transferred sense, to describe a gathering of brilliant or distinguished persons or objects.
GALBA, SERVIUS SULPICIUS, Roman general and orator.
He served under Lucius Aemilius Paulus in the third Macedonian
War. As praetor in 151 B.C. in farther Spain he made himself
infamous by the treacherous murder of a number of Lusitanians,
with their wives and children, after inducing them to surrender
by the promise of grants of land. For this in 149 he was brought
to trial, but secured an acquittal by bribery and by holding up his
little children before the people to gain their sympathy. He was
consul in 144, and must have been alive in 138. He was an
eloquent speaker, noted for his violent gesticulations, and, in
Cicero’s opinion, was the first of the Roman orators. His
speeches, however, were almost forgotten in Cicero’s time.
Livy xlv. 35; Appian, Hisp. 58-60; Cicero, De orat. i. 53, iii. 7; Brutus 21.
GALBA, SERVIUS SULPICIUS, Roman emperor (June A.D.
68 to January 69), born near Terracina, on the 24th of December
5 B.C. He came of a noble family and was a man of great wealth,
but unconnected either by birth or by adoption with the first six
Caesars. In his early years he was regarded as a youth of
remarkable abilities, and it is said that both Augustus and
Tiberius prophesied his future eminence (Tacitus, Annals, vi. 20;
Suetonius, Galba, 4). Praetor in 20, and consul in 33, he acquired
a well-merited reputation in the provinces of Gaul, Germany,
Africa and Spain by his military capability, strictness and
impartiality. On the death of Caligula, he refused the invitation
of his friends to make a bid for empire, and loyally served
Claudius. For the first half of Nero’s reign he lived in retirement,
till, in 61, the emperor bestowed on him the province of
Hispania Tarraconensis. In the spring of 68 Galba was informed
of Nero’s intention to put him to death, and of the insurrection of
Julius Vindex in Gaul. He was at first inclined to follow the
example of Vindex, but the defeat and suicide of the latter
renewed his hesitation. The news that Nymphidius Sabinus,
the praefect of the praetorians, had declared in his favour revived
Galba’s spirits. Hitherto, he had only dared to call himself the
legate of the senate and Roman people; after the murder of
Nero, he assumed the title of Caesar, and marched straight for
Rome. At first he was welcomed by the senate and the party of
order, but he was never popular with the soldiers or the people.
He incurred the hatred of the praetorians by scornfully refusing
to pay them the reward promised in his name, and disgusted the
mob by his meanness and dislike of pomp and display. His
advanced age had destroyed his energy, and he was entirely in
the hands of favourites. An outbreak amongst the legions of
Germany, who demanded that the senate should choose another
emperor, first made him aware of his own unpopularity and the
general discontent. In order to check the rising storm, he
adopted as his coadjutor and successor L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi
Licinianus, a man in every way worthy of the honour. His
choice was wise and patriotic; but the populace regarded it as a
sign of fear, and the praetorians were indignant, because the
usual donative was not forthcoming. M. Salvius Otho, formerly
governor of Lusitania, and one of Galba’s earliest supporters,
disappointed at not being chosen instead of Piso, entered into
communication with the discontented praetorians, and was
adopted by them as their emperor. Galba, who at once set out to
meet the rebels—he was so feeble that he had to be carried in a
litter—was met by a troop of cavalry and butchered near the
Lacus Curtius. During the later period of his provincial administration
he was indolent and apathetic, but this was due
either to a desire not to attract the notice of Nero or to the
growing infirmities of age. Tacitus rightly says that all would
have pronounced him worthy of empire if he had never been
emperor (“omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset”).
See his life by Plutarch and Suetonius; Tacitus, Histories, i. 7-49; Dio Cassius lxiii. 23-lxiv. 6; B. W. Henderson, Civil War and Rebellion in the Roman Empire, A.D. 69-70 (1908); W. A. Spooner, On the Characters of Galba, Otho and Vitellius in Introd. to his edition (1891) of the Histories of Tacitus.
GALBANUM (Heb. Helbenāh; Gr. χαλβάνη), a gum-resin, the
product of Ferula galbaniflua, indigenous to Persia, and perhaps
also of other umbelliferous plants. It occurs usually in hard or
soft, irregular, more or less translucent and shining lumps, or
occasionally in separate tears, of a light-brown, yellowish or
greenish-yellow colour, and has a disagreeable, bitter taste, a
peculiar, somewhat musky odour, and a specific gravity of 1·212.
