the British Atrebates inscribed “Comm Commios” – is that Comm, son of Comm, or is it lack of space that called for Commios, son of Commios to be a little bit compressed? Yay for dead languages, especially when they remain largely unwritten!

Comm or Commios (I think I’m settling for Comm Commios, just to keep things easy ;P) – one thing I know for certain is that he is the kind of character I like, because he changes his mind so often. Like Ambiorix and Vercingetorix, he hung around Caesar for a while; in his case, it lasted longer than for the other two. After the battle of the Sabis in 57 BC, where his people suffered severe losses, Comm seems to have stepped up to Caesar or in some other way made himself noticed, and Caesar appointed him king of the Atrebates; the Atrebates were henceforth also exempt from taxes. Comm saved the Roman general’s skin in Britain, and in return he got to rule the Morines, a neighbouring people of the Atrebates, as well. In 53 BC, Caesar pillaged the lands of the Menapians to put them under pressure not to shelter Ambiorix, and here too he put Comm in charge, whom he praises for his courage and cleverness.

However…

Also at this time, a fugitive Ambiorix is riding around Belgica, skirting Roman man-huntsmen and preaching rebellion to the Belgic leaders. And though Caesar remains tactfully silent on the subject, Aulus Hirtius reveals in his Book VIII of DBG that shortly after, Labienus has to send his right hand man Gaius Volusenus (“who hated Commius”) to undertake the Atrebate king’s assassination: Labienus has heard it rumoured that Commios has lapsed and is now conspiring against Rome. The attempt fails (though only just), and next time we hear of Commios, he is heading the army that must rescue Vercingetorix from Alesia.

Commios was one of the last leaders to take up arms against Rome, but he proved to be very tenacious once he had set his mind on rebellion. He never managed to mobilise a great army after Alesia, but what forces he had he used efficiently; Caesar notes that his troops are better organised than is usual in Gaul and that their attacks are well thought-out. But eventually the Atrebate king tires, too. He gets even with Volusenus, then offers peace to Mark Antony (yes, that Mark Antony) on the condition that he never has to face a Roman again.

One other thing I like about Commios is his resilience. When Caesar is done with Gaul, the land is little more than a graveyard. Commios has spent a lot of energy fighting, and he has lost. So what does he do? Instead of sulking in a corner, he crosses the Channel to Britain and starts a new dynasty there, eventually reigning over Berkshire, Hampshire, West Sussex, West Surrey and a part of Wiltshire. Archaeologists say that he introduced the practice of coinage there.

There is an attractive, but probably fictitious, anecdote about Commios’s sailing for Britain. Frontinus records that Caesar did not honour the agreement made by Mark Antony and decided to pursue Commios. When he arrived by the coast, the Atrebate king had already set sail, but the tide was low and his ship stranded on the flats. Commios had his wits about him and ordered the sails to be spread, and because the wind was fair, Caesar gave up the pursuit, thinking that the ship was afloat and had too much of a head start. Thus the traitor escaped…


A coin minted by Commios in Britain – it has his trademark “E” with the funny slant.

In the case of Commios, Caesar is even less specific than he was about Vercingetorix; we have not even the vaguest indication about his age. For some reason I have always imagined him as fortyish, maybe because I assume that his down-to-earth approach to leadership (his siding with Caesar was of great benefit to the Atrebates; he seems to have been more concerned with his people’s welfare than with glory) is an indication of sedate maturity as opposed to Ambiorix’s and Vercingetorix’s fiery radicalism. My idea of Commios (and Vercingetorix, actually) changed very little between 2003 and today, and I actually find that it plays out really well with my new version of Ambiorix. Those two will be close during the most crucial phase of the story, so it is important to have some interesting interaction between them. They are sufficiently different to provide contrast, whereas, if Frontinus’s story is any indication, their minds certainly meet when it comes to shrewdness.

Character sketches

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These are some of the first few sketches in which I am trying to establish the looks of Ambiorix and Vercingetorix. They will probably go through a few changes yet before they reach their definitive shape :-).

I haven't decided on a style yet, which is unusual for me. The visual approach tends to come first, but then this project is relatively young, and in the past year I have learnt a few things about drawing and comics that have made me a little less impetuous than I used to be. So I will continue developing, getting my hand in, and decide what kind of style is suitable when I have a better idea of what the story needs...

