tinctive culture of their own.

Celtic Migrations--
The Celts Assail the Etruscans in Northern Italy

Such is the description which the ancients give us of this nation.
Its origin can only be conjectured. Sprung from the same cradle from
which the Hellenic, Italian, and Germanic peoples issued,(7) the
Celts doubtless like these migrated from their eastern motherland into
Europe, where at a very early period they reached the western ocean
and established their headquarters in what is now France, crossing
to settle in the British isles on the north, and on the south passing
the Pyrenees and contending with the Iberian tribes for the possession
of the peninsula. This, their first great migration, flowed past the
Alps, and it was from the lands to the westward that they first began
those movements of smaller masses in the opposite direction--movements
which carried them over the Alps and the Haemus and even over the
Bosporus, and by means of which they became and for many centuries
continued to be the terror of the whole civilized nations of
antiquity, till the victories of Caesar and the frontier defence
organized by Augustus for ever broke their power.

The native legend of their migrations, which has been preserved to us
mainly by Livy, relates the story of these later retrograde movements
as follows.(8) The Gallic confederacy, which was headed then as in
the time of Caesar by the canton of the Bituriges (around Bourges),
sent forth in the days of king Ambiatus two great hosts led by the
two nephews of the king. One of these nephews, Sigovesus, crossed
the Rhine and advanced in the direction of the Black Forest, while the
second, Bellovesus, crossed the Graian Alps (the Little St. Bernard)
and descended into the valley of the Po. From the former proceeded
the Gallic settlement on the middle Danube; from the latter the oldest
Celtic settlement in the modern Lombardy, the canton of the Insubres
with Mediolanum (Milan) as its capital. Another host soon followed,
which founded the canton of the Cenomani with the towns of Brixia
(Brescia) and Verona. Ceaseless streams thenceforth poured over the
Alps into the beautiful plain; the Celtic tribes with the Ligurians
whom they dislodged and swept along with them wrested place after
place from the Etruscans, till the whole left bank of the Po was
in their hands. After the fall of the rich Etruscan town Melpum
(presumably in the district of Milan), for the subjugation of