T W Rolleston

Myths & Legends of the Celtic Race T W Rolleston

In the chronicles of the classical nations for about five hundred years previous to the Christian era there are frequent references to a people associated with these nations, sometimes in peace, sometimes in war, and evidently occupying a position of great strength and influence in the Terra Incognita of Mid-Europe. This people is called by the Greeks the Hyperboreans or Celts, the latter term being first found in the geographer Hecatæsus, about 500 B. C. Herodotus, about half a century later, speaks of the Celts as dwelling "beyond the pillars of Hercules"-i.e., in Spain-and also of the Danube as rising in their country. Aristotle knew that they dwelt "beyond Spain," that they had captured Rome, and that they set great store by warlike power. References other than geographical are occasionally met with even in early writers. Hellanicus of Lesbos, an historian of the fifth century B. C., describes the Celts as practising justice and righteousness. Ephorus, about 350 B. C., has three lines of verse about the Celts in which they are described as using "the same customs as the Greeks"-whatever that may mean-and being on the friendliest terms with that people, who established guest friendships among them. Plato, however, in the "Laws," classes the Celts among the races who are drunken and combative, and much barbarity is attributed to them on the occasion of their irruption into Greece and the [pg 18] sacking of Delphi in the year 273 B. C. Their attack on Rome and the sacking of that city by them about a century earlier is one of the landmarks of ancient history.