THE LOCATION OF THE CELTS ACCORDING TO HECATAEUS, HERODOTUS, AND OTHER GREEK WRITERS

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Patrick SIMS-WILLIAMS

Introduction

The two earliest Greek writers to mention the Celts, Hecataeus of Miletus (c. 560‑480 BC) and Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 485‑424 BC), were natives of Asia Minor, and their knowledge of western geography was inevitably hazy, as Herodotus himself admits: I cannot speak with exactness concerning the westernmost regions of Europe. I personally don’t believe there is a river called Eridanus flowing into a Northern Sea, from which it is said our amber comes. Nor do I know of the Cassiterides, from which tin is brought. Indeed the very name Eridanus is Greek, created by some poet, and is not foreign. Neither can I confirm that a sea beyond Europe even exists. All we know for certain is that our tin and amber come from very distant regions. 1

Despite their distance from the Celts, Hecataeus and Herodotus both distinguish them from their immediate neighbours (the Ligurians and Cynesians respectively), and are thus more useful to us than some later writers such as Ephorus (c. 400‑330 BC), who used the term Keltoi in a generalized, schematic way, assigning the four points of the compass to Indians, Ethiopians, Celts, and Scythians. 2 This shorthand should not be taken out of its astronomical context, as it is by modern scholars who deduce that the Keltoi were just the western, non-Greek ‘ Other’. Just as Ephorus can hardly have imagined that the east and south were solely occupied by Indians and Ethiopians (without Persians, Egyptians, etc.), so he cannot be assumed to have believed that only Celts inhabited his ‘ Celtic’ quadrant. 3 In fact, in another context, he distinguished between Celts and Iberians, although getting their relative proportions wrong