Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/168

 136 The Idea of Hades in Celtic Literature.

and last asylum of the living "(p. 85) . . . "The primi- tive text of the narrative that Nennius had under his eyes transported this race from Ireland not into Spain, but into the land of the dead " (p. 117). Here he actually imagines the existence not only of a tradition, but of actual manuscripts proving the tradition, that a statement made by Caesar with regard to the belief of the inhabitants of Gaul held true also in Ireland, and he argues that the manuscripts relating to the legendary settlements of the peoples of Ireland have been deliberately changed to support this view. But there is not any sign that these particular legends of the settlements have undergone a change corresponding to this view.

To return to Caesar's statement, that the Gauls thought themselves to be descended from Dis Pater, " the god of death," it is to be remarked that Caesar makes the announcement in explanation of the fact that the Gauls reckoned all kinds of time not by days, but by nights, and that when they were calculating birthdays or the beginning of the months and of the year, they always took care to place the night before the day {De Bello Gallico, vi. c. 18 §1, 2). But though Caesar might have conceived some such explanation necessary in what appeared to him a peculiar custom, we know that the Gauls were by no means the only nation to count time in this manner. Among other nations, the Norse appear to have done so, and we find the same method of reckoning employed in the first chapters of Genesis.

A great deal of discussion has been aroused by the identification by M. de Barthelemy of the small figure of the man with the cup and mallet with the Dis Pater of Caesar. It is a statuette in bronze found at Premeaux (Cote-d'Or), now in the Museum of Beaune, and represents a man with a mass of hair peaked in front, and a beard and heavy moustache, standing erect, clad in a tunic to