Aigosages

The Aigosages are attested in Hellenistic historiography (notably Polybius) as a Gallic/Galatian tribal contingent recruited in Thrace and brought across the Hellespont in 218 BC by Attalus I of Pergamon to serve in his war against the Seleucid rebel Achaeus. The brief ancient record treats them as one of several Celtic groups encountered and employed by Hellenistic rulers rather than as a settled polis; their precise earlier origins are uncertain in the sources, and modern summaries note that they may have been among Celts present in Thrace or refugees from the kingdom of Tylis, but this remains speculative in the surviving evidence.

Surviving sources do not provide a physical or ethnographic description of individual Aigosages (no detailed accounts of dress, arms, or bodily features are preserved). The record describes them functionally and socially: they moved as a single body accompanied by a slow baggage train that included families and possessions, indicating a mobile mercenary community rather than a purely military detachment.

As a human tribal mercenary group, the Aigosages' capacities were military and social rather than supernatural. The sources record that they could be transported en masse across the Hellespont and settled; they conducted raids in the Troad and along the Hellespont and were capable of besieging cities (they besieged Ilium, though the siege failed). They also displayed disciplinary instability in the field — according to the narrative, a lunar eclipse at the river Megistus (dated to 1 September 218 BC in modern reconstructions) triggered a mutiny — and their activities ended when Prusias I of Bithynia sent a force (numbered by Polybius at 4,000) that annihilated the group around 217–216 BC (the precise date is disputed).