moving a Biturigan group to weaken a people that had long resisted Caesar. Louis Maurin treats much of this as conjecture. An alliance between the Santones and the Helvetii would have given Caesar an obvious grievance that he never invokes, and the comparison with the Helvetii, a people hundreds of thousands strong, fits poorly the transfer of a single group. Strabo, moreover, places Bordeaux on the left bank in Aquitanian rather than Santonian territory.

Despite these reservations, the settlement of a Biturigan branch in the Bordelais