Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar

by T. Rice Holmes

When Caesar came to Gaul, revolutionary forces were at work to which there are analogies in the earlier history of Greece and Rome. Many of the states had expelled their kings, whose authority had passed in some cases into the hands of annually elected magistrates, while in others perhaps the council of elders kept the government to itself. But these oligarchies were never long secure. The magistrates were fettered by rules, jealously framed, which weakened their executive power. Like the Tarquins, the banished kings or their descendants looked out for opportunities, which Caesar’s policy offered to them, of regaining their position; while eloquent nobles who had contrived to amass wealth summoned their retainers, hired mercenaries, surrounded themselves with desperadoes or with the discontented poor, whose grievances they promised to redress, and occasionally succeeded, like Pisistratus of Athens, in making themselves tyrants. Celtillus, the father of the great Vercingetorix, had acquired a kind of supremacy over the whole of Celtican Gaul; but he was dogged by the jealousy of his brother nobles, who put him to death on the charge of plotting to revive the kingship. Monarchy and oligarchy had each their partisans: everywhere there were adventurers who hoped to make their way to fortune by Roman aid, while others, eager to oust their rivals, were ready to welcome German invaders; and thus every state, every clan, every hamlet, nay, every household was riven by faction.[1126] But in Britain there is no sign that either oligarchy or tyranny had yet anywhere supplanted monarchy. Still, there were doubtless many points of resemblance. We may suppose that in Britain, as in Gaul, the tribal king was assisted by a council of elders; that the British, like the Gallic nobles, had their devoted retainers and perhaps also dependents who had fallen into their debt;[1127] that only those who became their dependents could expect protection, and that only those lords who were strong enough to protect could count upon obedience. In Britain too we may be sure that the masses were in the state of semi-serfdom which Caesar regarded as the condition of the Gallic populace; and that political power was monopolized by the nobles and the Druids.

Religion.

But, besides improved communication, developed commerce, and constant intercourse with their Continental kinsmen, there were other forces making slowly and feebly for unity,—common religious ideas and, to some extent, common ecclesiastical organization. On the other hand we may suppose that the religious union which existed together with much diversity was an effect as well as a cause of political association: when clans found it expedient to combine, the similar deities of each, which the others had before regarded with hatred and jealousy, would tend to become fused, while those which were peculiar would be worshipped still.[1128] Old superstitions of course continued to flourish side by side with those which the Celtic invaders had brought with them. The spirits of springs, of lakes, of rivers, of mountains, and of woods—of every weird and awesome dell, or cavern, or rock—were worshipped in the Iron Age as they had been for centuries before, and as they continued to be after what was called Christianity had become the official creed.[1129] The Dea Arduinna who hovered over the forest of the Ardennes and Abnoba, the goddess of the Black Forest, had their counterparts in Britain. These deities, however, may have been comparatively recent; for the conception of a god whose realm was a forest was of course later than that of the spirit of a single tree.[1130] Even the terror that impelled the pristine savage to propitiate demons was not yet dead: near Newcastle-on-Tyne was erected by some Roman or Romanized Briton an inscription Lamiis tribus—‘to the Witches three’—who, it has been truly said, ‘were doubtless as British as the witches in Macbeth’.[1131] But the cult of wood and water and the dread of devils are common to all primitive peoples and to the ignorant among many who are called civilized;[1132] and such survivals in Celtic Britain may well have been common to the pre-Celtic population and to the Celts who conquered them. Moreover, it is likely enough that the greater gods whom the Celts worshipped and who, variously imagined and with various names, were the common heritage of the Aryan-speaking peoples, were in part descended from deities who were not Aryan, and were adored in Britain in a somewhat different spirit before the first Celt landed on the Kentish shore.[1133]

