Description
The Romans gave the name Gallaecia to the northwest part of the Iberian peninsula (northern Portugal, Galicia, Asturias, Leon and Cantabria). The Gallaeci (Greek Kallaikoi) tribes (or Gallaecians) Gallaeci lived in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. One of their southern towns, Cale, become the Roman town of Portus Cale, today's Porto, after which the modern state of Portugal is named.
The wild Gallaic Celts make their entry in written history in the first-century epic Punica of Silius Italicus on the First Punic War:
- Fibrarum et pennae divinarumque sagacem
- flammarum misit dives Callaecia pubem,
- barbara nunc patriis ululantem carmina linguis,
- nunc pedis alterno percussa verbere terra,
- ad numerum resonas gaudentem plaudere caetras. (book III.344-7)
- "Rich Gallaecia sent its youths, wise in the knowledge of divination by the entrails of beasts, by feathers and flames— who, now crying out the barbarian song of their native tongue, now alternately stamping the ground in their rhythmic dances until the ground rang, and accompanying the playing with sonorous caetrae" (a caetra was a small type of shield used in the region).
Gallaecia, as a region, was thus marked for the Romans as much for its Celtic culture, the culture of the castros or castrexa — hillforts of Celtic origin—as it was for the lure of its gold mines. This civilization extended over present day Galicia, the north of Portugal, the western part of Asturias, the Berço, and Sanabria and was distinctive from the neighbouring non-Celtic Lusitanian civilization to the south, according to the classical authors Pomponius Mela and Pliny the Elder.
At a far later date, the mythic history that was encapsulated in Lebor Gabála Érenn credited Gallaecia as the point from which the Gallaic Celts sailed to conquer Ireland, as they had Gallaecia, by force of arms.
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