Note 1244 — Chapter V

This statement is, I admit, open to dispute. Caesar (B. G., vii, 33, § 4) does not expressly say that Druids exercised the right in question, but priests (sacerdotes); and it has been argued that those priests may not have been Druids (see my Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul, 1899, p. 534, n. 3, and G. Dottin, La rel. des Celtes, p. 41). But, so far as we know, the only other name that designated a priest in Gaul was gutuater, which occurs in two Gallo-Roman inscriptions (ib., and Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul, 1899, p. 818); and I doubt whether it is possible to prove that in pre-Roman times the gutuater was not a Druid. Anyhow, considering the terms in which Caesar describes the Druids, considering what he says of their power, political and legal as well as spiritual (fere de omnibus controversiis publicis privatisque constituunt), I find it difficult to believe that they would have permitted any priest who was not one of themselves to exercise the very important function which he describes in B. G., vii, 33. [For confirmation of the statement in the text see H. d’A. de Jubainville, Les Druides, p. 159, who, however (pp. 2-6), insists that gutuatri were distinct from Druids.]