With the conquest of Gaul complete, only two areas of continental Europe remained to the Celts, north-west Spain and the old Hallstatt heartland in central Europe. The civil wars (49-45, 44-30 bc) that heralded the collapse of the Roman Republic gave these remaining independent tribes a stay of execution. Octavian, the victor of the civil wars, did not try to resurrect the republic but ruled as emperor under the name Augustus. Augustus set about consolidating the frontiers of the Roman Empire along more defendable lines. This required an advance into central Europe north to the Danube, while the frontier in Spain was one that could be eliminated entirely. In 26 bc Augustus personally led a campaign against the Cantabri, Astures and Gallaeci. The mountainous terrain proved hard going for the Roman army, but within a year Augustus declared the war to be over. As so often for the Romans in Spain, he was premature in claiming victory. Revolts broke out in 24, 22 and 19. The last rebellion was rather brutally crushed by Augustus’ son-in-law Agrippa, but only after he had restored
Morale and discipline to an army which had learned to fear the Cantabri. Even then there was another rebellion in 16 bc and it was only in 13 bc, after Augustus had personally reorganised its provincial government, that Spain was truly pacified, Spain subsequently became one of the most peaceful Roman provinces and only one legion was based there compared with three in Britain.
The Celts of central Europe had not only the Romans to contend with - they were also under pressure from the Germans and the Dacians. The Dacians probably first encroached on the Celts when they began to expand under King Rubobostes from their original homeland in Wallachia into Transylvania c. 170 bc. Dacia had become a major kingdom, occupying most of modern Romania, when its king Burebista began to expand aggressively westwards into the territory of the Boii, Taurisci and Scordisci in 60-59 BC. Burebista himself believed he was reconquering Dacian territory lost to the Celts during their migrations three centuries before. The Dacian attacks against the Boii were devastatingly successful, driving them out of what is now Slovenia and northern Hungary and probably Moravia as well, leaving only Bohemia itself. The Greek historian Strabo described this area as the ‘desert of the Boii’. The survivors, who numbered over 30,000, fled across the Danube into the kingdom of Noricum, a coalition of Celtic tribes, which controlled most of the eastern Alps, and besieged the oppidum at Noreia (Neumarkt, Austria). Repulsed, they travelled through the Alps and found a welcome in the territory of the Helvetii. The Boii subsequently supported the Helvetii when they tried to migrate across Gaul in 58 bc, so unwittingly helping to give Caesar the pretext for his conquest of Gaul. Unlike the Helvetii, Caesar allowed the Boii to settle in Gaul, By this time they had had most of the fight knocked out of them and they played little part in the Gallic war, remaining loyal to Caesar until 52, when, probably as a result of coercion by their stronger neighbours, they sent a small contingent to join the Gallic relief army at the siege of Alesia.
Apart from Ariovistus’ foray across the Rhine, the German expansion into Celtic territory is undocumented. The destruction and abandonment of the oppidum of Zavist, near Prague, c. 25 bc probably marks the Germanic conquest of the remnants of the Boii. By around 16-8 bc all of the former Celtic territories north of the Danube were under the control of the Germans or the Dacians. By this time the Celts between the Alps, the Balkans and the south bank of the Danube had also succumbed to Roman rule. The Vindelici and Raeti of Bavaria were conquered in 15 bc, and the kingdom of Noricum was annexed peacefully very shortly afterwards. Noricum had been a Roman ally since 186 and the kingdom’s elite had already adopted a highly Romanised lifestyle through the influence of a colony of Roman merchants at Virunum (Zollfeld), the royal capital. The Romans conquered the last independent Celtic tribes of continental Europe, in Pannonia and lllyricum (approximately western Hungary and Serbia), in three years, between 12 and 9 bc. There was little resistance: perhaps these Celts found the prospect of domination by the Romans, with whom they had much in common, less unwelcome than that of domination by the barbarian Germans.
World History