What do we know about those gods? The Celts were the first inhabitants of Britain about whose religious views definite information has been handed down to us, as distinct from what we may infer from sepulchral discoveries and from ethnography; but it is hardly an exaggeration to say that of the spirit of their religion we know little more than of that of the people who built the chambered tombs. Some five-and-twenty writers, from Timaeus, who wrote three centuries before the birth of Christ, to Ammianus Marcellinus, who was contemporary with Julian and Valens, have contributed to our knowledge; but most of them have left only a few sentences derived from hearsay or from nameless authorities of whose credibility we know nothing. They wrote of Celts who lived in widely distant countries, among various populations, and at different epochs; and very few of them referred to the Celts of Britain.[1134] Supposing that official Christianity were to become extinct, what could the historian of the fifth millennium learn of the manifold doctrines preached by English clergymen if he were obliged to extract his materials from passages referring to mediaeval Catholicism, Calvinism, Methodism, or the orthodox faith which thinly disguises the Shamanism of Russia, and scattered in the works of writers who began with à Kempis and ended with Spurgeon? Coins, Gallic and British, in so far as they are not merely imitative, appear to be fraught with religious symbolism; but the ingenuity which has spent itself in the effort to explain the symbols has yielded little certain result.[1135] Geographical names testify to the cult of various gods without telling us anything of their attributes; and sometimes we may fancy that we can detect the presence of divinity when we have only to do with the name of a Roman gens.[1136] Inscriptions and altars supply names of deities which are names and nothing more, or bewilder us by coupling as surnames with the name of a Roman god a multiplicity of Celtic gods. Anonymous statues are attributed to divers deities by divers archaeologists, though some of them may not be deities at all. Inscriptions, altars, and statues alike belong to the period of the Roman Empire, when the introduction of Roman gods and goddesses had thrown the Celtic pantheon into wellnigh inextricable confusion; and the monuments of Britain, for the most part, were apparently the outcome of the devotion either of Romans or of Gallic, Batavian, Dacian, and other officers of auxiliaries. Nor can we tell how far British religious ideas had become estranged from those of Gaul by contact with aboriginal cults, or how far the religion of the British Goidels (if indeed they existed) differed from that of the Brythons. If we turn to the Mabinogion, to the Triads, or to Irish mythology, we are checked by the reflection, which our foremost Celticist was forced to make even while he was fascinated by the quest, that ‘the gulf of ages’ separates ‘the literature of the Celtic nations of the present day from the narrative of the writers of antiquity and the testimony of the stones’.[1137]

Cannot then Caesar help us? His evidence is of course valuable; but he did not write for the modern student of religion. Disregarding minor and local deities, perhaps ignorant of their existence, he recorded the names and summarized the attributes of the five principal Gallic gods; but,—the names are Roman. Mercury—the inventor of all arts, the pioneer of communication, the patron of commerce—was the most reverenced of all:[1138] then follow the names of Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva.[1139]

Now we do not know from whom Caesar derived his information; but assume that it came from the best authority, his friend and political agent, the Aeduan Druid, Diviciacus, who was also an honoured guest of Cicero.[1140] Then Caesar was in the position not of Lafcadio Hearn, who made his home in Japan, gave his life to the study of all things Japanese, and at last confessed that the more he tried to learn the more he realized his ignorance; not of Sir Alfred Lyall, who, prepared by discriminative reading, devoted all the time that he could command to the observation of Oriental creeds; but of some Anglo-Indian administrator who, in his scanty leisure, should jot down the heads of a conversation with a Brahmin, and offer them as an outline of Hindu religion. Only the Anglo-Indian could speak Hindustani; and Caesar was obliged to employ an interpreter. One of the most learned and sane of modern Celtic scholars has related that when the musician, Félicien David, was invited at Cairo by the viceroy to instruct his wives, etiquette compelled him to give the lessons to a eunuch, who passed them on as best he could.[1141] Caesar, he remarks, was in the position of the eunuch. And if we could certainly identify the five great Roman gods with their Gallic counterparts, how much more of Celtic religion should we know?

