Andronicus and Antigonus

Both Andronicus and Antigonus are Gauls from the south of France. Thousands of Gauls were enslaved by Greek and Carthaginian merchants in the fourth century, and traded freely throughout the Mediterranean. In addition, Syracuse (still a city in modern Sicily) under Dionysius the Elder and under Timoleon, hired Gaulic cavalrymen as mercenaries. Some were sent to Sparta in the mid-fourth century BC, and by the time of Tyrant there were Gaulic mercenaries serving throughout the Mediterranean.

I wanted several of my core characters to be “aliens” to the Greek world. The message I wanted the Gauls to send was that the armies of Alexander and Macedon, of Athens and Sparta, even of Persia, were not “national” armies in the modern sense. Alexander’s phalanx probably had men of twenty nations marching in it, and any army that had mercenaries (and that includes every major force of the period) would have a polyglot mass of men from every race and religion.

I have distinguished between the Gauls of southern France (in the persons of Andronicus and Antigonus) and the Keltoi, who are proto-Galatians just beginning to filter down into the Danube and the Scythic plains in this period. Leucon, the Tyrant of Olbia, has a bodyguard of Keltoi. They have enough words in common with the Gauls to communicate, but their cultures are already growing distinct.

How can you tell them apart? Well, Antigonus is a former slave. He’s smaller, dark haired, and far more Hellenized. Andronicus is larger, a little older, and still carries a La Tene style longsword (see page 116 of Connolly’s “Greece and Rome at War” for a discussion of types). Andronicus is blond. He is a former phylarch in the cavalry of Syracuse, and served at Crimissus, Timoleon’s greatest victory. Antigonus has been with Kineas since the siege of Tyre in 332 BC, whereas Andronicus only joined Kineas in the Ectabana campaign of 330 BC. The two are both “chieftain’s sons,” or so they claim.