Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race - Knowledge Rush

8 Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race
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Aristotle knew that they dwelt “beyond Spain,” that they had
captured Rome, and that they set great store by warlike power.
References other than geographical are occasionally met with
even in early writers. Hellanicus of Lesbos, an historian of the
fifth century B.C., describes the Celts as practising justice and
righteousness. Ephorus, about 350 B.C., has three lines of verse
about the Celts in which they are described as using “the same
customs as the Greeks”—whatever that may mean—and being
on the friendliest terms with that people, who established guest
friendships among them. Plato, however, in the “Laws,” classes
the Celts among the races who are drunken and combative, and
much barbarity is attributed to them on the occasion of their
irruption into Greece and the sacking of Delphi in the year 273
B.C. Their attack on Rome and the sacking of that city by them
about a century earlier is one of the landmarks of ancient history.
The history of this people during the time when they were the
dominant power in Mid-Europe has to be divined or reconstructed
from scattered references, and from accounts of episodes in their
dealings with Greece and Rome, very much as the figure of a
primæval monster is reconstructed by the zoologist from a few
fossilised bones. No chronicles of their own have come down to
us, no architectural remains have survived; a few coins, and a few
ornaments and weapons in bronze decorated with enamel or with
subtle and beautiful designs in chased or repoussé work—these,
and the names which often cling in strangely altered forms to the
places where they dwelt, from the Euxine to the British Islands,
are well-nigh all the visible traces which this once mighty power
has left us of its civilisation and dominion. Yet from these, and
from the accounts of classical writers, much can be deduced with
certainty, and much more can be conjectured with a very fair
measure of probability. The great Celtic scholar whose loss we
have recently had to deplore, M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, has, on
the available data, drawn a convincing outline of Celtic history
for the period prior to their emergence into full historical light