LYCOS RETRIEVER
Gaul: Celtic Gaul
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The locus classicus for the Celtic gods of Gaul is the passage in Caesar's Commentarii de bello Gallico (5251 BC; The Gallic War) in which he names five of them together with their functions. Mercury was the most honoured of all the gods and many images of him were to be found. Mercury was regarded as the inventor of all the arts, the patron of travelers and of merchants,...
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Gallia (in English Gaul) is the Roman name for the region of western Europe occupied by present-day France, Belgium, western Switzerland and the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the west bank of the Rhine river. In English the word Gaul commonly refers to a Celtic inhabitant of that region in ancient times.
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The Dying Gaul depicts a wounded Celtic warrior who lies upon the earth awaiting death. It was found in the gardens which had belonged to Sallust, a Roman historian. The statue is a Roman copy of one of the bronze statues dedicated at Pergamon by Attolos I in commemoration of his victories over the Gauls who had invaded Asia Minor in 239 B.C. Fourth and fifth century Greek sculpting had never depicted such a subject. It must have been a startling innovation at the time of its creation.
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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 ... Bibliography under ‘Ancient and Continental’.
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Roman Gaul were characterized by syncretism of Graeco-Roman deities with their native Celtic, Basque or Germanic counterparts. In many cases, this took place by interpreting indigenous gods in Roman terms, such as with Lenus Mars or Apollo Grannus. Otherwise, a Roman god might be paired with a native goddess, as with Mercury and Rosmerta. adopted by Rome.
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By 50 BC, when the Roman occupation of Gaul under Julius Caesar was complete, the region's population had been speaking Gaulish, a Celtic language, for some 500 years. Gaulish... gave way to the conquerors' speech, Vulgar Latin, which was the spoken form of Latin as used by the soldiers and settlers throughout the Roman Empire.
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