Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/155

140 is in one place described as ‘a sad, dark man,’ is puzzling, as he is almost uniformly elsewhere said to be fair.

But the wearing of the moustache seems to have been universal, and it was regarded as a sign of manliness. Cuchulain, in the war of the Táin, was so ashamed that on account of his extreme youthfulness his moustache had not yet grown, that before he showed himself to the women, he had one painted on with blackberry juice. In the battle of Moira, fought in the north of Ireland in 637 A.D., it is said that the druid who was sent to reconnoitre the hosts of the High-King of Erin for the provincial King of Ulster, against whom he was fighting, was dismayed at the ferocious appearance of the troops, ‘what with their tufted moustachios and long beards hanging to their waists, and overhanging eyebrows, and what with the strangeness of their short gathered vests and their gold-embroidered cloaks of black sheepskin thrown over their shoulders.’

But to return for a moment to the Dying Gaul. It will be noticed that the figure is unclothed, this being no doubt the reason that it was for so long a time supposed to be that of one of the gladiators, who fought in the shows unprotected by any clothing whatever. But our author mentions that though some of the Gauls wear iron breastplates, hooked, ‘others, content with what nature affords them, fight naked’ (see also Livy, xxii. 46), and this observation is amply borne out by the Irish tales. Had we no actual historical record of the circumstance, we should imagine that such a sentence as the following from the Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel was merely a heightening of the effect on the part of the Irish writer: ‘This was the way that the king and his followers took to Tara, past Usnech of Meath; and they saw the raiding from east to west and from south to north, and they saw the war-bands and the hosts, and the men stark-naked; and the land of the southern O’Neills was a cloud of fire around him,’ § 25, p. 24. But with the testimony of the Latin writer before us, and several other examples from Irish literature itself, we can scarcely doubt that it is a record