War in Gaul: the cast (2)

2. Vercingetorix, High King of All of Gaul (sort of)



Vercingetorix lives on in French history books as a noble freedom fighter. Was he that? Hm. No doubt he was very eager to have the Romans gone from his land, but one of his main motivations was that he wanted it all for himself. Actually he was a bit reactionary. His people, the Arverni, lived close to Rome and had a political system similar to the Republic’s: they had a senate, and each year they chose a supreme magistrate, the Vergobret, comparable to a Roman consul. Vercingetorix’s father Celtillos had attempted a coup d’état and proposed himself as king, but the Arverni revolted against that and burnt him at the stake as an enemy of the state. Vercingetorix thought he’d have another try, and he was evicted from the capital of Gergovia by his uncle Gobannitio, who was then Vergobret. In response, he rode around the land to gather an army of the people and took Gergovia by storm, overthrowing his uncle. It is not quite clear whether he was actually made king, but the Gallic leaders did appoint and confirm him as general of a huge army of the united Gaulish peoples. As such, Vercingetorix accomplished something extraordinary – he managed to bring almost all of Gaul together under his banner, and he was the only man to do so.

As an idea it was far from stupid: their divided state made the Gaulish peoples their own worst enemy. Caesar easily took advantage of the strife. But Vercingetorix had more brilliant notions: he knew just how to tackle Caesar. Like Ambiorix, he seems to have sucked up to Caesar for a while and gained the title of ‘friend of Rome’; in the meantime he figured out his enemy’s weaknesses. Vercingetorix thought that the only way to beat the legions was to starve them. His strategy was that of scorched earth – he told the Gauls to destroy their own lands so the Romans would find nothing there. He was very ruthless – he ordered the disobedient hung or mutilated – but his tactics did work. Vercingetorix vanquished the legions at Gergovia, and it hurt. However…

It’s hard being the general of an army made up of a heap of different tribes, each with their chieftains who want to seem important, and to have to give such unpopular orders as “Burn your town! I don’t care how pretty it is!” or “NO, for the millionth time, we’re NOT going to engage Caesar in an open battle, because we’re just not capable of holding our own in one!” And so, well, it didn’t last. His cavalry got carried away attacking the retreating Romans at one point, and Vercingetorix got holed up in Alesia and it was his turn to starve; Caesar put up a siege unmatched in the annals of military history for its brilliance, and eventually Vercingetorix had to surrender. Unlike most vanquished Gaulish leaders, Caesar didn’t have him executed on the spot; he sent Vercingetorix to Rome, where he languished in prison for five years, then he was displayed in Caesar’s great triumph and ritually strangled in the Tullianum.

I do wish Caesar had described Vercingetorix in great detail, but of course he didn’t. He merely says he was rich and powerful – and young. When I went surfing around the Net for more information about Vercingetorix, I noticed that some sites mentioned his age as thirty (not quoting any sources, of course), while others said he may have been as young as seventeen (not quoting any sources either). I thought I would check Caesar’s Latin text, to find out what word got translated as ‘young man’ in my edition. It turns out that Caesar calls Vercingetorix an adulescens, which according to my Latin dictionary is a young man “between the ages of 17 and 25, or 30”. Heh. It’s at once clear where the figures come from, and also what their source is :D.

Now, I do think seventeen is a bit young… Though, if people died much younger than they do nowadays, would they have grown up much sooner too? Was it as unheard-of to have a seventeen-year-old general as it seems now? I don’t know… I’m opting for early twenties as a kind of middle road. Again, I prefer him to be young so as to contrast him with his principal opponent – Caesar, who was nearing fifty at the time of the decisive battle for Gaul.

As for what Vercingetorix looked like, historians like to quote coins. One that is brought up is a Roman one minted around 48 BC, showing a gaunt man with a goatee and wild, battle-style peaked hair. The other one was minted by Vercingetorix himself and shows a totally different head:


Gold stater minted by Vercingetorix.

Do we get the before/after effect here? The Roman coin may be showing the Arvernian prince after his four-year stay in a Roman prison… Vercingetorix’s own coins, like just about all other Gaulish money, are based on gold staters from Macedonia. I do wonder whether the face on the coin is meant to resemble the king who minted it, or whether it is simply an imitation of a Greek head – it has the curls and general hairstyle of Alexander. But it is entirely possible that Vercingetorix should not have looked a lot like your typical Celtic ‘barbarian’ the way Napoleon III’s statue at Alise-Ste.-Reine has it. After all, his wealth most probably derived from trade with Rome; his land was very close to the Provincia, and his people had even adopted the Roman political system. Why would fashion not have dictated short hair and clean-shaven faces for Arvernian nobles, just like Roman fashion did?

