Druidic Rituals and Roman Administrators (original) (raw)
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Quid de Druidibus poetae et scriptores antiqui ac viri docti archeologiae periti tradiderint
Quid de Druidibus poetae et scriptores antiqui ac viri docti archeologiae periti tradiderint, 2007
The text is a Latin summary of the author's MA thesis - entitled "The Ancient Druids in View of Graeco-Roman Literature and Archaeological Findings" - defended in July 2007 at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. The primary object of this thesis has been to reconstruct a historically veritable image of the druids. Ancient Greek and Roman literary testimonies have been subjected to a careful analysis, which additionally entailed their juxtaposition against the copious archaeological finds available to us today. This approach has led to the resolution of some of the controversies hitherto obfuscating the picture of the Celtic wise men. To start with, the bias on the part of the sources forming the so-called Posidonian tradition has been ascertained. This literary school of thought consists of authors who approve of the expansion policy implemented by the Roman Empire; consequently, their writings often border on demagogic propaganda, as they zealously depict the druids as savage barbarians eagerly practicing human sacrifice. A careful analysis of archaeological finds has served to establish that the druids did indeed sacrifice human beings – however - only in utmost emergencies, which, incidentally, was a common practice in every other contemporaneous culture, including that of the Greeks and the Romans. Secondly, the specific character of the druidic organisation has been demonstrated. Being a typical Indo-European form of priesthood, it nonetheless constituted a truly unique phenomenon, to which there was no equivalent elsewhere in the ancient world. Moreover, Nora Chadwick’s theory denying the priestly functions of the druids has been challenged. Thirdly, the statements left by the writers of the Alexandrian tradition have been asserted against the assumptions made by Stuart Piggott, who claims that Celtic tribes were never able to develop a philosophical system comparable with that of the Pythagoreans or the Brahmins. Finally, a dynamic picture of the druids has been conveyed by means of setting them against the political and cultural background of their times. They have been presented to the reader as priests, educators, judges, philosophers, historians, prophets, magicians, astrologers and astronomers, as well as medicine men and poets. Argumentum Dissertationis Academicae sub eodem titulo in Universitate Jagiellonica anno MMVII defensa.
Manipulating the Past. Re-thinking Graeco-Roman accounts on ‘Celtic’ religion
IN: Fraude, Mentira y Engaños en el Mundo Antiguo, ed. by Franciso Marco Simón, Francisco Pina Polo and José Remesal Rodríguez. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona (Colleccio Instrumenta, vol. 45), pp. 35-54, 2014
Did druids really exist? Did Celts perform human sacrifice? The aim of this paper is to scrutinise our sources on Celtic religion. We can see that our sources are not only unreliable, but they were also consciously used to manipulate the readers’ image of Celts. Rome’s long-standing fear of the Galli had made way for a fear of the druids by the 1st century A.D. The Romans were increasingly interested in the Celts/Galli in the 1st century B.C., catalysed by Caesar campaigning in Gaul and Britain. But despite first-hand knowledge, authors used obsolete topoi. The reasons for this changed through time and the ‘Celts’ became increasingly instrumentalised. This leads us to another important question: can we use these Graeco-Roman sources for the study of Celtic religion? Are the information on deities, rituals, priesthoods, re-incarnation and Pythagoreanism reliable? These are some of the questions addressed in this paper.
The Image of Druids in Contemporary Paganism: Constructing the Myth
A. Anczyk, H. Grzymała-Moszczyńska (Eds.). Walking the Old Ways. Studies in Contemporary European Paganism, 2012
Sages, wise-men, and certainly wise-women, worshippers of Nature, prophets, magicians, occultists, diviners and priests -all of these names were used at least once in the reference to the group mentioned by Julius Caesar in his Gallic War (De Bell. Gal., VI, 13), and named druidae. The truth about these people may be never revealed, for even the ancient writings do not state clearly who they were (Hutton, 2009, pp. 22-23). We can suppose they were an important social class in the Celtic societies, somehow connected to rituals and teaching. When the sources are obscure, they are often supplemented or even substituted by tales of imagination. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is not to reveal the Ultimate Truth about the druids, but to show how the myth of a druid, which survived to present times, was constructed. The myth itself can have (and surely often has) its roots in historical facts, but the blooming tree we see today consists of ideas added years
Internal aliens: northern Gaul in the early empire
In 48 A.D. the Roman emperor Claudius delivered a speech to the senate where he proposed that aristocrats from all of Gaul would be allowed to enter the senatorial class. He tried to solve the “Gallic problem”, the problematic relation between Rome and the foreign Gauls, who had been their enemies for so long. This event was of great importance for northern Gaul, which had been part of the empire for less than a century, as they now got the opportunity to take part in the empire as Romans. Of course, this evoked a response from the Roman aristocracy and the following debate showed different views on the Gauls. This literature shows us that the Roman image of Gaul is far more complex than earlier perceived. With the completion of the Gallic provinces under Augustus, the problem was not solved. Examining this relation is difficult because, to the Romans, the label “Gaul” included all Gauls and the discussion mainly focused on the natives of the Three Gauls. These northern Gauls had, of all Celtic people, been opposed to Rome for the longest period, but were also attributed with the wars between Rome and Narbonese and Cisalpinian tribes. While Cisalpina and even Narbonensis assimilated into the Roman empire, the Comatan Gauls were preserved as the dangerous Gauls of the past. They could not be Roman because they were too different. This played a large role in the debate and shows that even after Augustus the “Gallic problem” existed in the minds of Rome.
