Anagnutes Erotic

The Anagnutes were a small Gaulish people of the Atlantic coast of western Gaul, in what is now the Vendée department of France, attested from the late Iron Age into the Roman period. They did not vanish so much as dissolve. Folded into the territory of their larger neighbors, the Pictones, they became part of the Gallo-Roman population of Poitou, and their descendants are among the French of the Vendée and the lower Loire today. Almost everything written about them fits in a single line. Pliny the Elder, listing the peoples of Roman Aquitania in the first century AD, names the Anagnutes beside the Ambilatri and the Pictones. The Greek geographer Artemidorus, quoted centuries later by Stephanus of Byzantium, mentions a Celtic people by the Ocean called the Agnotes, and they may well be the same group heard through a Greek ear. That is the whole dossier. No named leader, no battle, no treaty survives under their name, and even the meaning of the name has not been settled.

What can be said comes from where they sat. Their country lay south of the Loire estuary, with the Namnetes to the north and the Pictones inland and to the south, along a low shore, much of it then open bay and salt marsh where there is reclaimed farmland now. A people that size beside a power like the Pictones was probably a client, bound to the bigger tribe by obligation and protection. That was the normal architecture of Gaulish politics, and it may explain why Caesar, who dealt with the Pictones and drew ships from them for his Atlantic campaign of 56 BC, never mentions the Anagnutes. They spoke Gaulish, the Continental Celtic language shared, with local variation, from the Atlantic to the Alps, and they would have practiced the polytheism of their neighbors, though nothing of their worship is recorded. When Augustus reorganized Gaul he stretched the province of Aquitania north to the Loire, which is why a Celtic people of the Vendée turns up in Pliny's list of Aquitanian tribes despite having nothing to do with the Aquitani proper of the southwest. Within that province the Anagnutes are not known to have had a civitas of their own. Administration presumably ran through the Pictones and their capital at Lemonum, now Poitiers, Latin gradually displaced Gaulish, and the smaller name dropped out of use. Their legacy is mostly a lesson in how the ancient record works. The big tribes left capitals that became French cities. Peoples like the Anagnutes left a name in a list, a reminder of how crowded Iron Age Gaul was.