"Celt" Conjecture

[Rumo]

It's my understanding that the major brunt of this thread revolves around the assumption that Caesar lied in claiming the Gauls called themeselves "Celts," either individually with personal names or collectively. At the time the BG was published Caesar had a slew of enemies in Rome itself, and certainly he would have been called to task on this point and many others, simply as an attempt to discredit his up-and-coming rise to power. What we get for critical rebuttal is silence.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not Will Durant, a Caesar-admirer. What Caesar did in Gaul was deplorable; and in the substrata of his glories we discover that his command was responsible for the deaths of 330, 000 German men, women, and children in a single day. The entire nobility of the Veneti had their throat cut. The defenders of Uxellodumun had their right hands chopped off. And everything living, from babies to dogs, was killed in the massacre of the Bituriges. The war and its aftermath accounted for some 2 million Gallic lives, including the terrible death of a starved Vercingetorix at the base of the Fora. Caesar was a deplorable human being, BUT he was not a blatant liar.

I already admitted there's no clear, undeniable evidence Caesar's ethnography is nothing but a reflection of previous, stereotypical views, a compilation serving to shape his image as conqueror of Gaul. I already recommended Riggsby's careful analysis. From 3rd chapter of The Celtic World (ed. Miranda J. Green - who, by the way, gives a nice introduction on who were the Celts), author David Rankin:

• Julius Caesar's famous account of his wars in Gaul (De Bello Gallico) makes use of Poseidonios's histories. The fact that Poseidonios did not regard the Celts as mere primitives was grist to Caesar's propagandistic mill, since he could represent himself as the conqueror of no mean people.

• Julius Caesar did not come into contact with Celtic life as it was lived. His purpose was to dominate Gaul and exploit it for his own purposes, not to comprehend Celtic society in any greater depth than seemed conformable to the achivement of his ends.

ending with

• There is a noteworthy consistency in the evidences we have for Graeco-Roman attitudes to the Celts, who remained archaic, heroic, terrific, eloquent, volatile. No doubt one of the main factors which helped to crystalize this view was the persistence over the centuries of a rhetorical scheme of education. This placed great emphasis on the learning and development of topoi (communes loci), or common themes. Once the picture of the Celts had congealed, it would be difficult for detailed observation to modify it. [...] The romantic view of the Celts and their culture owes much to these ancient attitudes. However, our attempts to see the Celts through classical eyes are focus through the lens of a literature written by an eduated class whose understanding was in many ways shielded from the input of factual information by the influence of rhetorical training.

Who in Rome would have challenged Caesar's story, if most of them were thinking in the same way?

Today, people in varying countries consider themselves Celts-- the Irish, the Scottish, the Welsh, the Bretons, and maybe even some Spaniards-- and it seems ludicrous that they are a deluded and post-Caesarian product of a less than authentic tradition. To me, there is no "Celtic Conjecture." And obviously, I stand not alone. :roll:

As ludicrous it may seem, it's a widely acknowleged fact the modern Celtic identities are a recent fabrication. From Michael Dietler's "'Our Ancestors the Gauls': Archaeology, Ethnic Nationalism and the Manipulation of Celtic Identity in Modern Europe" (in American Anthropologist, NS, vol. 96.3/1994):

• What, for example, does the word Celtic mean and where does it come from? Today the term is applied to everything from a basketball team in Boston to a soccer team in Scotland, to art and music styles, and to a literary genre. As with Boston Celtics basketball team, the term is generally assumed by Americans to refer to an affiliation with an ethnic heartland in Ireland or Scotland. However, it is highly unlikely that the people of either of these regions ever called themselves Celts before the 19th century. This identification is a product of modern historical philology, which recognized the linguistic connections between modern Irish Goidelic, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Manx and the ancient Celtic languages of the continent.

After a short presentation of the classical sources and a review of Caesar's and Strabo's opposite perspectives, the author notes

• Ironically, if Strabo is correct in his etymology of the term Celtic, it is quite possible that the original Celts may have spoken Ligurian rather than the language that their name has subsequently come to signify.

An incovenient possibility, isn't it?