Miranda Aldhouse‐Green . Caesar's Druids: Story of an Ancient Priesthood . New Haven : Yale University Press . 2010 . Pp. xvii, 338. $40.00.
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 116; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/ahr.116.2.500
ISSN1937-5239
Autores ResumoPosidonius of Apameia (135–51 B.C.) was a Greek scholar of note who traveled in coastal Gaul. He wrote an important ethnography of the Celts in the twenty-third book of his now-lost History. Some of it, with changes and additions, was copied by later writers including Julius Caesar (who probably made additions based on own his experience). All of this material amounts to around thirty pages, and only a small portion of that deals with druids. Nonetheless, it is about ninety percent of what is known about them from key texts of the classical world. Scholarly books about druids are thus normally slender. Adding a survey of possibly relevant archaeological material in order to enhance or clarify the evidence of the texts, as Miranda Aldhouse-Green seeks to do in this new volume, is not always informative since, as she points out, there is “no direct archaeological testament to Druids” (p. 19). A book that is over 300 pages in length must, therefore, be richly padded with comparanda that frequently have little to do with the actual historical context of late Celtic Gaul or Britain. Given the little that we know, selecting them is a thoroughly problematic endeavor. It is not even clear, for example, that druids were priests and sacrificers, and not philosophers or even teachers. Aldhouse-Green is probably correct to follow Stuart Piggott in arguing otherwise, but she raises the murkiness level considerably by studiously avoiding any analysis of the gradations and types of religious specialists in the period even though the Posidonian texts, cited by authors who were contemporaries of Caesar, do seek to distinguish between druids and vates or diviners. Although uncertainty exists, there is a serious likelihood that Gaulish and British druids differed in character from practitioners who specialized in oracular or prophetic activities. Aldhouse-Green ignores the question; it might mean that she would have to exclude her lengthy material on oracles and druidesses. It might also mean that she would have to include early medieval Irish material that she deems irrelevant (although, remarkably, Icelandic saga is perfectly germane). Instead, she chooses to decidedly expand the range of referents by continually alluding to “clergy,” “ritualists,” “religious officials,” druids “and their followers,” “shamans,” “healers,” and druids “and their inheritors.” A box of conjectural relationships is thereby created to be opened at will. As “ritualists,” the druids can be related to all of them. Add to this another handy device called “cognate cultures”—ranging from prehistory to the twenty-first century and from the Mediterranean to South America and Siberia—and “druids” become irreparably malleable creatures.
Referência(s)