The hill was worth taking long before anyone wrote its name down. In the last centuries BC the Celtic Boii built an oppidum here — a fortified hill town — and struck silver coins on the summit, the biatec issues, named after the word stamped on them; one of those coins was later put on Slovakia's five-crown piece, so a Celtic design was still in Slovak pockets until the country adopted the euro. Bricks stamped by Roman legions have come out of the same ground, because the empire's frontier ran along this river and the army worked on both banks. Nothing of that first town is standing, but it explains the whole site: a defensible rock beside a river crossing, at the gap where the Carpathians end and the plain begins.Tento kopec sa oplatilo obsadiť dávno predtým, než niekto zapísal jeho meno. V posledných storočiach pred naším letopočtom si tu keltskí Bójovia postavili oppidum — opevnené mesto na kopci — a priamo na skale razili strieborné mince, razby typu biatec, pomenované podľa nápisu na nich. Jedna z nich sa neskôr dostala na slovenskú päťkorunáčku, takže keltská minca putovala po vreckách Slovákov až do zavedenia eura. Z tej istej pôdy pochádzajú aj tehly so značkami rímskych légií — hranica ríše viedla po Dunaji a vojsko pracovalo na oboch brehoch. Z toho prvého mesta nestojí nič, no vysvetľuje, prečo je hrad práve tu: brániteľná skala pri brode, v mieste, kde sa Karpaty končia a začína rovina.