Beyond "polis religion" and sacerdotes publici in Southern Gaul
in: Richardson and Santangelo (ed.), Priests and State in the Roman World. (PAwB 33) Stuttgart: Steiner 2011, 2011
Can we use the "polis religion" model for understanding religious activities in the Roman provinces? No! Models based on Classical Greece and religious institutions in Rome are not helpful for understanding developments in the Roman provinces, like here in the case of southern Gaul. There, we see the importance of individualisation in a highly connected world. Even in major cities in this highly "Romanized" province, the nature of the religious activities is non-Roman and not controlled by a pro-Roman "ordo". This paper looks at a number of cites, like Nemausus / Nîmes, Glanum, Aquae Sextiae / Aix and her territory. Despite the wealth of epigraphic evidence, we can recognise that "public priests" are marginal in shaping the religious activities in this region.
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2003
For half-a-century Henry Chadwick has been contributing to our knowledge of early Christian history, covering an immensely wide range of subjects from Priscillian of Avila to Boethius, and Early Christianity and the classical tradition to Augustine of Hippo, to say nothing of his translations of Origen, Augustine and the Sentences of Sextus. It would be tempting to present the book under review as summing up a lifetime's scholarship, were it not that Chadwick's apparently inexhaustible energy may already have impelled him to the composition of yet another major work. Nevertheless, one may reasonably regard the present volume as a crowning, if not necessarily a final, achievement. The first thing which must strike any reader is the immense range and depth of the author's scholarship. He covers a period of six hundred years with no diminution of information, or easy generalisations. As the history proceeds and the evidence becomes more plentiful, so does the narrative. Particularly impressive are the descriptions of the theological complications in the issues of the Trinitarian and Christological controversies. Free from the prejudices which marked some scholars of an earlier generation, for whom Arians, Nestorians and Monophysites were heretics, and bad, Chadwick brings out the complex nature of the formulae to which the ordinary episcopal voter, with no particular theological expertise, was asked to agree at the various councils. It is no wonder that so many looked wistfully back to the first Nicene creed as one that needed no further elaboration, especially when, as Chadwick observers, ' in Christian history … the most passionate disputes have been, and were in the fourth century, between those who stood very close to one another. The issues were too often logomachies ' (p. 226). It is also salutary to be reminded that an orthodox hero like Athanasius 'had a blighted reputation for being a man of violence ' (p. 258) and that 'there have been few heretics who have not claimed the authority of scripture ' (p. 290). The style of the narrator is clear, enlivened by occasional colloquialisms and modern parallels. In the Diocletianic persecution, 'the see of Carthage turned out to be an exceedingly hot seat … Some bishops '' moonlighted '' with secular jobs ' (p. 149). It is startling to have St Cyprian's ecclesiology expressed in the form : ' The local church is a microcosm of the universal Church, the very spouse of Christ. She does not sleep around ' (p. 154), and to be told that Gregory the Great's ' most time-consuming duty was to be executive president of a large investment corporation ' (p. 661). There are copious references to original sources within the body of the text and (relatively rare) footnotes, indicating modern critical editions or discussions of debatable points. The long bibliography of modern secondary writings (pp. 698-713) makes clear the quantity and quality of work produced in the last fifty years. There has never been a better time to learn about early church history. Given the length of Chadwick's book and the thoroughness of his treatment, it is difficult to point to any particularly dominating themes. One already has been indicated : his fairness-he seeks to give every individual a hearing, and not to denounce those who, in the course of history, have been found to have chosen the wrong side. He does not push his own religious convictions: at the beginning of the book Jesus Christ is 'a charismatic prophet from Galilee ' (p.
I will present two case studies of a Late Antique and an Early Medieval text which chose idiosyncratic ways of operating between the polarities of Christianity and paganism when describing the wisdom traditions of outgroups or ‘ethnically presented’ past groups. The cases are those of the Res gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus and the Cosmographia Aethici of ‘Pseudo-Jerome’. At the first glimpse, there is barely anything linking these two texts, beyond the fact that both are written in a Latin that is idiosyncratic to say the least. There are, however, some interesting commonalities between my two texts today – and they come particularly to the fore when attention is paid to the way both Ammianus and Pseudo-Jerome handle the theme of barbarian sages and the pagan wisdom tradition – the ‘alien wisdom’ of Arnaldo Momigliano. One important shared aspect is that both of these writers inhabit a doubled role in-between paganism and Christianity. In some ways, the Cosmographia is trying to conjure up the world that Ammianus operated in, but from a Merovingian point of view.
International Ancient Warfare Conference, UCD, Dublin, 28 June 2018, 2018
Polybius has traditionally been ignored as an ethnographic author in the tradition of Herodotus. This is mainly due to the lack of ethnographic digressions as they appear in the work of the Halicarnassian. However, a closer look at Polybius' scattered descriptions of the Celts throughout his own Histories shows a vivid interest not only in the character of the Gauls, but also in the macro models of his predecessors who explained the differences between different peoples in the oecumene with different paces of development, the climatic nature of the respective regions and other philosophically inspired theories. The paper will show that Polybius used these arguments to make the Celts appear more primitive and dangerous than they actually were as to convince his readers that the Romans, who had often fought against this 'Barbarian' foe, were the defenders of civilisation and should be accepted as rulers over the Greek world.