220s, the king, Attalus I, set up a large victorymonument in the sanctuary of Athena in Pergamum depictingGauls in defeat. It was from this group that the famous sculptureof the dying Gaul, known from what is usually thought to be alater Roman copy, originally came.

Aristotle, Plato, and Ephorus

Polybius, Livy, and Pausanias

Diodorus’ description of the long droopingmoustaches of the Celts, so long that they completely cover themouth so that drink is strained through them.

Ephorus (quoted by Strabo)offers the insight that the Celts are careful to avoid becoming fat orpot-bellied and a young man is punished if his stomach hangs overhis belt.

The Classical texts abound with anecdotes displaying the Celt as‘other’.

Plato, in his Laws written in the middle of the fourth century,is the first to offer observations on the Celts stressing theirwarlike nature and their drunkenness.

Strabo was probably using the lost ethnographic works ofPoseidonius as a source for this and much of his other informationon Celtic behaviour, and, since Poseidonius is thought to havetravelled in the West, probably in Gaul, in the late second centuryBC, he too may have made first-hand observations rather than justrepeating earlier sources.

Strabo, for example, is quiteexplicit:The whole race . . . is war-mad, high spirited and quick to battle, butotherwise straightforward and not of evil character. And so whenthey are stirred up they assemble in their bands for battle quiteopenly and without forethought ... They are ready to face dangereven if they have nothing on their side but their own strength andcourage. (Geog. 4.4.2)

The term Galli/Galatae, which may mean ‘stranger’ or‘enemy’, is more likely to be a general-purpose name by whichnorthern barbarians, among them the Celts, were referred to byothers. Whether all Galli/Galatae regarded themselves as Celtsis completely unknown.

Julius Caesar. Writing of Gaul(France) in the mid-first century Bc he states, quite deliberately ofthe inhabitants, presumably in an attempt at clarification, ‘we call[them] Gauls though in their own language they are called Celts’.

Greek Pausanius emphasizes thatKeltoi was a far more ancient name than Gall.

An even earlier source is the ethnographer Hecataeus of Miletus,who was about in the late sixth century Bc. From scraps of his lostwork quoted by others we learn that Narbon (near modernNarbonne in southern France) was a Celtic city and trading centreand that Massalia (Marseilles) was a Greek city founded in Ligurianterritory near Celtica. He also lists Nyrax as a Celtic city but itslocation is unknown, though some argue that it may have beenNoricum in Austria.

Herodotus also offers other tantalizing scraps of Celtic geography.

‘Tf the heavens and earth are divided into four parts, the Indians willoccupy the land of the east wind, the Ethiopians the regions fromwhich the south wind blows, the Celts the west, and the Scythiansthe land of the north wind.’ This was the world view of Greekhistorian Ephorus of Cymae, whose great work Universal History,in thirty books, was written in the first half of the fourth century Bc.The original text has long since disappeared but this particularscrap survives as a quotation in Strabo’s Geography (1.2.28),compiled nearly three centuries later.

Simon James claimed inhis 1999 book The Atlantic Celts Ancient People or ModernInvention,

Or should we accept, as J. R. R. Tolkien wrote in 1963, that‘anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not somuch a twilight of the gods as of the reason’, remembering, as thegreat Celtic scholar David Ellis Evans sternly pointed out in 1999,that Tolkien’s aside was meant specifically to make fun of certainextreme linguistic entomologies and not to be all embracing.

e know if this Mike has a website/newsletter? I've just started reading up on Celtic history, delving deep down into druidry, so I'd be interested to see what he's doing.2 commentsAwardshare

same with our with the with the dendrites we will always tell you the story tell the story to the juvenile who's coming through the novices who's coming through the ceremony will tell them so as they 00:47:47 get to a certain age or a certain time or a certain experience in the ceremony we will then pass that knowledge onto him and we'll take it to him so these hieroglyphs and 00:47:58 petroglyphs and the etchings on the rocks and the paintings on there on the cave walls that's our library that is our library

Seeking to address the reductive opposition both between written and oral texts and between script and print in the Early Modern period, Fernando Bouza, one of Spain's most influential cultural historians, makes an elegant case for the equality and complementary natures of the various modes of communication.