CHAPTER 16
GIANTS ATTACK ROME
“The Celtic giants are described by Pausanias, the famous geographer and traveler as the tallest people in the world during ancient times. He writes, “They rush at their adversaries like wild beasts, full of rage and temperament, with no kind of reasoning at all; even with arrows and javelins sticking through them, they were carried on by sheer spirit while their life lasted. Some of them even pulled the spears they were hit by out of their wounds and threw them back."
Roman historian Titus Livius, known as Livy, also wrote around 380 BC that an ancient tribe of Celtic giants was finding its towns and villages burdened with overpopulation. As a cure for the limited space, these giants attacked the inhabitants of the northern countryside of Italy and easily made this land their home. Upon conquering the region, the giants cried out to march on to Rome to conquer the infamous Roman capital.
Nearly fifty thousand giants marched from the northern Italian countryside to the city. With mighty warriors on foot and horses, in chariots and carts, these giants sent fear into every town, village, and farm along the way to the capital of the mighty Roman Empire. These massive invaders were nothing like the frightened Roman villagers. They were blond-haired, barbaric invaders of unbelievable height. Their giant size was frightening enough, but with their unsophisticated, animal-like behavior, these beings seemed unchallengeable to the Romans.
News of the giants’ march to Rome was met much too late for the Roman armies to intervene. The power of the giant warriors was severely greater than anything the Romans had seen in battle in the past. The giants held no regard for any life along the way; they burned, killed, and ravaged every Roman settlement and town in their path toward Rome. The Romans did all they could to stop the march, but all efforts were in vain.
The Romans continued to fight the great giant warriors but found themselves outmatched by their superior stature. The giants marched into battle either wearing heavy iron and bronze chains or, in many cases, nothing at all. Their nakedness was a tactic that sent fear into the minds of the armies. The giants marched with weapons that demonstrated their enormous size and great strength. Their swords were bigger than even the spears of the Romans. As they marched, the giants beat their swords in rhythm against their shields. The sound was described as ear-shattering thunder meant to insight fear in all that heard it.
When the giants were poised to attack, trumpets sounded with an ear-piercing guarantee of death. As they marched, the ground shook. Their war tactics were the bloodiest the Romans had ever seen. With one swipe of their mighty sword, a single giant could cut two or three Roman soldiers in half all at once. As the top halves of the Roman soldiers fell, bloody to the ground, the bottom half of the bodies would sometimes take several steps on their own as the nervous system would execute the last brain commands to the legs. It was a gruesome scene as described in Roman history by Levy.
In celebrating their victory over the Romans, the giants would cut off the heads of every person they had killed. Each giant warrior would display the heads of those he had killed to their king. In exchange, the king would honor the warrior with riches equal to the number of heads he returned. The giants would take the heads of their worst enemies or proudest kills and saw off everything from their eyebrows down. The remaining portion would be carefully cleaned out of the brain, muscles, skin, and blood. The skulls then dried out in the sun. They would then stretch leather around the outside of the skull and line the inside with precious metal like gold and use it as a drinking chalice or cup. The scalp of hair from the heads of their kills was used as handkerchiefs and bathroom tissue. They would proudly display them on the saddles and bridles of their horses. Present-day archaeologists have discovered that these Celtic giants used human skulls to decorate the doorways and rooftops of their homes. It is no mere legend; it is an absolute fact that such barbaric warfare and customs existed in ancient times.
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With the graphic details of the naked barbarians coming, the citizens of Rome had heard the news of the slaughter and began one of the largest exoduses of the city in its entire history. No one was about to stay and become the next victim of what was becoming the greatest sense of brutality that the civilized Romans had ever seen. Nearly all of Rome was vacant as the giants marched into the city. The giants marched in without provocation, looted and ransacked the progressive city of everything. They eventually set fire and burned Rome to the ground. Livy would write that these giants would remain a blemish on the Roman reputation forever. The humiliation they suffered would never completely heal.
In 225 B.C., more than a hundred and fifty years later, the Romans were finally able to get revenge on the giants. It is written that some seventy thousand giant warriors again crossed the Apennine Mountains and began to hold northern Italy hostage. The giants continued to push into Italy and were less than a hundred miles from Rome when, this time, the Roman Senate and army were ready. The Romans were able to kill nearly forty thousand of the giant warriors in one bloody day. The Romans were smart. They had studied their losses and made plans that would use the giants and their size against them. Their plans of using javelins and arrows worked superbly this time against the naked giant warriors. Tall men with only shields to protect themselves could easily be hit with javelins and arrows from a greater distance. Then, when the Romans engaged them in hand-to-hand combat, their extensive training allowed them not only to kill the forty thousand but to take another ten thousand as prisoners. As the slaughter continued, the giants continued to fight with little regard for their own lives, even when they saw they were losing the battle, they refused to give up. This ensured an even greater number of the giants to be slaughtered.
Battles between the Romans and the Celtic giants went on and on, with each side having significant victories throughout history. It was not until the great Roman military genius Gaius Marius and his power-hungry nephew, Julius Caesar, that the empire was finally able to put a stop to the giants and their attacks.
In the Battle of Aquae Sextiae, Marius tricked over one hundred thousand of the giants into chasing his cavalrymen up a hill. When they reached the top, the Roman cavalry turned and drove the giants into the woods where Marius and his legion of men were waiting. It was a great ambush that all but annihilated the northern giants and prevented them from attacking Rome ever again.
A story claims that some of the northern Roman villagers, once victimized by the giants, managed to capture the mightiest warrior of the giants, Tadmores. Tadmores had been one of the ring leaders, but when the fighting became too intense, he fled the battlefield during the annihilation. A group of villagers managed to capture and kill him. The villagers then turned the body of Tadmores over to Marius and the Romans. Marius returned to Rome as a hero with his greatest trophy being the giant body of Tadmores, whom he proclaimed to be king of the giants, atop the spears of the returning Roman soldiers. This would serve as a turning point in Roman history as it relates to stories of the giants. From this point on, Roman history mentioned giants mostly in terms of their remains, as trophies of the heroes of Rome and not as a conquering people.”
Grandpa Jack spoke of himself, “As a socio-cultural anthropologist, I am asked to study the social and cultural aspects of a people. These written Roman texts are evidence of the existence of said giants. Where there are dead giants, there are giant bones. And Roman history documents such physical evidence.”
