Information About the Region of Galatia and its Inhabitants

Galatia, to whose churches the holy Apostle Paul wrote this Epistle, is a region in Asia Minor, surrounded by Paphlagonia, Pontus, Cappadocia, Phrygia, and Bithynia. It was inhabited by Greeks; but in the third century before the birth of Christ, Gauls settled there and mingled with them, and afterward Jews also came in considerable numbers.

The Gauls, as the accounts tell, came from the banks of the Rhine under the leadership of Brennus. There were three tribes: the Trocmi, Tolistoboii, and Tectosages—all Celts. At first they raided various regions of Macedonia and Greece, then in Thrace they settled themselves somewhat, founding something like a principality under the name Tylis. Meanwhile they did not cease to satisfy their warlike inclinations—and this prompted Nicomedes I (280–255 BC), king of Bithynia, to invite them to aid him against his brother Kivel. For this purpose they crossed into Asia Minor in 280 BC under the leadership of Leonor and Lotar; but there they remained, receiving from Nicomedes, in compensation for their service, lands in Bithynia. They did not cease to expand these lands at the expense of neighboring regions, until Attalus, king of Pergamum, opposed them, gaining a victory that made such an impression on them that they judged it better to change their place of settlement and moved to the river Halys, which flows through the middle of Galatia from southwest to northeast. This happened in 240 BC. There they settled finally and never changed their dwelling place again. Shortly after, in 189 BC, the consul Manlius subdued them to the Romans, yet leaving them their own government under their rulers, who later received the title of kings. From this time forward they turned to peaceful pursuits and arts and began to cultivate their fertile and flourishing land. The natural consequence was that through civil and domestic relations they mingled with the local Greeks, adopting their customs and language, although, as the blessed Jerome notes (at the beginning of the second book of his Commentary), even in his time some there spoke the language of the Treveri. From this all the inhabitants of that region came to be called Gallogreeks, and the region itself was called Gallogrecia. But later these names were replaced with others, and they came to be called Galatians, and their country Galatia—perhaps from their tribal name Celts, from which through kalty and kalaty the name Galatians and Galatia could have been formed. Pausanias (the ancient Greek writer, author of the Description of Greece) (as mentioned by the venerable Philaret of Chernigov in his introduction to the Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians) writes: “Only recently have they come to be called Galatians; from ancient times both they and others called them Celts.” The blessed Jerome, at the beginning of the second book of his Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, cites the opinion of Lactantius, that just as Gauls were called Galatai, that is, milky, on account of the whiteness of their bodies, from the Greek γάλα, milk—so also the region where Gauls mingled with Greeks, on account of this, received the name Galatia.

The wealthy region of Galatia began to attract Jews—perhaps shortly after the time of Alexander the Great, when they were sometimes forced to settle in various regions or were drawn to it by their own commercial desires and enterprises. Their numbers especially multiplied in this region after Augustus showed his patronage of the Jews settling there and ordered a decree to this effect to be posted in the temple at Ancyra, as Josephus Flavius wrote.