Libicii Erotic

The Libicii were a Celtic people, probably with Ligurian roots, who lived on the western Po plain around Vercellae, modern Vercelli in Piedmont, from at least the fourth century BC until Rome absorbed them during the second and first centuries BC. They became the Latin-speaking citizens of Roman Vercellae, and their descendants are folded into the population of today's eastern Piedmont and Lomellina. Ancient writers never settled on a spelling. Polybius calls them Lebecii and lists them, beside the Laevi, among the first Celts to settle near the upper Po. Livy writes Libui. Pliny the Elder uses the form kept here and supplies the key detail: Vercellae belonged to the Libicii and was founded by the Salluvii, a people of mixed Celtic and Ligurian character better known from the hills behind Marseille. Ptolemy later gives them two towns, Vercellae and Laumellum, now Lomello.

That mixed pedigree is the point. Their country lay where the Ligurian uplands met the Celtic lowlands, along the Sesia and down toward the Po, with the Salassi in the Alpine valleys to the northwest, the Taurini to the west and the far stronger Insubres of Milan to the east. They spoke a form of Cisalpine Gaulish, and one stone shows it. A boundary marker found at Vercelli, cut in the first century BC, carries the same text in Latin and in Gaulish, the Gaulish written in the north Italian alphabet borrowed from the Etruscans. In it a man named Acisius Argantocomaterecus, whose second name looks like an office built on the Celtic word for silver, gives a field to be shared by gods and men. The Gaulish text says this in a single compound, joining the word for gods to the word for mortals. It is as close as anyone gets to hearing the Libicii speak, and nearly all that survives of their religion, presumably the polytheism of their Celtic neighbors.

They were never a power. Livy has their farmland plundered during the Gallic wars of the 190s BC, after which the region passed under Roman control. In 101 BC Marius and Catulus destroyed the Cimbri on the Raudine Plain, which ancient tradition places near Vercellae, though the site is disputed. The communities north of the Po received Latin rights in 89 BC and full Roman citizenship in 49 BC, and Vercellae became an ordinary Roman town. Pliny also records a censors' law capping at five thousand the workforce in the gold mines of Victumulae, in Vercellae's territory. The spoil heaps from that mining still cover the Bessa, near Biella. The tribal name itself lives on only in the texts.