- Chapter Six -
a question about our own understanding of the written record, and also about
the author's understanding and treatment of the available evidence. Despite the
superficial appearance of the written records as a more reliable testimony to past
social organization than archaeology, their evidence needs very careful appraisal.
There are two main bodies of written evidence for the social organization of the
Celts, the works of the Greek and Roman authors who mention them, and various
writings, especially legal tracts, surviving from early medieval Ireland.
References to the Celts in the classical authors are fragmentary, and none of them
is concerned primarily with a discussion of Celtic society. One major source would
have been the ethnographic work of Poseidonios, but this survives only in scattered
references in later authors (Tierney 1960); he seems to be recording the position,
perhaps specific to particular parts of France, around 100 BC. Julius Caesar has a
particular value as an eye-witness to events in Gaul in the middle of the first century
BC (Nash 1976), but though his military and political activities brought him into
contact with powerful leaders, and there are many references to them in his works,
he does not offer us a sustained account of Celtic society. His evidence is also specific
to a particular period, and he is best informed about central France and Switzerland,
though mentioning conditions elsewhere. The differences between the versions of
Celtic social organization given by Poseidonios and Caesar are a clear reminder that
Celtic society was changing through time, especially during the period of intensify-
ing contact with the expanding Roman world, and indeed that such contact may itself
have been a potent force for change.
In addition to the limitations of such evidence, there is a problem in understanding
the references that do survive. When Caesar, for instance, uses the Latin word rex
(king) to refer to a Celtic social institution, it is important not only to ask how well
informed he could have been, and how well he understood the social conditions, but
also to appreciate that both he and his readers were conditioned by the prevailing
ideology of the classical world towards the non-classical or barbarian peoples,
and that he was interpreting Celtic institutions in the linguistic terms of the Latin
language; he would have to choose the most appropriate term, despite what may have
been major differences in the real nature of the social institutions he was trying
to describe. Constraints of language may therefore lead to an assimilation of social
institutions, and a blurring of real cultural differences. In our own turn, modern
readers of Caesar have to come to terms with contemporary attitudes towards
the classical world and imperial conquest, as well the difficulty of interpreting his
language, as in the translation of rex as king.
The early medieval Irish literature may seem to escape one of these layers of inter-
pretative difficulty, since it comprises documents written by a society about itself,
but they still require a very careful understanding of the social context in which they
were produced. Some of the most interesting are a wide variety of legal texts dealing
with early Irish law (Kelly 1988); unlike the classical authors, some of these early
Irish sources are specifically concerned with social organization, even obsessively so.
The Crith Gablach, for instance, spells out in great detail the possessions of various
grades of farmer. The writing down of hitherto traditional wisdom is a sign not just
of the adoption of literacy but of a fundamental change in the nature of authority,
and a detailed concern for the definition of social rank indicates a period when social