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Act_16:6; Gal_1:1; Gal_4:13-15
At length, however, it was deemed desirable to enter upon new ground; and therefore Paul, with Silas and Timothy, proceeded northward “throughout Phrygia and the region of Galatia.” It is usual to describe Phrygia as “a large and populous province of Asia Minor,”—and such indeed it had become in the age of Constantine. But at this time, and long before and after, the term Phrygia had no political significance, but was merely a geographical expression denoting a debatable country of indeterminate extent, diffused over the frontiers of the province of Asia and Galatia, but belonging chiefly to the former.
In Galatia we, for Paul’s sake, take a deeper interest, and concerning it there is no lack of information.
This province was inhabited by a peculiar people of Gaulish origin, from whom it took the name of Galatia. It was, in fact, a Gaulish settlement, and Galatia was the Gaul of the East. Some may wonder to see a Gaulish colony prosperously established in the heart of Lesser Asia, and would be perplexed to guess how they got there. The Galatians, then, were a stream from that torrent of Gaulish barbarians which poured into Greece in the third century before Christ, and which recoiled in confusion from the cliff’s of Delphi. These tribes had previously separated from the main army, and penetrated into Thrace. There they were joined by a number of the fugitives from the broken army. They found no power here which could effectually oppose them; and soon the coast of the Propontis came under tribute to them, and they were masters of its fair towns and cities. Thus they remained a good while; but at length considering that only a narrow strait separated them in onw part from the fertile plains and valleys of Asia, of which they had already received pleasing reports, they conceived an eager desire to pass over and claim a heritage there. They had no ships, however, and could not devise the means of getting over, and in this perplexity they actually sent to Antipater, the governor of the opposite coast, to fetch them over. To this he naturally demurred; and the Gaulish princes meanwhile quarrelling among themselves, one of them led back the greater part of the forces to Byzantium whence they had come. The leader of those that remained at the straits soon found the means of crossing over. He seized the vessels in which Antipater had sent over an embassy to watch their proceedings, and, by incessantly passing to and fro night and day, succeeded in getting over all his army. Not long after, the Gauls who had withdrawn in the first instance, went over also, being actually assisted by Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, who craved the aid of their good swords in his wars. That aid was very effectual; and when, having performed their work, they marched inland to carve out their own fortunes, the nations on that side of the Taurus shrunk in terror before these awful barbarians—though, as Livy affirms, there were but 20,000 of them, and not more than half of these armed. The terror of their name made conquest easy; and in no long time the whole of the peninsula north of the Taurus became tributary to them. The suzerainty and tributes of this region—but not, as some state, its territorial occupation—they divided among their three tribes, the Tectosages, the Trocmi, and the Tolistoboii, remaining themselves seated chiefly on the Halys, that is, in the district which, from their occupation of it, acquired the name of Galatia. Here they lived in great prosperity, increasing rapidly in numbers. They took part in all the wars of the time, hiring themselves out as mercenary troops; and we find them acting as body guards to the kings of Syria and of Egypt. Even Herod the Great had four hundred of them in his pay.
In time, however, the neighboring monarchs found means to curtail their power, and at length it was confined to what had come to be considered their proper territory. The Romans, who had turned their arms against them, after the war with Antiochus the Great, as the only power capable of giving any disturbance, left them in nominal independence, and it was only upon the death of their last king Amyntas, in the time of Augustus, that Galatia became a Roman province.
These Gallo-Grecians yielded but slowly, and never entirely, to the softening influences of the Greek civilization by which they were surrounded. Indeed, they seem for a long time to have resisted that influence, and to have maintained, on calculation, that ferocious and formidable aspect by which the original inhabitants had been so greatly terrified. The anomalous aspect of this “fierce and cruel nation,” set clown in midst of a people of all others most mild and tractable, struck the attention of the consul Manlius, and is mentioned by him in his speech to the army at the beginning of the campaign. He also gives a curious description of their personal appearance, which is more interesting to us than it could be to those who had already met them in battle, in the army of Antiochus. They were men of large person and tall stature, wearing their yellow hair in long shining locks. They carried immense bucklers, and wielded exceedingly long swords; and they came to battle with songs, whoops, and dances, clashing their swords and targets, and making altogether a horrible noise, wherewith to dismay their opponents.
Before this they had, however, abandoned their native Druidism, and adopted the worship of Cybele; and as time passed on, and when from the increase of population, and the lapse of power, and the cessation of wars, they ceased to be a wholly military people, many of their specialties melted down; so that by the time Paul appeared among them, they had become pretty well assimilated to their neighbors, although still retaining traces of their origin. They had then long been familiar with the Greek language and Greek culture. Paul wrote his epistle to them in Greek, and the contemporary inscriptions of the province are usually in that language. Indeed, many of the inhabitants must have been of purely Greek origin; there was also doubtless a material substratum of the early Phrygian population; and there seems to have been considerable numbers of Jews in the principal towns.
But amid changes of language, religion, institutions, and habits of life, we often see that the mysterious thing called “national character,” which seems to flow in the life blood of a people, remains essentially unaltered through the lapse of ages; and it may not be difficult to recognize in the Galatians, as described in Paul’s epistle, traits of character, which remind us vividly of the Gauls as described to us by ancient historians, and of the Gauls as known to our living experience.