Melpum must have stood near the spot where Milan is now. The situation of Milan is exceedingly favourable, and often as it has been destroyed, it has been always restored; so that it is not impossible that Melpum was the same town. Without doubt, the Gallic migration came sweeping on with headlong impetuosity, like the billows of a stormy sea; how then can we suppose that Melpum had withstood the barbarians for two hundred years, or that they had conquered it, and had left the Etruscans undisturbed during the whole of that time? It is absurd to believe this, merely to bear out an uncritical assertion of Livy’s. Twelve years after the taking of Rome, as is usually computed; or, according to a more correct chronology, nine years later, the Triballians, who in the times of Herodotus abode in Lower Hungary, were seen in Thrace, having been driven out of their own country by the Gauls. It is evident that the same movement which led them to the Middle Danube, extended likewise to the Po. And should they who in a few days came from Clusium to Rome, and afterwards appeared also in Apulia, have sat still in a corner for two hundred years? These Gauls were partly Celts, but the great body of them were Belgians or _Cymri_. This may be gleaned from the fact that their king, as well as he who appears before Delphi, is called Brennus; _Brenin_, according to Adelung in Mithridates, means in Welsh and _Bas Breton_ a king. But what gave rise to the whole migration? The statement of Livy that a famine had driven forth the Gauls, is quite in the character of all those traditions about national migrations which we find in Saxo Grammaticus, in Paul Warnefrid from the Swedish lays, in the Tyrrhenian legends concerning Lydia, and elsewhere. In the case of a people however, like the Celts, any special account of this kind, in which, as here, even the leaders are named, is no more worthy of belief than all other legends among nations who have not the use of writing. It is indeed certain that the Celts had Greek letters; but they may only have used them for the purposes of every day life, and it is well known that they were not allowed to commit the old lays to writing. The Celts, however, had a tradition which we meet with in Ammianus Marcellinus, that Britain had been one of their most ancient seats. We now find them in Britain, Ireland, in different places in Spain, and in two places in Portugal. For the Celticans and Celts in Portugal, who dwelt in Algarve and Alemtejo, and between the Mincio and Douro, are pure Celts; the Celtiberians in Spain are a mixture of Celts and Iberians: they live in the heart of the mountain range between Saragossa and Madrid, which is connected with the Pyrenees.[119] Of these Celts in Spain the same tradition has been preserved, as of their appearance in Italy: they are said to have been driven thither by famine, and to have spread by conquest. Yet here is again a confusion of the two opposite poles in the tradition.