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Rh antiquity as Thucydides, between and, word and deed, is one of the growths of an age beginning to devote itself to philosophy and conceited moralizings over the hollowness of human nature. Formulæ of words have always been the backbone of magic as well as the means, in most religious systems, of moving the gods to accede to the worshipper's prayer: in ancient Erinn the words of the satirist were believed to raise hideous blotches on the face of him who happened to be the object of them, and the Gaulish euhemerist who undertook to enlighten Lucian was content to believe Ogmios to have performed the labours of Heracles, without the grosser club and bow, by the irresistible force of his charms of speech.

The two names Gwydion and Geir point, as we have seen, distinctly to the character of their bearer as a personification of speech or eloquence, while it would appear that his other name of Se or Seon (for Segon-) must have referred directly and originally to him in respect of his strength or power, and recalled labours like those of Heracles. For these forms are doubtless of the same origin as the name of the war-god Segomo; but in the face of the German word sieg, 'victory,' and its cognates, we should perhaps treat them as meaning more exactly a god of victory, in a word the Mercurius Victor of an inscription in Gaul. The remarkable thing, however, is that under the name of Se or Seon here in question, Gwydion is only referred to as a philosopher or astronomer and patron of artists and professional men, which looks as though force and victory, in his case, were chiefly to be explained somewhat in the way the native guide of Lucian represented to him, that the labours of