Pomponius Mela

The Barddas of Iolo Morganwg, Vol. I., ed. by J. Williams Ab Ithel, [1862], at sacred-texts.com

POMPONIUS MELA, A.D. 45.

His description is as follows:--

"They [the Gauls] have an eloquence of their own, and their Druids as masters of wisdom. These profess to know the magnitude and form of the earth and the world, the motions of the heaven and the stars, and the will of the gods. They teach the most noble of the nation many things privately, and for a long time, even for twenty years, in a cave, or in inaccessible woods. One of their precepts has become public, namely, that they should act bravely in war, that souls are immortal, and that there is another life after death. Therefore along with the dead, they burn and bury things which belonged to them while living. Their debtor and creditor accounts were transferred

p. lxv

below. Some even went so far as to ascend the funeral pyres of their friends of their own accord, as though about to live with them." ¹

Mela agrees with Cæsar as to the knowledge which the Druids were said to possess concerning the universe, and as to their being in the habit of training their disciples for the long space of twenty years. live may conclude from the only specimen of their precepts, which he succeeded in obtaining, that they were inculcated in the Triadic form:--

1. Interment. The remains discovered in ancient sepulchres sufficiently prove that the Cymry in former times buried with their princes and great men those things to which in their life-time they had been particularly attached, such as their steeds and arms.

2. The debt of the deceased. Undoubtedly this is a remnant of the ancient doctrine of the metempsychosis, according to which the man, after his fall in Abred through death, was regarded as suffering punishment, or paying the debt which he had contracted in his life-time.

3. Voluntary death. It is, likewise, very probable that there is some connection between the custom, which some of the people in Gaul adopted, of throwing themselves on the funeral pyres of their relatives, and the doctrine of eneidvaddeu, already spoken of.

Footnotes

lxv:1 De Situ Orbis, lib. iii. c, 2.