I am always weary of having too much text in a comic, and feel that stories should not be burdened with too many explanations or treatises – that is what essays are for. However, a good history tale needs research, and finding a balance between tale and history is an art in itself. One step in this case will be to put as much information as possible in the visuals. So, whereas I originally conceived of Vercingetorix as having very long hair and a fringe of beard, I decided to give him a clean-shaven aspect and half-long hair instead, so that he holds the middle ground between Rome on the one hand and Gallia Comata (“long-haired Gaul”) on the other. Not that this will solve all my information-related quandaries, but it’s a start ;-).

War in Gaul: the cast (1)

You’d think that after having started and abandoned several megalomaniac comics projects, I’d have learned to keep things manageable by downsizing the scope and number of characters of the stories I start, but no. I’m incorrigible. Whether War in Gaul has a greater chance of ever going somewhere than my previous enterprises, I don’t know, but once again I’m starting big. If I want to present my story’s main characters to you, I have to tell you about no less than five people. …Yes, I know. But I may still change my mind ;P.

1. Ambiorix, king of the Eburones


I showed the cute blondie to my best friend last Friday and made her gasp – not because she thought he was pretty, but because I told her he is my version of Ambiorix. She had been expecting someone more along the lines of the Tongeren statue, I suppose. That is the image of the king of the Eburones as Belgians know it, having seen it on labels and boxes of the most expensive Belgian brand of shoes, or on beer bottles, or on signs of pubs, dry cleaning, car washes and goodness knows what else. Most people don’t question the funny hat, the fact that Ambiorix is standing on a very pre-Celtic dolmen, or the man’s dress code – would he be bare-chested in a pre-Inconvenient Truth climate? But this is the way in which he got fixed in the Belgian subconscious.

Caesar does not tell us anything specific about Ambiorix, such as how old he was or what he looked like. We are free to imagine him any way we like. When in 1866, Jules Bertin was commissioned to sculpt a statue of the Belgic chieftain for Tongeren, he chose a local blacksmith as a model; a hero should have some muscle, right? The Frenchmen Rocca and Mitton in their series Vae Victis make Ambiorix a grey-haired kind of patriarch. Neither of those visions is interesting to me.

The information that Caesar does give us about Ambiorix makes him an unconventional kind of king, at least for a Celt. Celtic kings tended to be men who had made a name on the battlefield. Like the Greeks who went for Troy, they were greatly interested in honour and glory. This was one of their weaknesses when they faced Caesar’s legions: they would insist on encountering the Romans in open battles, chasing glory by running headfirst into a shield wall, but they were invariably flattened by the order and tactic of a professional army. Ambiorix for his part does not seem to have cared about honour at all. What he wanted was to destroy the soldiers camping on his land, and he knew that could never be done in a ‘fair’ battle. He decided to cheat instead. With lies he coaxed one and a half legions into a trap and had some eight thousand men massacred. Dio Cassius says that he did not even join the fight himself – he just watched, and (this is something Caesar says too) made one of the Roman generals disarm with a promise of parley, only to have him killed in cold blood. Later, when Caesar exacts vengeance on Ambiorix’s people, the king himself goes on the run. He is hunted down by the Romans but never caught.

To me, Ambiorix doesn’t sound much like a classic hero or someone his fellow kings would have spontaneously looked up to. In order to pull off his deception, he would probably have had charm, a way with words, and the ability to lie well. (My main reason for making him so cute is that looking nice and a touch feminine would have helped him to convince the Romans of his innocence and trustworthiness.) For some time he was of service to Caesar and during that period figured out how to tackle the Romans. He must definitely have been perceptive, clever, and an agitator – while on the run for Caesar’s men, he toured the Belgic kingdoms spreading revolt – but too sneaky and self-preserving to be considered heroic and brave. Of course that is exactly how I like my characters, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Ambiorix wrestled his way to the fore of my story…

I find that for some reason, I always try to make my main character as young as possible, so that they face a crisis early in life and have to spend the rest of it dealing with the consequences of their choices. Ambiorix is no different – he got younger at every turn, and is at this moment in his late teens when Caesar invades Gallia Belgica (meaning he is about twenty when he tricks the Romans). That will make the Gallic War the thing that shapes him; I find that more interesting than looking at the effects on a mature adult, though I do have a mature main character as well. Another reason why I need Ambiorix to be young is the better to contrast him with his fellow king, Catuvolcos.



Caesar reports that Catuvolcos was ‘elderly’. What I should take this to mean in an age when the average man did not get older than forty, I am not entirely sure. I have opted for a Catuvolcos who is old but not ancient – a sixty-year-old already qualifies as a senex in Roman terms.

