contumacy in reference to their judgments was punished by exclusion from the sacrifices.  This sentence of excommunication was the severest punishment among the Gauls.  The men so punished were treated as outlaws, and

cut off from all human society, with its rights and privileges.  Over these Druids there was one head, who wielded the highest influence among them.  On his death the nearest of the others in dignity succeeded him, or, if several were equal, the election of a successor was made by the vote of the Druids.  Sometimes the primacy was not decided without the arbitrament of arms.  The Druids met at a fixed time of the year in a consecrated spot in the territory of the Carnutes, the district which was regarded as being in the centre of the whole of Gaul.  This assembly of Druids formed a court for the decision of cases brought to them from everywhere around.  It was thought, Cæsar says, that the doctrine of the Druids was discovered in Britain and thence carried over into Gaul.  At that time, too, those who wanted to make a profounder study of it resorted thither for their training.  The Druids had immunity from military service and from the payment of tribute.  These privileges drew many into training for the profession, some of their own accord, others at the instance of parents and relatives.  While in training they were said to learn by heart a large number of verses, and some went so far as to spend twenty years in their course of preparation.  The Druids held it wrong to put their

religious teaching in writing, though, in almost everything else, whether public or private affairs, they made use of Greek letters.  Cæsar thought that they discouraged writing on the one hand, lest their teaching should become public property; on the other, lest reliance upon writing should lessen the cultivation of the memory.  To this risk Cæsar could testify from his own knowledge.  Their cardinal doctrine was that souls did not perish, but that after death they passed from one person to another; and this they regarded as a supreme incentive to valour, since, with the prospect of immortality, the fear of death counted for nothing.  They carried on, moreover, many discussions about the stars and their motion, the greatness of the universe and the lands, the nature of things, the strength and power of the immortal gods, and communicated their knowledge to their pupils.  In another passage Cæsar says that the Gauls as a people were extremely devoted to religious ideas and practices.  Men who were seriously ill, who were engaged in war, or who stood in any peril, offered, or promised to offer, human sacrifices, and made use of the Druids as their agents for such sacrifices.  Their theory was, that the immortal gods could not be appeased unless a human life were given for a

human life.  In addition to these private sacrifices, they had also similar human sacrifices of a public character.  Cæsar further contrasts the Germans with the Gauls, saying that the former had no Druids to preside over matters of religion, and that they paid no attention to sacrifices.

In his work on divination, Cicero, too, refers to the profession which the Druids made of natural science, and of the power of foretelling the future, and instances the case of the Æduan Divĭciācus, his brother’s guest and friend.  Nothing is here said by Cicero of the three classes implied in Diodorus, but Timagenes (quoted in Ammianus) refers to the three classes under the names ‘bardi,’ ‘euhages’ (a mistake for ‘vates’), and ‘drasidæ’ (a mistake for ‘druidæ’).  The study of nature and of the heavens is here attributed to the second class of seers (vates).  The highest class, that of the Druids, were, he says, in accordance with the rule of Pythagoras, closely linked together in confraternities, and by acquiring a certain loftiness of mind from their investigations into things that were hidden and exalted, they despised human affairs and declared the soul immortal.  We see here the view expressed that socially as well as intellectually the Druids lived according to the Pythagorean philosophy.  Origen

also refers to the view that was prevalent in his time, that Zamolxis, the servant of Pythagoras, had taught the Druids the philosophy of Pythagoras.  He further states that the Druids practised sorcery.  The triple division of the non-military aristocracy is perhaps best given by Strabo, the Greek geographer, who here follows Posidonius.  The three classes are the Bards, the Seers (ouateis=vates), and Druids.  The Bards were hymn-writers and poets, the Seers sacrificers and men of science, while the Druids, in addition to natural science, practised also moral philosophy.  They were regarded as the justest of men, and on this account were intrusted with the settlement of private and public disputes.  They had been the means of preventing armies from fighting when on the very verge of battle, and were especially intrusted with the judgment of cases involving human life.  According to Strabo, they and their fellow-countrymen held that souls and the universe were immortal, but that fire and water would sometime prevail.  Sacrifices were never made, Strabo says, without the intervention of the Druids.  Pomponius Mela says that in his time (c. 44 a.d.), though the ancient savagery was no more, and the Gauls abstained from human sacrifices, some traces of their former practices

still remained, notably in their habit of cutting a portion of the flesh of those condemned to death after bringing them to the altars.  The Gauls, he says, in spite of their traces of barbarism, had an eloquence of their own, and had the Druids as their teachers in philosophy.  These professed to know the size and form of the earth and of the universe, the motions of the sky and stars, and the will of the gods.  He refers, as Cæsar does, to their work in education, and says that it was carried on in caves or in secluded groves.  Mela speaks of their doctrine of immortality, but says nothing as to the entry of souls into other bodies.  As a proof of this belief he speaks of the practice of burning and burying with the dead things appropriate to the needs of the living.  Lucan, the Latin poet, in his Pharsalia, refers to the seclusion of the Druids’ groves and to their doctrine of immortality.  The Scholiasts’ notes on this passage are after the manner of their kind, and add very little to our knowledge.  In Pliny’s Natural History (xvi, 249), however, we seem to be face to face with another, though perhaps a distorted, tradition.  Pliny was an indefatigable compiler, and appears partly by reading, partly by personal observation, to have noticed phases of Celtic

religious practices which other writers had overlooked.  In the first place he calls attention to the veneration in which the Gauls held the mistletoe and the tree on which it grew, provided that that tree was the oak.  Hence their predilection for oak groves and their requirement of oak leaves for all religious rites.  Pliny here remarks on the consonance of this practice with the etymology of the name Druid as interpreted even through Greek (the Greek for an oak being drūs).  Were not this respect for the oak and for the mistletoe paralleled by numerous examples of tree and plant-worship given by Dr. Frazer and others, it might well have been suspected that Pliny was here quoting some writer who had tried to argue from the etymology of the name Druid.  Another