CHAPTER SEVEN
APPEARANCE, LIFE AND
LEISURE
--.•. --
Glenys Lloyd-Morgan
D
espite 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'im!galite' (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.
Despite this fictitious but amusing nonsense, there are genuine, contemporary
representations of Celts and their deities from the pre-Roman as well as the Roman
Imperial periods. The sub-Roman period is somewhat less well represented.
Warriors, for example the surviving three-quarter-Iength statue of the Warrior of
Grezan (Gard) (Figure 7.2), and the third-century BC bust of a helmeted warrior
95