But let us learn what we can. Celtic religion, in so far as it was descended from the religion of the undivided Aryan stock, was fundamentally one with the religions of Italy and Greece; and we might expect that it would resemble most closely the religion of the Italians, to whose tongue Celtic was most nearly akin. But our imperfect knowledge of the classical religions hardly helps us more to understand the religion of the Celts than the remark of Caesar, that about their deities ‘they have much the same notions as the rest of mankind’.[1142] For the religion of Rome had been deeply tinged by contact with the Etruscans and the Greeks, just as the religion of the Celts had been affected by their fusion with the aboriginal peoples of Central Europe, Gaul, Spain, and Britain; and the Celts were in a less advanced state of civilization than the Romans. What is certain is that, like every other polytheistic religion, that of the Celts, except perhaps in so far as it was moulded by Druidical doctrine, had no definite theology, but was an ever-expanding, ever-shifting, formless chaos,—the same in its main developments in Britain, Gaul, and Spain, yet differing in every tribe and household, and in every age;[1143] that, on its practical side, it was a performance of traditional rites; that its aim was not the salvation of souls, but the safety of the state; and that it concerned the individual most as a member of a family, a community, or a tribe.[1144] Like all other polytheists too the Celts were ready to believe in gods who were not theirs: in the reign of Tiberius the boatmen of Paris set up an altar on which, side by side with their own Esus and Tarvos Trigaranus, were figured Jupiter and Vulcan.[1145] The theory, which has been defended with vast if somewhat uncritical erudition, that the king was regarded as an incarnation of the sky-god, may possibly be true both of the Celts and of other Indo-European peoples.[1146] Perhaps the Celts, like the Romans, gave more thought to the ritual by which their gods might be persuaded to grant them their hearts’ desire than to the persons of the gods themselves.[1147] Doubtless to the Celt, as to the Roman, however little his religion may have fostered nobility of life or contrition for sin, dread of the mysterious was a salutary discipline.[1148] But what we want to apprehend is this,—wherein the spirit of Celtic religion differed from that of the religion of ancient Latium, of Greece, of the Semitic tribes; and if the effort is not wholly vain, we may only hope to attain a distant and hazy view. He who desires to understand the subject will work at it for himself. All that I can hope to do is to put him on the road and to set up a sign-post here and there. The reader who has absorbed what is valuable in the teaching of Tylor, Boissier, Lyall, Frazer, Robertson Smith, Reinach, and Camille Jullian will be best able to discern what is suggested by the texts and monuments that preserve a few fragments of Celtic faith.

