42 



BIRDS IN LEGEND 



who had a daughter "tail and majestic" but unsatisfactory 

 because she refused all the suitors who presented them- 

 selves. Then Hercules came along, and the haughty 

 maiden surrendered at Arras. The result was a son 

 named Galetes — a lad of extraordinary virtues who be- 

 came king and extended his grandfather's dominions. 

 He called his subjects after his own name Galatians and 

 his country Galatia. This is nonsense. Moreover 

 "Galatia" is Greek, and was applied by the Greeks, long 

 before the day of Diodorus, to the lands of a colony of 

 Keltic-speaking migrants who had settled on the coast 

 of Asia Minor, and became the Galatians to whom Paul 

 wrote one of his Epistles. The Greek word Galatai was, 

 however, a form of the earlier Keltai. 



As has been said, what we call Savoy and France 

 were known to the Romans as Gallia, Gaul ; but this term 

 had been familiar in Italy long before Caesar had estab- 

 lished Roman power over the great region between the 

 German forests and the sea that he tersely described as 

 Omnia Gallia; and it seems to have originated in the fol- 

 lowing way: 



About i ioo B. C. two wild tribes, the Umbrians and 

 the Oscans, swept over the mountains from the northeast, 

 and took possession of northern Italy. These invaders 

 were Nordics, and used an antique form of Teutonic 

 speech. They were resisted, attacked, and finally over- 

 whelmed by the Etruscans, who about 800 B. C, when 

 Etruria was at the height of its power, extended their 

 rule to the Alps and the Umbrian State disappeared. In 

 the sixth century new hordes, calling themselves Kymri, 

 coming from the west, and speaking Keltic dialects, 

 swarmed into northern Italy from the present France. 



