From Gaul, where they appear to have established themselves north of the Garonne and about the Seine and Loire, the hungry tribes made a dash for Spain, shortly before 500 B.C., and wrested the peninsula from the hands of the Phœnicians. One hundred and twenty years later North Italy shared the same fate. Surging through the passes of the Alps they overthrew the Etruscans on their own ground in the great battle of Allia, 390 B.C., and annexed their territory. Flushed with the victory they pressed forward, and within three days stormed and sacked the town of Rome itself. Indeed, it is with this momentous incursion that authentic Roman history begins. One more mighty invasion of the East, and the Illyrians along the Danube are vanquished, thus rendering the conquerors masters of a vast territory extending from that river and the Adriatic to the Atlantic, and bounded on the north by the Rhine and Mid-Germany, and on the south by Mid-Italy and Mid-Spain, and including the British Isles—a magnificent empire rivalling that of Alexander or of Cæsar in their palmy days. Goldsmith’s lines might well apply to them— One only master grasps the whole domain, And half a tillage stints the smiling plain. So formidable, indeed, were the Celts during the period of their ascendency that it served the purpose of the classic nations—Greeks and Romans—to keep the peace with them as best they could, and even to play them off against their own hereditary foes. And so the expansive tribes were for the most part on friendly terms with both, especially with the Greeks. We have an account in Strabo of an interview which Alexander the Great had with their ambassadors. It is given on the authority of Ptolemy, his general. The young potentate knew well the advantage of cultivating good fellowship with his powerful neighbours, and when the tribes of the Adriatic sent delegates he received them with all due courtesy and respect. While they were drinking, says the general, Alexander asked them what was the object of their greatest fear, thinking they would say himself. But the imaginative Celts had quite other views. They feared no man. One thing only alarmed them, they replied, and that was lest the heavens should one day fall and crush them. Still, they added, that they valued the friendship of such a man as he was above everything. “How vainglorious these Celts are!” muttered the young autocrat to his courtiers, a little piqued, perhaps, at their rejoinder. Yet, if such were really the object of their superstitious dread, the promise they made was not without its own grim cogency. “If we fulfil not our engagement,” they said, “may the sky falling upon us crush us, may the earth opening swallow us, may the sea overflowing its borders drown us.”