of culture
is the sense of a common relationship in the nation; so little
of it comes to light in the Celtic battles fought on the soil of what
is now Lombardy, while it strikingly appears in the struggles
against Caesar. To all appearance the Celtic nation, when Caesar
encountered it, had already reached the maximum of the culture
allotted to it, and was even now on the decline. The civilization
of the Transalpine Celts in Caesar's time presents, even for us
who are but very imperfectly informed regarding it, several aspects
that are estimable, and yet more that are interesting; in some
respects it is more akin to the modern than to the Hellenic-Roman
culture, with its sailing vessels, its knighthood, its ecclesiastical
constitution, above all with its attempts, however imperfect,
to build the state not on the city, but on the tribe and in a higher
degree on the nation. But just because we here meet the Celtic nation
at the culminating point of its development, its lesser degree
of moral endowment or, which is the same thing, its lesser
capacity of culture, comes more distinctly into view.
It was unable to produce from its own resources either a national
art or a national state; it attained at the utmost a national theology
and a peculiar type of nobility. The original simple valour
was no more; the military courage based on higher morality and judicious
organization, which comes in the train of increased civilization,
had only made its appearance in a very stunted form among
the knights. Barbarism in the strict sense was doubtless outlived;
the times had gone by, when in Gaul the fat haunch was assigned
to the bravest of the guests, but each of his fellow-guests who thought
himself offended thereby was at liberty to challenge the receiver
on that score to combat, and when the most faithful retainers
of a deceased chief were burnt along with him. But human sacrifices
still continued, and the maxim of law, that torture was inadmissible
in the case of the free man but allowable in that of the free
woman as well as of slaves, throws a far from pleasing light
on the position which the female sex held among the Celts
even in their period of culture. The Celts had lost the advantages
which specially belong to the primitive epoch of nations, but had not
acquired those which civilization brings with it when it intimately
and thoroughly pervades a people.

External Relations
Celts and Iberians

Such was the interna