Antonini) bear witness to the location of the town on the Aquileia-Emona-Poetovio road. The Roman town name is recorded on over a hundred inscriptions and on numerous milestones.

The town covered an area of about sixty-five hectares and had about 10,000 inhabitants at its peak during the second and third centuries when, to a large extent, it retained its Celtic character. The autochthonous component was reflected in onomastic material, the worship of Celtic divinities such as Epona, Noreia, Celeia, etc., and in the archaeological remains. Celeia did not exhibit a regular insular layout, because it developed out of a pre-existing settlement. Houses were located along roads, some of which were paved in the town’s center and, in some sections, lined with colonnades. Excavations have revealed houses that were adorned with mosaics and frescos, dated from the first to the fourth century. A second-century Roman temple was located on the southern edge of the town. The forum, as yet not excavated, was probably situated in the southwestern part of the town.

Cemeteries were located in the western, southern, and northern parts of the town, along roads leading to emona, Neviodunum, and Poetovio. Marble vaults for some of the local eminent politicians can also be found some fifteen kilometers west of Celeia, where their estates were situated. The town wall was built after the great flood of the river Savinja at the end of the third century. The town was the seat of a diocese in the Early Christian period (fifth and early sixth centuries a.d.). A church decorated with richly colored mosaics, donatorial inscriptions, and a baptisterium were recorded, dating from this period. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the town was abandoned and its former inhabitants sought refuge in isolated upland settlements.

The first reports of the collection and protection of Roman monuments in Celje date from the end of the fifteenth century. Some of the monuments were incorporated into buildings and churches during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The foundation of the Municipal Museum (Mestni muzej) in 1882 helped to protect extant monuments and led to the first organized archaeological excavations of the site in 1889.

Irena Lazar

References

Šašel, J. 1970. “Celeia.” RE Suppl. 12, 139–148 (Opera Selecta [1992]: 583–587).

Celts

Ancient Sources

The name Keltoi (Celts), probably a corruption of another Greek word, Galatoi, was first used by Greek writers in possibly the early sixth century b.c. Avienus, in his Ora maritima written in the fourth century a.d., claimed to be using sources dating from the sixth century b.c., including a sailing manual known as the Massiliot periplus. Avienus referred to Great Britain as Albion and Ireland as Iernè, and he also mentioned Ligurians in southern France being pushed southward into Iberia by Celts.

Around 500 b.c., Hecataeus of Miletus, writing on the Phocaean Greek settlement at Massalia (Marseilles), placed it in the land of the Ligurians while identifying nearby Narbo (Narbonne) as Celtic. In 480 b.c., Herodotus, with a rather jumbled geographical sense, recorded that Keltoi were to be found at the headwaters of the Danube, near the city of Pyrene on the Turkish coast, and west of the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar). By this period, there is archaeological evidence of goods traded by Greeks to peoples in france and by Etruscans (as exemplified by a wealthy woman’s grave of the late sixth century found at Vix on the river Saône in central France), so first-hand information from Greek travelers would have been available. Although it seems highly doubtful that any one term was applied universally to the indigenous peoples of Europe north of the Alps, it seems only sensible to use two names almost interchangeably, following Julius Caesar, who wrote in the mid-first century b.c. of the inhabitants of what is now central France that the Romans called them Gauls, but they called themselves Celts.

In the mid-sixth century b.c., Greek exchange links with “barbarian” centers north of