Note 1171 — Chapter V

Prof. Rhys (Celtic Heathendom, p. 126) says that ‘most of the remains of antiquity connected with his temple make him a sort of Jupiter’, but adds (ib., p. 130) that he ‘was not simply a Neptune ... he was also a Mars, as the inscriptions at Lydney testify’. But the testimony of the inscriptions (Corpus inscr. Lat., vii, 138-40) consists simply in the letter M; and Hübner, to whom the professor appeals, queries his own suggestion that M stands for Marti. [I learn from one of Mr. A. B. Cook’s articles in Folk-Lore (xvii, 1906, p. 39, n. 1) that Hübner (Jahrbuch des Vereins von Alterthumsfreunden im Rheinlande, Heft lxvi, 1879, pp. 29-46) corrected and supplemented the account of Nodons which he had given in the Corpus, and interpreted D. M. NODONTI as d(eo) m(agno)—‘the great god’—a reading which would authorize us to regard him, with Mr. Cook, as ‘a Jupiter and a Neptune rolled into one’.]