If, as is usually supposed, the word is originally German and primarily signified the servant standing in battle "against the back" (-and-= against, -bak- = back) of his master, this is not wholly irreconcileable with the singularly early occurrence of this word among the Celts.
According to all analogy the right to keep -ambacti-, that is, -- doouloi misthotoi--, cannot have belonged to the Celtic nobility from the outset, but must only have developed itself gradually in antagonism to the older monarchy and to the equality of the free commons.

If thus the system of -ambacti- among the Celts was not an ancient and national, but a comparatively recent institution, it is--looking to the relation which had subsisted for centuries between the Celts and Germans, and which is to be explained farther on--not merely possible but even probable that the Celts, in Italy as in Gaul, employed Germans chiefly as those hired servants-at- arms.

The "Swiss guard" would therefore in that case be some thousands of years older than people suppose.

Should the term by which the Romans, perhaps after the example of the Celts, designate the Germans as a nation-the name -Germani---be really of Celtic origin, this obviously accords very well with that hypothesis .-- No doubt these assumptions must necessarily give way, should the word -ambactus- be explained in a satisfactory way from a Celtic root; as in fact Zeuss (Gramm.p.

796), though doubtfully, traces it to -ambi- = around and -aig- = -agere-, viz.