Gaul

Gaul [L Gallia]. English name for the land in antiquity populated by P-Celtic-speaking peoples, south and west of the Rhine, west of the Alps, and north of the Pyrenees, approximately coextensive with the modern nations of France, Germany west of the Rhine, Belgium, and western Switzerland. The culture and language of the Celts extended across the Alps into Cisalpine Gaul [L Gallia Cisalpina], what is today northern Italy down to the Apennines; at various times Celtic dialect was also spoken in much of northern Europe, from Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, much of the Balkans, to Galatia in what is today Turkey. Little can be known about the Gauls from the meagre surviving documents in the Gaulish language, but we can see obvious parallels with Welsh, Cornish, and Breton as well as more remote links to Old Irish. Most of what we know about Gaul derives from the sometimes prejudiced views of classical commentators, beginning with Julius Caesar, who conquered the country 59–50 BC. The historical leader of Gaulish resistance, Vercingetorix, has been the focus of many legends. Recent archaeological evidence has demonstrated that the Gauls were far less barbaric than the conquering Romans implied.

Most gods of Gaul are known to us by Roman names. Tacitus (2nd cent. AD) used the phrase interpretatio romana for the process under which the Romans described the gods of the Celts as if they were indeed Roman divinities. Thus a native god whose name is lost to us is now referred to as Gaulish Mercury, Gaulish Mars, etc. Iconographic evidence shows that the ancient Gauls acceded to this forced identification by portraying their gods with Roman affects. Modern commentators have coined the phrase interpretatio celtica to describe the reverse phenomenon in which the Celts adapted Roman gods into their own belief systems, venerating the god under a Latin name but adding a Celtic epithet. Caesar determined six principal gods of the Gauls and ranked them as he perceived a Gaulish pantheon: Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, Minerva, and Dis Pater (Pluto). Modern commentators doubt that the Gauls clearly differentiated the functions of particular gods or of any pantheon that was propitiated throughout their culture. The names of other native gods survive in inscriptions at various shrines and in other classical commentators, but these also are called into question. The god Teutates cited by Lucan (1st cent. AD) may simply derive from the ‘god of the tribe’; cf. teutā, ‘tribe’; OIr. túath, ‘people, tribe, nation’.

See Olwen Brogan, Roman Gaul (Cambridge, Mass., 1953); Jean-Jacques Hatt, Celts and Gallo-Romans, trans. James Hogarth (London, 1970); J. L. Brunaux, The Celtic Gauls: Gods, Rites and Sanctuaries (London, 1978); H. D. Rankin, Celts and the Classical World (London, 1987); Pierre-Yves Lambert, La Langue gauloise: description linguistique, commentaire d'inscriptions choisies (Paris, 1994). See also Bibliography under ‘Ancient and Continental’.

2. Alternate spelling of Macpherson's Goll 2.