Why was the god whom Caesar equated with Mercury honoured above all others by the Continental Celts? Did the Britons share their devotion? And is Caesar’s statement confirmed? Some centuries earlier, when the Celts were a host of warriors, the war-god had been the most conspicuous figure in their Olympus; and his subsequent inferiority to Mercury is regarded, perhaps justly, as an indication of the progress which they had made meantime in the arts of peace.[1149] Possibly Lug, the Irish representative of the Gaulish Lugos, whose name appears in Lugudunum, or Lyons, in Luguvallum, or Carlisle, and in Lugotorix, a Kentish chieftain,[1150] and who in an Irish legend figures as a carpenter, a smith, a harpist, a poet, and a musician, may have been the British Mercury;[1151] but we cannot tell whether he ranked higher than Mars. Assuming that votive stones in some measure reflect the faith of the native Celts, Mars was deeply reverenced in Britain. He appears with various epithets, the names of Celtic deities, one of which, Camulus, meaning ‘the god of heaven’,[1152] was commemorated in Camulodunum, and perhaps bears witness to his former greatness. It is remarkable, in view of Caesar’s statement, that in British inscriptions the name of Mercury is far less common than that of Mars;[1153] but if the discrepancy is at all connected with the comparative backwardness of British civilization, it must also be remembered that the organization of Britain under Roman rule was military.[1154] One religious custom indeed, of which Caesar himself witnessed examples, proves that Mars, however inferior he may have been to Mercury, had still many fervent worshippers in Gaul. When the warriors of a Gallic tribe had made a successful raid, they used to sacrifice to Mars a portion of the cattle which they had captured; the rest of their booty they erected in piles on consecrated ground. It rarely happened that any one dared to keep back part of the spoil; and the wretch who defrauded the god was punished, like Achan, by a terrible death.[1155] Another British epithet of Mars, Toutates,[1156] appears with Esus and Taranis in a famous passage of Lucan,[1157] where they stand out as representative deities, in whose honour dreadful rites were performed. None of the three, save Esus,[1158] is mentioned in Gallic inscriptions, whereas Epona, the goddess of equitation, a minor deity, whose statues, representing a woman riding upon a mare, or seated between foals, have been found both in France and Britain,[1159] appears ten times; and accordingly a distinguished French archaeologist concludes that they were insignificant objects of local worship.[1160] But it is not credible that the devotee who composed his inscription to Toutates should have unwittingly ascribed to a mere local god the qualities of Mars. Again, if Taranis was not one of the greater gods, it is surprising to find in Britain an inscription in honour of Jupiter Tanarus,[1161]—Jove the Thunderer. Nor is it likely that Lucan should have learned the names of the trinity whom he made famous unless their worship had been national.[1162] But it does not follow that Tanarus was the Jupiter of the independent Celts. Tanarus, being the Thunderer, was assimilated to the Roman Jupiter; and perhaps the Jupiter Tanarus whose inscription was found at Chester may have been an outcome of the Roman Jupiter and of a Gallic divinity who is known as the god of the wheel.[1163] Statues have been discovered in France, representing a god with a wheel on his shoulder, in his hand, or at his feet; and this god was assimilated in imperial times to Jupiter. Altars on which wheels are represented have also been found in the north of England; and miniature wheels of gold, silver, bronze, and lead—alone, or forming parts of ornaments or helmets, or stamped on coins—have been met with in scores both in France and England. Probably they had a religious meaning; and it has been supposed that they are symbolical of sun-worship, and that the god with the wheel was the god of the sun.[1164] Traces of sun-worship are still discernible in the May and midsummer festivals which are kept up in our own island and in many European lands.[1165]

Of the other great deities Minerva appears in Irish legend under the name of Brigit[1166], possibly the same goddess as Brigantia, in whose honour several inscriptions were erected in Britain,[1167] although in Gaul, unless perhaps in the name of the town Brigantium, there is no trace of her worship;[1168] while Apollo was assimilated by Roman or Romano-British devotees sometimes to Maponus, whose name survives in the familiar Welsh Mabon[1169], sometimes to Grannos, in whose honour an inscription was set up near Edinburgh.[1170] There are also vestiges of the cult of a god who resembled Neptune. At Lydney, on the western bank of the Severn, in the country of the Silures, a temple was built in Roman times to Nodons, whose name reappears in Welsh legend as Lludd and again in our Ludgate Hill. The marine scenes which are depicted in mosaic on the floor seem to show that he was a god of the sea;[1171] while the structure of his temple may justify the conjecture that he was likewise a Jupiter, even as the Italian Jupiter was god of sea as well as of storm and sky.[1172] In Gaul he was unknown; and an eminent Celticist has assumed that he was peculiar to the Goidelic Celts.[1173] On the other hand, Toutates, Taranis, Epona, and Belisama were apparently unknown on Goidelic soil.[1174] But it profits little to dispute about names. It does not follow that the Goidels did not recognize somewhat similar deities akin to these; and Belisama was simply the goddess who in Roman Gaul was identified with Minerva.[1175]

Caesar, in a familiar passage,[1176] tells us that the Gauls regarded themselves as descendants of Dis Pater, who was conspicuous in the old Latin pantheon as the god of the dead, although in Caesar’s time he had been dethroned by the Pluto who was imported from Greece.[1177] Several Gallo-Roman images, the best known of which is on an altar discovered at Sarrebourg,[1178] represent a god with a hammer: a bronze statue of the same deity has been found in England;[1179] and eminent French archaeologists believe that this was no other than Dis Pater.[1180]