Aigosages Erotic

The Aigosages were a Celtic war band, called Gauls in the Greek sources, who crossed from Europe into northwestern Anatolia in the late third century BC as hired soldiers of Attalus I of Pergamon. The Bithynian king Prusias I wiped them out in 216 BC, and they left no known descendants. Almost everything known about them comes from a few chapters in the historian Polybius, who covers their story from arrival to destruction in only a few years. Nothing they said or made in their own words survives. Their name, as the Greeks wrote it, is the only piece of their speech on record. The name ends the same way as that of the Tectosages, one of the Galatian tribes then settled in central Anatolia, but no one knows whether the two groups were connected.

Attalus brought them over because they were known as fighters. They did not travel as a stripped-down army. Their wives and children came along, following the troops in wagons. In 218 BC he took them on campaign against Achaeus, a Seleucid commander who had declared himself king in Asia Minor, pushing through Aeolis and into Mysia. The long march had already worn them down when an eclipse of the moon took place, and at that point the Aigosages refused to go any farther. Attalus had no good options. If he forced them on, they might go over to Achaeus. If he killed them, he would be known as a king who slaughtered men who had crossed to Asia trusting him. He led them back to the Hellespont instead and promised them land there.

Having land did not calm them. Around the Hellespont they began raiding local towns and laid siege to Ilium, the Greek city on the site of Troy. Alexandria Troas sent 4,000 men who broke the siege and cut off their supplies. The Aigosages then seized Arisba, in the territory of Abydos, and went on threatening the cities nearby. In 216 BC Prusias marched against them and beat them in battle. He then massacred nearly all the women and children in their camp and gave their baggage to his own soldiers.

Today the Aigosages survive as a cautionary tale more than as a people. Polybius tells their story as a lesson for outsiders from Europe who crossed into Asia too readily. They were part of the larger movement of Celtic groups into the Balkans and Anatolia that began in the 270s BC. The same movement produced the Galatians, whose defeat Attalus celebrated in the Pergamene victory monuments later copied as the Dying Gaul. The Galatians put down roots and kept a separate identity for centuries. The Aigosages lasted only a few years on Asian soil.