The Celtic World (Routledge Worlds)

(Barry) #1

  • Chapter Thirty-One -


Figure 31.2 Ship carrying wine barrels. (Landesmuseum, Trier. Photo: H. Thornig.)

The Celtic population, while adopting many aspects of Roman material culture,
maintained also many of its Celtic attributes. We have already seen that Jerome
testifies to the continued use of the Celtic language among the Treveri in the fourth
century. Celtic religion too continued to flourish, alongside such imports as the
imperial cult and the eastern cults, including Christianity, that soldiers and others
introduced. Naturally the forms of the religion changed. Druids disappeared, but
how important they had been, except in aristocratic circles, is in any event disputed. 50
Certainly their power and prestige did not long survive the end of Celtic indepen-
dence, and Claudius actually proscribed them, Augustus having already forbidden
Roman citizens to participate.^51 Human sacrifice and head-hunting, which had
been features of Celtic society in pre-Roman times, clearly did not survive the con-
quest either. But the popular religious beliefs and practices that can be shown still to
flourish after the conquest, often in a strongly syncretistic form, must have had very
deep roots. Celtic religion attached great importance to natural features considered
to be sacred, such as mountains, springs and rivers, and there are many references to
sacred groves.
Celtic divinities were twinned with Roman counterparts, but the result is often
'hybrid and ambiguous', due perhaps to the contrast between 'Roman gods, defined
strictly by function, and the ill-defined local spirits of the Celts'.52 Did the Celts
find it harder to accept the interpretatio Romana and to meld their beliefs with those
of the Mediterranean world than most other peoples, the Jews being a notable


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