Divide and conquer?

The Roman conquest of the Celts looks much like the working out of an implacable vengeance for the sack of Rome. But Roman expansion was no more centrally planned than Celtic expansion had been - it was driven mainly by internal politics and the search for secure frontiers - and the Romans’ hostility toward the Celts can be exaggerated. Although the

Romans certainly did see the Celts as inferior and potentially dangerous barbarians, their relations with them were usually far more pragmatic than their rhetoric might lead one to suppose. They formed alliances with many Celtic peoples, who welcomed Roman protection against hostile Celtic or non-Celtic neighbours. And the Romans were usually punctilious when it came to keeping their side of the bargain, as much with the Celts as with other peoples. Of course, alliances with Rome tended to lead in one direction only, that is to eventual absorption into the Roman Empire, but if the influence, status and wealth of the tribal elite were thereby secured, this would not necessarily be unwelcome. The Celts had only a very weak sense of common identity: their primary loyalty was to their tribes, or even their families. Tribes were often divided into factions based on kinship and sometimes one of these might call on Roman assistance against its rivals. Such divisions were certainly exploited by the Romans. Tribal elites usually acted in what they perceived as their individual best interests. This did not preclude cooperation between tribes, but none of them could conceive that they all had a common interest in defending the abstract notion of ‘Celtic independence’ against Roman imperialism because no such common interest existed. Why fight the Romans simply to carry on paying tribute to the overbearing Celtic tribe in the next valley? For good reasons, Rome simply was not seen as the common enemy by all Celts. Modern historians usually see this lack of common identity and common purpose among the Celts as the main factor in their eventual conquest by the Romans. Even the Romans saw it this way. For example, Tacitus noted how long it took the Britons to learn ‘that a common danger must be repelled by union’. Disunity allowed the Romans to divide and conquer.

Or did it? Rather than simply asking why the Romans were able to conquer the Celts, it is also worth asking why it took them so long. Taking, as it did, all of400 years, the Roman conquest of the Celts was no blitzkrieg, and it was never actually quite completed. In the same time that it took them to conquer the Celtic peoples of Iberia, that is, the last two centuries BC, the Romans conquered the entire eastern Mediterranean with its ancient and sophisticated civilisations, like those of Greece and Egypt, and well-ordered kingdoms with standing armies and strongly fortified cities. Sometimes resistance was fierce, but battles often had decisive results and, once an area had submitted to Roman rule, rebellions were rare and brief (except in Judaea). In contrast, Celtic Iberia was still a decentralised tribal society, albeit one that was moving towards urbanisation and state formation. Battles there were rarely decisive and rebellions were frequent and bloody. Yet the Iberian Celts never came close to uniting in common cause against the Romans. In contrast, the Gauls’ resistance to Rome collapsed within a year of their uniting under the leadership of Vercingetorix. Clearly disunity cannot have been the disadvantage it is so often assumed to be. More than this, could disunity, or, more precisely, the decentralisation that came with it, actually have been the reason why the Celts resisted Rome for so much longer and with so much more success than anyone else bar the Germans (another decentralised society)?