By the side of these mounted warriors the infantry fell into the background. In the main it essentially resembled the bands of Celts, with whom the Romans had fought in Italy and Spain. The large shield was, as then, the principal weapon of defence; among the offensive arms, on the other hand, the long thrusting lance now played the chief part in room of the sword. Where several cantons waged war in league, they naturally encamped and fought clan against clan; there is no trace of their giving to the levy of each canton military organization and forming smaller and more regular tactical subdivisions. A long train of waggons still dragged the baggage of the Celtic army; instead of an entrenched camp, such as the Romans pitched every night, the poor substitute of a barricade of waggons still sufficed. In the case of certain cantons, such as the Nervii, the efficiency of their infantry is noticed as exceptional; it is remarkable that these had no cavalry, and perhaps were not even a Celtic but an immigrant German tribe. But in general the Celtic infantry of this period appears as an unwarlike and unwieldy levy en masse; most of all in the more southern provinces, where along with barbarism valour had also disappeared. The Celt, says Caesar, ventures not to face the German in battle. The Roman general passed a censure still more severe than this judgment on the Celtic infantry, seeing that, after having become acquainted with them in his first campaign, he never again employed them in connection with Roman infantry.

If we survey the whole condition of the Celts as Caesar found it in the Transalpine regions, there is an unmistakeable advance in civilization, as compared with the stage of culture at which the Celts came before us a century and a half previously in the valley of the Po. Then the militia, excellent of its kind, thoroughly preponderated in their armies[23]; now the cavalry occupies the first place. Then the Celts dwelt in open villages; now well-constructed walls surrounded their townships. The objects too found in the tombs of Lombardy are, especially as respects articles of copper and glass, far inferior to those of northern Gaul. Perhaps the most trustworthy measure of the increase of culture is the sense of a common relationship in the nation; so little of it comes to light in the Celtic battles fought on the soil of what is now Lombardy, while it strikingly appears in the struggles against Caesar. To all appearance the Celtic nation, when Caesar encountered it, had already reached the maximum of the culture allotted to it, and was even now on the decline. The civilization of the Transalpine Celts in Caesar's time presents, even for us who are but very imperfectly informed regarding it, several aspects that are estimable, and yet more that are interesting; in some respects it is more akin to the modern than to the Hellenic-Roman culture, with its sailing vessels, its knighthood, its ecclesiastical constitution, above all with its attempts, however imperfect, to build the state not on the city, but on the tribe and in a higher degree on the nation. But just because we here meet the Celtic nation at the culminating point of its development, its lesser degree of moral endowment or, which is the same thing, its lesser capacity of culture, comes more distinctly into view.

It was unable to produce from its own resources either a national art or a national state; it attained at the utmost a national theology and a peculiar type of nobility. The original simple valour was no more; the military courage based on higher morality and judicious organization, which comes in the train of increased civilization, had only made its appearance in a very stunted form among the knights. Barbarism in the strict sense was doubtless outlived; the times had gone by, when in Gaul the fat haunch was assigned to the bravest of the guests, but each of his fellow-guests who thought himself offended thereby was at liberty to challenge the receiver on that score to combat, and when the most faithful retainers of a deceased chief were burnt along with him. But human sacrifices still continued, and the maxim of law, that torture was inadmissible in the case of the free man but allowable in that of the free woman as well as of slaves, throws a far from pleasing light on the position which the female sex held among the Celts even in their period of culture. The Celts had lost the advantages which specially belong to the primitive epoch of nations, but had not acquired those which civilization brings with it when it intimately and thoroughly pervades a people.

Such was the internal condition of the Celtic nation. It remains that we set forth their external relations with their neighbours, and describe the part which they sustained at this moment in the mighty rival race and rival struggle of the nations, in which it is everywhere still more difficult to maintain than to acquire. Along the Pyrenees the relations of the peoples had for long been peaceably settled, and the times had long gone by when the Celts there pressed hard on, and to some extent supplanted, the Iberian, that is, the Basque, original population. The valleys of the Pyrenees as well as the mountains of Bearn and Gascony, and also the coast-steppes to the south of the Garonne, were at the time of Caesar in the undisputed possession of the Aquitani, a great number of small tribes of Iberian descent, coming little into contact with each other and still less with the outer world; in this quarter only the mouth of the Garonne with the important port of Burdigala (Bordeaux) was in the hands of a Celtic tribe, the Bituriges-Vivisci.

Advance of Roman Trade and Commerce into Free Gaul Of far greater importance was the contact of the Celtic nation with the Roman people, and with the Germans. We need not here repeat - what has been related already - how the Romans in their slow advance had gradually pressed back the Celts, had at last occupied the belt of coast between the Alps and the Pyrenees, and had thereby totally cut them off from Italy, Spain and the Mediterranean Sea - a catastrophe, for which the way had already been prepared centuries before by the laying out of the Hellenic stronghold at the mouth of the Rhone. But we must here recall the fact that it was not merely the superiority of the Roman arms which pressed hard on the Celts, but quite as much that of Roman culture, which likewise reaped the ultimate benefit of the respectable beginnings of Hellenic civilization in Gaul. Here too, as so often happens, trade and commerce paved the way for conquest. The Celt after northern fashion was fond of fiery drinks; the fact that like the Scythian he drank the generous wine unmingled and to intoxication, excited the surprise and the disgust of the temperate southern; but the trader has no objection to deal with such customers.

Soon the trade with Gaul became a mine of gold for the Italian merchant; it was nothing unusual there for a jar of wine to be exchanged for a slave. Other articles of luxury, such as Italian horses, found advantageous sale in Gaul. There were instances even already of Roman burgesses acquiring landed property beyond the Roman frontier, and turning it to profit after the Italian fashion; there is mention, for example, of Roman estates in the canton of the Segusiavi (near Lyons) as early as about 673. Beyond doubt it was a consequence of this that, as already mentioned[24] in free Gaul itself, e. g. among the Arverni, the Roman language was not unknown even before the conquest; although this knowledge was presumably still restricted to few, and even the men of rank in the allied canton of the Haedui had to be conversed with through interpreters. Just as the traffickers in fire-water and the squatters led the way in the occupation of North America, so these Roman wine-traders and landlords paved the way for, and beckoned onward, the future conqueror of Gaul. How vividly this was felt even on the opposite side, is shown by the prohibition which one of the most energetic tribes of Gaul, the canton of the Nervii, like some German peoples, issued against trafficking with the Romans.