What opinion on the Gauls did Cicero and Caesar have?
Cicero was particularly prone to caricature with respect to the Gauls, which is surprising because he did not have much contact with them. Some of his friends used to export wine to the Morvan region, and he himself may have held some interest in these transactions. He also played host, in Rome, to the Eduen Druid Diviciados, whose vast culture he thus had a chance to measure. But that did not stop him, while entering legal arguments where he referred to the Gauls, to speak of them as retarded aliens, who practiced human sacrifice on the grand scale. With Caesar the carricature is also there, but it is not deliberate. It was not in his interest to present them as primitive beings, which would have devalued his exploits as conqueror. In his Commentaires sur la Guerre des Gaules, he thus seeks to emphasize the qualities of the Gauls, and looks to long passages form Poseidonios from Apamée to do so. He gives a resumé of the work, but a bad one, where he distorts the argumentation. It is Caesar, in effect, who downplays the role of the Druids, whom he reduces to mere priests whereas in fact they were also historians, philosophers or again, diplomats.
Are not the Gauls primarily responsible for the misunderstandings which surround their civilization, because they left but very few traces or accounts?
Indeed, and this makes sense because, in contrast to the Romans, the Gauls were not obsessed by the idea of leaving a mark on history, of engraving in marble stone their exploits or constructing grandiose monuments. This is due to their religious and philosophical ideas: believing in the reincarnation of souls, they thought man belonged to an on-going life-cycle, which rendered relative individual and even collective fate. Nonetheless, they had a certain sense of history, a purely oral history kept safe by the Druids, whcih transmitted one to the other extremely elaborate information on the origins of their civilization, or again detailled genealogies of certain aristocratic families. All of these things have been lost, due to a lack of written records.
Can we expect new archeological discoveries in the coming years?
We can always hope for occasional and miraculous finds, such as that of the riches of Tintignac, in Corrèze (Yo, Beaulieu-sur Dordogne), in 2004, which gave us headgear of amazing detail and inventiveness, dating from the third century B.C. We are also hoping to find a few texts, be they in Greek or in a cursive handwriting, which would give us more information on commercial circuits in an independant Gaul. But I am not sure we can expect the image we have of the Gauls which we have to change much from now on end, as it has been largely corrected in the past few years.
interviewers : Caroline Brun and Charles Giol.
Cicero was particularly prone to caricature with respect to the Gauls, which is surprising because he did not have much contact with them. Some of his friends used to export wine to the Morvan region, and he himself may have held some interest in these transactions. He also played host, in Rome, to the Eduen Druid Diviciados, whose vast culture he thus had a chance to measure. But that did not stop him, while entering legal arguments where he referred to the Gauls, to speak of them as retarded aliens, who practiced human sacrifice on the grand scale. With Caesar the carricature is also there, but it is not deliberate. It was not in his interest to present them as primitive beings, which would have devalued his exploits as conqueror. In his Commentaires sur la Guerre des Gaules, he thus seeks to emphasize the qualities of the Gauls, and looks to long passages form Poseidonios from Apamée to do so. He gives a resumé of the work, but a bad one, where he distorts the argumentation. It is Caesar, in effect, who downplays the role of the Druids, whom he reduces to mere priests whereas in fact they were also historians, philosophers or again, diplomats.
Are not the Gauls primarily responsible for the misunderstandings which surround their civilization, because they left but very few traces or accounts?
Indeed, and this makes sense because, in contrast to the Romans, the Gauls were not obsessed by the idea of leaving a mark on history, of engraving in marble stone their exploits or constructing grandiose monuments. This is due to their religious and philosophical ideas: believing in the reincarnation of souls, they thought man belonged to an on-going life-cycle, which rendered relative individual and even collective fate. Nonetheless, they had a certain sense of history, a purely oral history kept safe by the Druids, whcih transmitted one to the other extremely elaborate information on the origins of their civilization, or again detailled genealogies of certain aristocratic families. All of these things have been lost, due to a lack of written records.
Can we expect new archeological discoveries in the coming years?
We can always hope for occasional and miraculous finds, such as that of the riches of Tintignac, in Corrèze (Yo, Beaulieu-sur Dordogne), in 2004, which gave us headgear of amazing detail and inventiveness, dating from the third century B.C. We are also hoping to find a few texts, be they in Greek or in a cursive handwriting, which would give us more information on commercial circuits in an independant Gaul. But I am not sure we can expect the image we have of the Gauls which we have to change much from now on end, as it has been largely corrected in the past few years.
interviewers : Caroline Brun and Charles Giol.
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