ABSTRACT
In the extant literature the druids make their few appearances, which become increasingly rare as time passes, from about 52 B.C., when Cresar wrote the Commentaries, to about the year A.D. 385, when Ausonius wrote his collection of odes to the professors of Bordeaux. But in the first half of the 3rd century after Christ, Diogenes Laertius tells us, in a chance remark in the preface to his Lives of the Philosophers, that the druids were mentioned in two lost works, a treatise on Magic, then ascribed to Aristotle but now known to be apocryphal, and a big book by a Greek, Sotion of Alexandria, that must have been written somewhere about 200 B.C. This passage from Diogenes, therefore, although out of the proper chronological order of our authors, must be the starting-point. I give a translation of
V itte, intro., 5 Those who think that philosophy is an invention of the bar-
1 Cf. the aspersions of Asinius Pollio upon the trustworthiness of C:esar's writings: Suetonius, Div. lui., 56, 4. But see generally on the credibility of Cmsar's narrative St. G. Stock, De Bello Gallico, I-VII, Oxford, 1898, p. II, and also Rice Holmes, Casar's Conquest of Gaul, Oxford, 19II, pp. 2II-2,¢ and 527.
