ABSTRACT
Despite our growing knowledge of the ancient world, through excavation and the reassessment of the evidence from surviving texts, inscriptions, small objects of daily use and traces of structures within the landscape, there are still many popular misapprehensions about the past. Within the Celtic world we are hampered in that the surviving descriptions are all drawn in the main from the pens of Graeco-Roman writers and not from the people of the tribes and countries who were in various ways drawn into contact and conflict with the Mediterranean world. Some of the earliest descriptions, as for example Tacitus in his Germania, are not unbiased, as he contrasts the valour and rectitude of the tribes with what he saw as the declining moral strength and virtues of contemporary society in Rome. The attitude towards the northern tribes of Celts, as well as the Germans, as the Noble Savage and as a worthy and honourable opponent in war, is found not only in the literature but can also be seen reflected in the sculptures dedicated by King Attalus I in the late third century Bc. The original bronzes showed dying Gauls, and the dramatic composition depicting, amongst others, a warrior with his dead wife, killing himself rather than submit to the conqueror, is known from numerous Roman copies (Figure 7.1). This same romantic image of the ‘natural man’ is also found in the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century writers, such as Jean Jacques Rousseau in the essays, as for example ‘Discours sur les sciences et les arts’ (1751); ‘Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité’ (1755), and his novel Emile (1762); and in sculptures like the bronze statue of Ambiorix, joint king of the Eburones, made by Jules Bertin and erected in 1866 in the Grote Markt at Tongres, Belgium; or, more familiar to British eyes, the chariot group of Boudica and her daughters by Thomas Thornycroft designed between 1856 and 1871 but which was not cast and raised on to its site at Westminster Bridge until 1902. 1 The details of the piece, especially the presence of scythes on the wheels, 2 do nothing to dispel the popular misconceptions surrounding the Celts; rather, they reinforce the legend from one generation to the next.
