The writer of what we may call, for want of a better name, vers de société, usually wins a popularity that is merely fleeting; he must be in touch with the thought of his own generation, and in his poems reflect its sentiments, express its humour, and satirize its manners: but his subjects often fail to interest posterity, and in a few decades the poems are apt to be forgotten unless they contain a divine spark of intrinsic excellence. In like manner, the claim to a lasting reputation of the moral essayist is no less hazardous unless he can avoid, above all things, what a recent writer has termed ‘the dull insolence of technicality’. The Satires and Epistles still live after nineteen centuries, and require no apologist. They have earned immortality because of their influence both on the Roman world that Horace knew and on the minds of men, particularly Englishmen, for centuries afterwards. His world was not a very serious world, and he wrote of it as he found it, with his inimitable touches of half-cynical, but never unkindly moralizing; and yet, as these poems and the Odes show, he found it a pleasant enough place for those who knew where true joy was to be found. The Satires and Epistles would be interesting enough if only for the facts that Horace discloses about himself: his freedman father (a coactor), his own personal appearance (Epist. i. 20. 24), the simplicity of his early home (ib. 20, ‘me libertino natum patre, et in tenui re’), and his intense affection for his equally devoted father. He must have been more than thirty years of age when he wrote Satire i. 6, which, in lines 58–100, is one long tribute to his father, and expresses his gratitude for the sacrifices made by a father who was not too well-off; no snob could have written as sincerely as this about his humble family, and no man with any false pride would frankly confess that, in the reverse inflicted on the Republican army at Philippi, he was forced to leave his shield on the field of battle (Carm. ii. 7. 10: ‘relicta non bene parmula’). The disastrous war shattered any illusions he had of rising to eminence in the army, and left him a poor man; but it gave us the poet (Epist. ii. 2. 51, ‘paupertas impulit audax ut versus facerem’), and his subsequent introduction to Maecenas resulted in his fortune being assured.

Between Celtic and Graeco-Roman art there existed an irreconcilable antagonism. Celtic art, the art of pre-Roman Gaul, was essentially decorative and abstract, loving geometric motifs and the stylization of living forms for purposes of ornamentation; whereas Graeco-Roman art favoured naturalism and anthropomorphism. No real synthesis of these two opposed artistic doctrines was possible; so that Gallo-Roman art, the result of an attempt at an impossible synthesis, forced upon the Celtic artist by his Roman conqueror, is, judged by a purely aesthetic criterion, a very mediocre product. Its interest, therefore, is not primarily aesthetic, but historically its importance is paramount; for the extant sculptures, in all their diversity and extent, throw a flood of light on the religious cults, social customs, and economic conditions of Roman Gaul. Confining ourselves to Gallo-Roman religious sculpture, our object here is to give a general survey of the iconography of peculiarly Celtic deities which survived in the Roman province, as represented in sculptures of stone and bronze. Our concern, then, is not with Celtic religion as a whole, but only with its artistic aspect in the Roman era; but even so, literary and epigraphical evidence will frequently prove illuminating in the interpretation of the works of art. We must, clearly, exclude from our scope all purely Graeco-Roman divinities imported into Gaul, together with the Oriental and Egyptian deities of the second and third centuries a.d., and the later Christian monuments. Out of this sentina numinum, this kitchen-midden of all sorts of cults, we select for discussion here only the religious imagery of Celtic divinities which survived the Roman domination. But, before embarking on this venture, a brief sketch of the salient features of Celtic religion will be relevant.

The fable as a form of story is characteristically Greek. It is true that fables are also found in early Oriental literature; but these are either imitations (and very feeble imitations) or parallel growths, which never reached the fine flower of the Greek versions. And from the earliest times fables have been associated with the name of one man: Aesop the slave.

Our greatest thoughts occur to us at quite unexpected times and in quite unexpected places. We wish to share them with posterity, but we have nothing with us on which to write them down, and by the time we reach home we shall have forgotten all about them. Sometimes indeed in such circumstances we make use of a tree-trunk or blank wall, but the practice has an obvious disadvantage: it is not easy to convey our manuscript to the publisher, and our manuscript may have to wait many centuries before a publisher comes to it.

In 1844 G. J. Pennington, in An Essay on the Pronunciation of the Greek Language, wrote: ‘And this is the great difficulty which I have always found in discussing the point with my own countrymen, that they are prejudiced, not by theory, for that may be stated and refuted, but by a matter of taste, though mistaken taste, from which it is not easy to obtain a fair hearing.’

One of the greatest historical achievements of the last century was the gathering together of the Latin inscriptions scattered over the various countries of Europe and the Mediterranean. The scheme was originated by Kellermann of Copenhagen (1805–37), who spent the last nine years of his life collecting inscriptions in Italy. It was taken up by members of the French Academy and finally carried through by the Berlin Academy. Many scholars, French, German, and Italian, had prepared the way by publishing collections of inscriptions; and the plan of the two scholars Zumpt, uncle and nephew, who were entrusted with the early preparations did not embrace much more than the rearranging of the published inscriptions. In 1847 a comprehensive scheme—the compilation of a corpus of inscriptions whether already published or not—was submitted to the Berlin Academy by Theodor Mommsen. In 1853 final approval was given and in 1863 appeared the first volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, consilio et auctoritate Academiae litterarum regiae Borussicae editum.