We know very little about the Gallic language as the Gauls did not have a written culture. Translation of names is therefore tricky, and I have found many different etymologies. “Ambiorix” has been explained as “rich king”, “king of the surroundings” and “king of the enclosure”. Whichever (if any) of these is right, they have one thing in common: Ambiorix doesn’t have a particularly martial name, unlike Vercingetorix (“great king of the warriors”), Cassivellaunos (“commander in battle”) or indeed Catuvolcos (“battle-falcon”, also interpreted as “hero”). Funny enough, the names do tie in nicely with my purpose, and they support the complimentary nature of the two Eburone kings. They give extra weight to my choice of presenting Catuvolcos as an old school warrior-king and Ambiorix as a young man whose prestige derives from his wealth and (family) ties – Caesar mentions him as having allies among the Menapians and peoples on the other side of the Rhine.

I guess ‘wealth’ is relative, and frustratingly, I don’t know just how relative. The Eburones lived too far to the north to enjoy close contacts with the Mediterranean, and in the days of Ambiorix, they did not have any trade centres on their domain. In those days, trade (in metal, salt, pottery…) was the main source of wealth; agriculture only yielded enough to provide for the tribe’s own needs. If Ambiorix was rich, I guess he must have possessed a lot of cattle – cows and horses. My historical atlas shows that horses were an important ‘product’ in that part of the country at the time. Moreover, the Eburones had a problem with raiders from across the Rhine who conducted cattle raids.

(The Celts did not have an economy based on money; instead they determined a person’s wealth by the number of cattle they possessed. To the Romans, however, that did not mean much, as the Celts’ horses, cows and pigs were significantly smaller than their own.)

When I say that I have difficulty figuring out the meaning of wealth, the reason is the following:
Caesar names as one of the reasons for the success of Ambiorix’s ruse the fact that the Romans found it hard to believe that a relatively powerless people like the Eburones would rise against them. He mentions the Eburones being clients of the Atuatukes, then of the Treveri – this means that they were not powerful enough to maintain their independence. Yet, based on archeological findings, they seem to have occupied a pretty large territory – and to have possessed a lot of gold. Several gold treasures have been found on Eburone territory, the most recent discovery being the Treasure of Heers. This depot consisted of a quantity of coins, seventy-four of which were minted by the Eburones around the time of their revolt against the legions. Gold staters were used to hire mercenaries, as they were much too valuable for daily use; they were only ever minted by kings or very high dignitaries out of their personal fortune. Archaeologists estimate that there must have been more than a million in all.

The television news at the time made this out to be Ambiorix’s fortune, but to me it seems a lot for a king from an ‘insignificant’ tribe. At the time of his revolt, Ambiorix was taking orders from the Treveres; it appears to my ignorant self that if he had a million gold coins, he would have been able to buy the Treveres :P. But maybe they had even more gold. If that was the case, it becomes easier to understand why Julius ‘I’m Oh So Deeply in Debt’ Caesar really, really couldn’t resist visiting Gaul, and how it was possible that he brought such a quantity of gold back from his conquest that the prices in Rome fell so spectacularly as to make gold temporarily cheaper than silver… Another possibility is that the journalist misunderstood – that the Eburones made more than a million coins in total between 75 BC and 50 BC, not that they were all minted by dear Ambiorix. It’s not quite clear though. A literal translation from an article in Het Belang van Limburg mentioning the same amount goes: ‘Experts suspect that once, more than a million Eburon staters were minted, of which – as far as we know – 160 have been found’. Still, even then it appears to me that for a ‘poor’ tribe, they had a lot of precious metal…


An Eburon gold stater.

Another thing that fascinates me is the fact that the Eburones had two kings. I haven’t heard of any other Celtic people with the same; this peculiarity is why some scholars suggest that maybe Ambiorix and Catuvolcos were magistrates rather than kings, just like the Romans had two consuls to avoid any one person becoming too powerful. But this seems rather unlikely to me as the Eburones lived in the north of Belgica and were more conservative than southern peoples; the Belgic tribes all had kings, unlike peoples like the Arvernians and the Haeduans who had a republic with magistrates chosen by a kind of parliament, their political system influenced by their Roman neighbours’. Caesar says that Ambiorix and Catuvolcos ruled one half of the Eburones each, but they seem to have acted and decided as one, and the situation still remains a bit puzzling. I am still working out how to deal with the matter, but I sort of like the idea of Catuvolcos having a say in Ambiorix’s appointment – he could ask for a co-king because he is getting old and ill, or because he feels that society is changing (which it was) and that he needs a different (more mercantile? More diplomatic?) approach to kingship than the old warrior ideal. Also, if Ambiorix is as young as I am casting him, Catuvolcos might feel he can easily influence and teach him. Maybe he does not get along with his own son, and prefers to train another young man for kingship…