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The Celta outside Gani

contacts with the Cisalpine Celts, and the Greek cities of Tarentum and Syracuse had been well known to communities as remote as the far west of Gaul at the heginning of the third ccntury (see chapters 1, 5). The eastern Alps provided a ready avenue of contact between central Europę and the mercenary markets of Greek Italy and Sicily, and the Punie colonies in Sicily niust have become alf too familiar with Celts in the pay of Syracuse during their protracted fourth and third century wars. It is very likely that during the exceptionally high level of Punie mercenary reeruitment for the two wars with Romę, central European Celts played some part, and thereby came into possession of whatever coin the Carthaginians had to pay them in. It may be, indeed, that the Celts positively preferred familiar Greco-Roman currency to that of African Carthage itself.

During the second half of the second century bc, the picture in Bohemia and Southern Germany becomes increasingly complex. This was a time of turmoil and changing relationships following Rome’s conąuest of the western Mediterranean, which closed Greek and Punie markets for mercenary soldiers for ever, but replaced them with an ever-increasing demand for barbarian slaves, something that encourged endemic warfare in temperate Europę. Commercial dealings with the growing Roman empire were based upon silver as a standard of value, even if silver coins seldom actually changed hands, and gold coinage faded quickly from dealings between the Mediterranean and Celtic worlds. Therefore, while many central European warrior communities continued to strike gold or massive silver coinage for traditional military ends, the first Celtic silver coinages on the Roman ąuinarius standard now began to appear, sometimes replacing them entirely. Among the earliest and most important of these silver ‘ąuinarius’ issues was the ‘Bushel’ series (75), whose obverse type also owes something to the palm tree on third-century Punie silver coins. These may have come into existence to the north of the Danube in the mid second century and were well established by the 120s; they were struck from at least two separate mints. Another important early series was the German ‘monnaies a la croix’ (76), so called because of their close resemblance to contemporary silver coins of Languedoc. It is tempting to associate these coins with the Tectosages, perhaps originally of mid-Rhineland origin, who had distant colonial settlements around

Tolosa, in central Europę (Caesar Gallic War 6.24), and in Calatia. Certainly the resemblance between this German series and the south~western Gallic coinage is too close to dismiss the possibility of some sort of direct connection between them.

At the same time, during the second century, the gold Mussel tradition divcrsificd. A distinctive and influential new series, the ‘Rainbow cup’ coinage (Regenbogenschiisselchen), emerged around Stradonitz in Bohemia and moved to Bavaria, where it was centred upon the warrior centre at Manching (77). There was by now a very elear geographical boundary on the Rhine between the westernmost expression of this German Celtic tradition and contemporary Gallic gold coinages. Lilce the older Mussel coinage, the Rainbow cups travelled widely to northem Italy and to Gaul, and its authors were evidently among the last representatives of the great central European Celtic warrior societies whose golden age had been the epoch of military scrvice in the Hellenistic world.

In Bohemia, Slovakia, Saxony and Bavaria, all Celtic coinage ended abruptly around 60 bc, contemporary with the disruption of sites such as Manching in Bavaria and Basel in Switzerland. The westward migration of the Helvetii, documented by Julius Caesar, was only one episode in a much morę widespread social upheaval in central Europę due to the southwards expansion of ferocious ‘Germans’ of whom even the central European Celts were afraid. This development was an indirect outeome of the growth of the Roman empire after the Second Punie War, for the mid second century saw a rapid inerease in Italian and Roman demand for bar banan slaves, something that attracted the warrior Germans to establish footholds closer to the Mediterranean. Caesar said of the Germans that they wanted to deal with Mediterranean mer-chants not so much because they wanted to purchase anything in particular, but in order to sell what they had captured - evidently, captives of war. Even experienced Celtic warrior communities were unable to withstand the force of their southwards advance, and they proved able to hołd the Roman empire at the Rhine.

This new generation of European warrior societies had little use for coinage other than as an exotic import (Tacitus described their taste in the first century ad for obsolete Republican serrated denarii). They had had no contact with the mercenary markets of the Hellenistic Mediterranean, attached no military prestige to the use of coinage, and organized their economic affairs on a

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