At the same time that they were consolidating their hold on Spain, the Romans were also extending their power eastwards into the Greek world. King Philip V of Macedon had given ineffectual support to Carthage in the Second Punic War and in 197 the Romans set out to punish him for his unprovoked aggression. After winning an easy victory over Philip at Kynoskephalai and forcing him to free the Greek city-states, which had been under Macedonian domination since the reign of Alexander the Great’s father, Philip II, the Romans withdrew. But they were soon back, drawn deeper and deeper into the quarrels of the Greek states until in 146 they imposed direct rule. Their involvement in the Greek world brought the Romans into contact with the Galatians. The Seleucid ruler Antiochus III (r. 223-187) was another Hellenistic king who liked to think of himself as a new Alexander the Great. Antiochus resented the Roman intervention in Greece, which he saw as being properly in his sphere of influence.
In 191 Antiochus took an army to Greece but was quickly driven out by the Romans. The next year, the Romans invaded Anatolia and won a decisive victory over Antiochus at the battle of Magnesia (Manisa, western Turkey). Antiochus’ army included such novelties as armoured cavalry, war elephants and scythed chariots, as well as a large contingent of Galatian mercenaries, none of which made much impression on the Roman legions.
As a result of their participation in the battle of Magnesia, the Galatians became the victims of a Roman punitive expedition in 189. The Tolistobogii and Trocmi were defeated together at the battle of Olympos near Pessinus. The victorious Romans sold some 40,000 prisoners, including women and children, into slavery. The Romans then occupied the hillfort of Ancyra (modern Ankara) before defeating the Tectosages at Magaba, about 30 miles (48 kilometres) to the north-west. Roman peace terms included a ban on the Galatians raiding in western Anatolia. In the aftermath of this defeat a chieftain of the Tolistobogii, Ortiagon, tried to unite the Galatians under a Hellenistic-style monarchy but without success.
Relations between the Galatians and the Romans improved after 189. When the Galatians renewed their raids on Pergamon in 167, the Romans intervened to restrain Pergamene retaliation and helped negotiate a peace treaty two years later that appears to have left both sides believing that they had won. The Galatians celebrated the peace by sacrificing their Pergainene prisoners to the gods, the Pergamenes with a sculptured frieze on their altar of Zeus, showing heaps of captured Celtic weapons. After 133, when Pergamon was bequeathed to Rome by its last king Attains III, the Romans came to see Galatia as a valuable buffer against invasion from the east and happily encouraged Galatian attacks on Pontus and Cappadocia. In 88 the Galatians suffered a terrible blow when most of the tetrarchs, their ruling aristocracy, were massacred by King Mithridates VI of Pontus. Mithridates was an ambitious despotic ruler with a hatred of Rome and its Celtic allies. Catching the Romans unprepared, he captured Pergamon in 88 and massacred the resident Roman population. This, perhaps, should have made the Galatians wary of accepting Mithridates’ invitation to peace talks: all but one of the 60 chiefs who attended were treacherously murdered in breach of all of the laws of diplomacy and hospitality. Many of those who had not attended, as well as the families of those who had, were also hunted down and killed. Altogether, only three tetrarchs survived. By the end of the following year, the Romans had driven Mithridates back to Pontus and restored Galatia’s independence, but it never really recovered from the loss of its ruling class. Mithridates continued to be a destabilising influence in Anatolia until his final defeat by the Roman general Pompey in 66. The Galatians remained loyal allies of Rome throughout.
In 64 Pompey reorganised the government of the Galatians, appointing a king (who was still called a tetrarch, however) to rule over each of the three tribes. By skilful use of diplomatic marriages. King Deiotarus of the Tolistobogii soon emerged as the dominant tetrarch and came to be regarded by the Romans as the sole ruler of Galatia. Deiotarus had been one of the three tetrarchs to survive Mithridates’ terror. When civil war broke out between Caesar and Pompey in 49, Deiotarus loyally supported his old patron. He survived Pompey’s defeat only because he had a good lawyer, Cicero, to argue his case before the Senate. Cicero later complained that Deiotarus proved rather mean when it came to paying for his services. Deiotarus seems to have had a knack for picking the losing side in Roman civil wars for he later supported Brutus against Mark Antony, but he still
Managed to die in bed of old age. The last Celtic king of Galatia was Deiotarus’ son Deiotarus II, who proved himself beyond doubt his father’s son by supporting Mark Antony against Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, in the last civil war of the Roman Republic. Deiotarus II was briefly succeeded by a native Anatolian, Amyntas. On his death in 25 bc Galatia was peacefully annexed and became a Roman province. In the years after Mithridates’ devastating attack, the Galatians had become increasingly Romanised in their way of life. Deiotarus I had even introduced Roman practices of estate management and legionary-style training for his army. This, together with the development of a centralised single monarchy for the three tribes, made the final assimilation of the Galatians into the Roman imperial system both easy and painless for all concerned. The Galatians kept their identity for a long time under Roman rule. Even as late as the fourth century ad, St Jerome would remark that the Galatians spoke the same language as the Gauls. How long they continued to do so is unknown but it must have died out before the eighth century as the name Galatia had fallen out of use by this time.
World History
