It was Poseidonius’ ethnography of the Celtsthat provided the information for Strabo, Diodorus Siculus,Athenaeus, and possibly also Caesar.

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.

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)

Elsewhere Strabo tells usthat Ephorus believed Celtica to be so large that it included most ofIberia as far as Gades (Cadiz).

‘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.