Druidic Rituals and Roman Administrators (original) (raw)

When the Early Imperial Roman writers imagined the cultural processes taking place in the newly-conquered Gaul, they frequently had recourse to a rhetoric that can appear strikingly similar to some later, colonial narratives of civilizational improvement and the abolition of nefarious ritual life. I will focus on the possible local informants of those Romans who, according to our literary sources (e.g. Pliny, Suetonius), rooted out the Druidic rites from Gaul. How did a Roman administrator recognize the forbidden ‘Druidic’ parts of Gallic ritual life? Who acted as the subaltern middlemen for the Romans in this process, and did they have any influence on the direction of the Roman gaze? This paper seeks to explore whether we might be able to use colonial analogies, particularly from British India, to aid us in distinguishing the knowledge-generation practices of the Roman administrators in the Early Imperial religious ‘middle grounds’ of Gaul.