[1036] B. G., v, 12, § 4.—utuntur aut aere aut nummo aureo aut anulis ferreis ad certum pondus examinatis pro nummo. So runs the passage in the British Museum Add. MS. 10084; but the Paris MS. 5764 has taleis (bars) instead of anulis (rings). ‘The phrase aut aere,’ says Dr. Haverfield (Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd ser., xx, 1904-5, p. 186), ‘must be wrong, and the conjecture anulis in Add. MS. 10084 is plainly an attempt to explain aliis. As aliis is the reading of A and part of B [the two principal families of the MSS. of Caesar’s Commentaries, generally quoted as α and β], and taleis of the rest of B, and aut aliis can hardly be other than a misreading of aut taleis, this latter may be accepted.’ E. Hübner (Pauly’s Real-Encyclopädie, iii, 1897, p. 864) accepts aut aere.
[1037] Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd ser., xx, 1904-5, pp. 179-91; Class. Rev., xix, 1905, pp. 206-7. Iron bars were also used as currency by the Spartans, and are still so used by the natives of West Africa near Sierra Leone.
[1038] B. G., v, 12, § 5; Trans. Internat. Congress of Prehist. Archaeol., 1868 (1869), pp. 185-90.
[1039] Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd ser., xx, 1904-5, p. 194.
[1040] See p. 260, infra.
[1041] See p. 499, infra.
[1042] See p. 267, infra. Caesar’s statement, that the Britons imported copper or bronze (aere utuntur importato [B. G., v, 12, § 4]), has always been a puzzle. I doubt whether any scholar would now infer from it that the cakes of copper which have been found in bronze-founders’ hoards were of foreign origin; but it has been suggested (Guide to the Ant. of the Early Iron Age [Brit. Museum], p. 86) that Caesar may have referred to articles of foreign manufacture such as the bronze flagon mentioned on p. 246, supra. See also J. Evans, Anc. Bronze Implements, p. 419.
M. S. Reinach (Rev. celt., xxi, 1900, p. 173) infers from Caesar’s observation that ‘the industrial activity to which the relics of the Bronze Age testify had long ceased’, and that there was an arrest, or rather a recoil of civilization. But, as we shall see hereafter (p. 267), the culture of the Bronze Age persisted in certain parts of Britain until the Roman conquest. Were the bronze implements that were used in those parts imported? If so, how could they have been paid for without industrial activity; and what conceivable reason can be suggested for the assumed paralysis? The industrial activity of the Early Iron Age in Britain is unquestionable; and I doubt whether any theory could be framed to account for a cessation, contemporaneous with the manufacture of iron, of the trade of the bronze-founder.
[1043] See p. 148, supra.
[1044] See J. Evans, Coins of the Anc. Britons, Suppl., p. 492; F. J. Haverfield, The Romanization of Roman Britain, 1906, pp. 20-1; and Vict. Hist. of ... Somerset, i, 198.