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CELTIC WEAPONS, CITIZEN SOLDIERS
This paper examines changing military panoply as a cultural dynamic in the early and middle Roman Republic. In the sixth and fifth centuries BC, combatants in central Italy predominantly fought with an imported Hellenic panoply, centred upon the round, rimmed hoplite shield (aspis). In addition to its effectiveness in combat, hoplite gear marked the elite status and cosmopolitan horizons of its wearer. The famous Chigi olpe explicitly linked hoplite weapons and tactics to aristocratic sociability and long-distance commercial contacts with the Aegean world.2 Yet over the course of the fourth century BC, the Romans and their Italian allies abandoned Greek hoplite panoply and replaced it with a new set of weapons and armour derived from Celtic peoples living in Cisalpine Gaul.3
Borrowing military hardware from other peoples was mostly unproblematic to the Romans, at least by the first century BC. The Ineditum Vaticanum boasted that the Romans first adopted hoplite weapons from the Etruscans (basically correct), then oval shields and javelins from the Samnites (quite false on the first point, as we will see), and naval warfare from the Carthaginians (somewhat true).4 The moral of the story was that the Romans were pragmatists untroubled by identity politics, at least when it came to the grim business of making war. But cribbing material culture from Celtic peoples posed potentially more of an ideological problem, because by the middle Republic the Celts were not simply another example of the ethnic diversity of the Italian peninsula, but rather the ultimate ‘barbarian Other’. Celtic Senones had sacked Rome in 390 BC, a military catastrophe of the highest order, while further Gallic invasions threatened central Italy between 367 and 349 BC.5 In the third century BC, the Romans engaged in genocidal wars (andrapodismos) against the Senones in the 280s BC, settled the desolation and faced down a serious counter-offensive by a Gallic coalition from 225 to 223 BC.6 Fierce fighting in Cisalpine Gaul continued throughout the Second Punic War and for a generation afterwards. In 189 BC, Manlius Vulso followed up the war against Antiochus the Great with a brutal campaign against the Galatians of Asia Minor, seemingly pursuing the sort of Celtic victory to which...