It contains about 8% of terpene; about 65% of a resin which
contains sulphur; about 20% of gum; and a very small
quantity of the colourless crystalline substance umbelliferone,
C9H6O3. Galbanum is one of the oldest of drugs. In Exodus
xxx. 34 it is mentioned as a sweet spice, to be used in the making
of a perfume for the tabernacle. Hippocrates employed it in
medicine, and Pliny (Nat. Hist. xxiv. 13) ascribes to it extraordinary
curative powers, concluding his account of it with the
assertion that “the very touch of it mixed with oil of spondylium
is sufficient to kill a serpent.” The drug is occasionally given
in modern medicine, in doses of from five to fifteen grains. It
has the actions common to substances containing a resin and a
volatile oil. Its use in medicine is, however, obsolescent.
GALCHAS, the name given to the highland tribes of Ferghana,
Kohistan and Wakhan. These Aryans of the Pamir and Hindu
Kush, kinsmen of the Tajiks, are identified with the Calcienses
populi of the lay Jesuit Benedict Goes, who crossed the Pamir
in 1603 and described them as “of light hair and beard like the
Belgians.” The word “Galcha,” which has been explained as
meaning “the hungry raven who has withdrawn to the
mountains,” in allusion to the retreat of this branch of the Tajik
family to the mountains to escape the Tatar hordes, is probably
simply the Persian galcha, “clown” or “rustic,” in reference to
their uncouth manners. The Galchas conform physically to
what has been called the “Alpine or Celtic European race,” so
much so that French anthropologists have termed them “those
belated Savoyards of Kohistan.” D’Ujfalvy describes them as
tall, brown or bronzed and even white, with ruddy cheeks, black,
chestnut, sometimes red hair, brown, blue or grey eyes, never
oblique, well-shaped, slightly curved nose, thin lips, oval face and
round head. Thus it seems reasonable to hold that the Galchas
represent the most eastern extension of the Alpine race through
Armenia and the Bakhtiari uplands into central Asia. The
Galchas for the most part profess Sunnite Mahommedanism.
See Robert Shaw, “On the Galtchah Languages,” in Journ. As. Soc. Bengal, xlv. (1876), and xlvi. (1877); Major J. Biddulph, Tribes of the Hindoo-Koosh (Calcutta, 1880); Hon. Mountstuart Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (1815); Bull. de la société d’anthropologie de Paris (1887); Charles Eugene D’Ujfalvy de Mezoe-Koevesd, Les Aryens (1896), and in Revue d’anthropologie (1879), and Bull. de la soc. de géogr. (June 1878); W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe (New York, 1899).
GALE, THEOPHILUS (1628–1678), English nonconformist
divine, was born in 1628 at Kingsteignton, in Devonshire, where
his father was vicar. In 1647 he was entered at Magdalen College,
Oxford, where he took his B.A. degree in 1649, and M.A. in 1652.
In 1650 he was made fellow and tutor of his college. He remained
some years at Oxford, discharging actively the duties of tutor,
and was in 1657 appointed as preacher in Winchester cathedral.
In 1662 he refused to submit to the Act of Uniformity, and was
ejected. He became tutor to the sons of Lord Wharton, whom he
accompanied to the Protestant college of Caen, in Normandy,
returning to England in 1665. The latter portion of his life he
passed in London as assistant to John Rowe, an Independent
minister who had charge of an important church in Holborn;
Gale succeeded Rowe in 1677, and died in the following year.
His principal work, The Court of the Gentiles, which appeared in
parts in 1669, 1671 and 1676, is a strange storehouse of miscellaneous
philosophical learning. It resembles the Intellectual
System of Ralph Cudworth, though much inferior to that work
both in general construction and in fundamental idea. Gale’s
endeavour (based on a hint of Grotius in De veritate, i. 16) is to
prove that the whole philosophy of the Gentiles is a distorted or
mangled reproduction of Biblical truths. Just as Cudworth
referred the Democritean doctrine of atoms to Moses as the
original author, so Gale tries to show that the various systems of
Greek thought may be traced back to Biblical sources. Like so
many of the learned works of the 17th century, the Court of the
