Helvetii

The Helvetii were a Gaulish people of the Swiss plateau, and their attempt to move house began the Gallic War. Pressed by Germanic peoples to the north and hemmed by mountains, they resolved to migrate west to the Atlantic coast. The preparation took three years. Caesar reports that they burned their own twelve towns and four hundred villages so nobody could turn back, and that a census in Greek characters found in their camp recorded three hundred and sixty-eight thousand people, of whom ninety-two thousand could bear arms. The figures are his and are usually treated as inflated. Their route lay either through the Jura passes or through Roman territory, and they asked permission for the latter. Caesar refused, built a nineteen-mile wall along the Rhone to stop them, and then followed when they took the other road. He caught them at the Saone crossing and destroyed one canton mid-river. The decisive battle came at Bibracte, where the Helvetii turned and nearly won. Caesar sent the survivors home and required them to rebuild the towns they had burned, because he wanted a buffer against the Germans rather than an empty country. That is the whole of the campaign that put a Roman army in Gaul permanently, and everything after it followed. The name survives in Helvetia, still the Latin name of Switzerland and the reason its stamps and coins carry it. Their four cantons were named in the same document Caesar cites. Orgetorix, who had organised the migration, was prosecuted by his own people for aiming at kingship and died before it began. The Roman colony at Aventicum became the capital of the resettled people. Swiss coins carry Helvetia because the country has four national languages and no neutral name in any of them.

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