But already, before the Greek repulse, the Celtic cup of conquest was full, and their vast empire began to crumble and disintegrate. The first great shock was given by the revolt of their born thralls, the Germans, about 300 B.C. In the struggle for independence these recovered their liberty and big stretches of territory. Besides falling out with the Greeks, the flurried tribes in that wild consternation of defeat came to blows with the Romans also, who in two different battles got the victory over them. Forced to ally themselves with former foes, now with the Etruscans, again with the Carthaginians, the Celts still fought desperately, but all in vain. Their dominion was doomed. And as if to hasten the swift debacle, the various sections of the same great people attacked and dispossessed each other. It was probably in the pressure of those times that the Brittonic invaders surged into Britain and elbowed their Gaelic kinsmen into more straitened circumstances; for all the continental Celts were simultaneously in the throes of a lamentable dispersion. Reverse followed reverse with singular fatality. Every attempt to redeem their desperate fortunes seemed to fail. “They went to the war, but they always fell,” said their own sad bard afterwards, summing up in one terse antithesis the history of their collapse. The failure was crushing and irretrievable. They lost Spain, they lost the north of Italy, they lost Gaul, and subsequently Britain. The story of Cæsar’s conquests needs no rehearsal. By 80 A.D. all Britain south of the Firth of Forth figured as a Roman province. Meantime the Celtic dialects of Gaul and Spain were gradually being superseded by the Latin, and even the laws, habits, and civil administration of the people were becoming Roman, until in the third century of our era scarcely a vestige of the ancient régime remained outside of the British Isles and Brittany, except to the south of the latter, where the influence of the discarded dialect on the adopted Latin might be traced.[5] In Britain the Romanising process was suddenly arrested by the hasty departure of the conqueror; and in the helpless abandonment that ensued the Saxons found an open door. The same fate that they had themselves formerly inflicted on their kinsmen now overtook the Britons, who were hustled in great numbers into the wilds of Cornwall, of Wales, and Strathclyde. And the last stage of the driving west remained to be accomplished in the case of the Irish, when the Anglo-Celts arrived in the twelfth century.