Druid. A druid was a member of the high-ranking professional class in ancient Celtic cultures.
Perhaps best remembered as religious leaders, they were also legal authorities, adjudicators, lorekeepers, medical professionals, and political advisors. While the druids are reported to have been literate, they are believed to have been prevented by doctrine from recording their knowledge in written form, thus they left no written accounts of themselves.
They are however attested in some detail by their contemporaries from other cultures, such as the Romans and the Greeks. The earliest known references to the druids date to the fourth century BCE and the oldest detailed description comes from Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico.
They were also described by later Greco-Roman writers such as Cicero, Tacitus, and Pliny the Elder. Following the Roman invasion of Gaul, the druid orders were suppressed by the Roman government under the 1st century CE emperors Tiberius and Claudius, and had disappeared from the written record by the 2nd century.
In about 750 CE the word druid appears in a poem by Blathmac, who wrote about Jesus, saying that he was. better than a prophet, more knowledgeable than every druid, a king who was a bishop and a complete sage. The druids then also appear in some of the medieval tales from Christianized Ireland like the Tain Bo Cuailnge, where they are largely port
Perhaps best remembered as religious leaders, they were also legal authorities, adjudicators, lorekeepers, medical professionals, and political advisors. While the druids are reported to have been literate, they are believed to have been prevented by doctrine from recording their knowledge in written form, thus they left no written accounts of themselves.
They are however attested in some detail by their contemporaries from other cultures, such as the Romans and the Greeks. The earliest known references to the druids date to the fourth century BCE and the oldest detailed description comes from Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico.
They were also described by later Greco-Roman writers such as Cicero, Tacitus, and Pliny the Elder. Following the Roman invasion of Gaul, the druid orders were suppressed by the Roman government under the 1st century CE emperors Tiberius and Claudius, and had disappeared from the written record by the 2nd century.
In about 750 CE the word druid appears in a poem by Blathmac, who wrote about Jesus, saying that he was. better than a prophet, more knowledgeable than every druid, a king who was a bishop and a complete sage. The druids then also appear in some of the medieval tales from Christianized Ireland like the Tain Bo Cuailnge, where they are largely port
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