their great enemy, Hannibal. They had just beaten, near Magnesia,
Antiochus, King of Syria. In his army they had encountered men of lofty
stature, with hair light or dyed red, half naked, marching to the fight
with loud cries, and terrible at the first onset. They recognized the
Gauls, and resolved to destroy or subdue them. The consul, Cn. Manlius,
had the duty and the honor. Attacked in their strongholds on Mount
Olympus and Mount Magaba, 189 B.C., the three Gallic bands, after a short
but stout resistance, were conquered and subjugated; and thenceforth
losing all national importance, they amalgamated little by little with
the Asiatic populations around them. From time to time they are still
seen to reappear with their primitive manners and passions. Rome humored
them; Mithridates had them for allies in his long struggle with the
Romans. He kept by him a Galatian guard; and when he sought death, and
poison failed him, it was the captain of the guard, a Gaul named
Bituitus, whom he asked to run him through. That is the last historical
event with which the Gallic name is found associated in Asia.

Nevertheless the amalgamation of the Gauls of Galatia with the natives
always remained very imperfect; for towards the end of the fourth century
of the Christian era they did not speak Greek, as the latter did, but
their national tongue, that of the Kymro-Belgians; and St. Jerome
testifies that it differed very little from that which was spoken in
Belgica itself, in the region of Troves.

The Romans had good ground for keeping a watchful eye, from the time they
met them, upon the Gauls, and for dreading them particularly. At the
time when they determined to pursue them into the mountains of Asia
Minor, they were just at the close of a desperate struggle, maintained
against them for four hundred years, in Italy itself; "a struggle," says
Sallust, "in which it was a question not of glory, but of existence, for