The Celts and the Gauls: widespread tribal societies across Western Europe, known for their fine metalwork and a restless, curving art, who left almost nothing written. A slow, unhurried reading of their world — the salt mines of the east, the princely graves, the iron swords set into the lakes, the spiral ornament, the walled towns, the learned men, the gods half-named, the long movement into Italy and Greece and the far east — and then the war with Rome, from the Helvetian migration to Alesia, told with the care we owe a story that survives only in the account of the man who won it.
For the edge of sleep. About 85 minutes.
Sources (a selection): Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico; Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica 5.26–32; Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 16.93–95 (oak and mistletoe); Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.19–23 (Delphi); Herodotus, Histories 4.46–49; Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 5.33–51; Cassius Dio, Roman History 39–40. Barry Cunliffe, The Ancient Celts (Oxford, 1997; 2nd ed. 2018); Bernhard Maier, The Celts (Edinburgh, 2017); Miranda Green (ed.), The Celtic World (Routledge, 1995); John Collis, The Celts: Origins, Myths and Inventions; Christopher Pare, “Fürstensitze, Celts and the Mediterranean World” (1991); John R. Collis, “‘Celtic’ Oppida”; Ian Stewart, The Celts: A Modern History (Princeton, 2016); Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar: Life of a Colossus (Yale, 2006); H. H. Scullard, From the Gracchi to Nero (Routledge, 1982); T. J. Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome (Routledge, 1995). National Museum of Denmark (the Gundestrup cauldron); British Museum (La Tène torcs).
