People
Rerviges
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Rerviges is almost certainly a copyist's slip for Nerviges, a Celtic form of the Nervii, a brave and warlike people who lived around the Sambre and the upper Scheldt and in the Ardennes forest. Julius Caesar wrote about them at length, and the historian Tacitus notes that they proudly claimed Germanic descent. Their capital was Bagacum, today Bavay in northern France. Yet the map sets their name beside Durocortorum, modern Reims, well away from their homeland. Scholars have read this misplacement as a sign that the names of peoples belong to an older layer of the map than its roads.