682 
Commerce by commission, weé are 
told, was then unknown; there were 
neither post-offices to facilitate cor- 
respondence, nor brokers, nor factors : 
every merchant either accompanied. 
his own goods, or sent a supercargo: 
along with them. Bills of exchange 
were unknown, and metal alone was 
the sole measure of value in the 
eastern empire. 
«Observations Historiqueset Critiques 
sur, &c.” Historical and critical Remarks 
relative to a Passage of Cesar concern- 
ing the Religion of the Gauls. By the 
late Mr. Charles Boullernier, of Dijon, 
librarian and Keeper of the medals, 
&c. of that city. 
Cesar observes in the sixth book 
of his Commentaries, that ihe Gauls, 
ineouseguence ofa tradition received 
from the Druids pretended to draw 
their origin from Dis: Galli-se omnes 
a dite patre prognates pra dicant. lt 
is here inquired, what ¢od is this same 
Dis ?\s be the Plato of ihe Greeks and 
Romans? or some other divinity un- 
known to both? and what did Cesar 
himself mean by it? adds the author. 
In his opinion, Czesar has supposed 
the Dis of the Gauls to be the God 
of Hell, and the Pluto of other na- 
tions: fur the Romans who considered 
themselves alone as enlightened, and 
Jooked on all other nations as barba- 
rous, connected every thing which 
they saw, or heard, with their own 
manners and usages...The worship 
of Pluto under the name of Dis being 
familiar to them, and a fundamental 
dogma of their theology, it is but 
little surprising that the Celtic word 
Dé, Di, or Dir, should have produced 
ihe idea of the same divinity wor- 
shipped by others under an appella- 
tion nearly similar. Deceived accor- 
dingly by the sound, and still more 
perhaps, by the cruel custom preva- 
Jent among the Gauls, of sacrificing 
human victims, Cesar did not hesitate, 
wearelold, to believe that the power 
to whom they ascribed their origin 
was the divinity who reigned in the 
infernal regions. He therefore iden- 
tified the Celtic with the Roman 
god, and his prejudices accordingly 
made him find in Esus, Taranis, Teu- 
tates, Belenus, Camulus, and Belisana, 
a close and intimate resemblance with 
Jupiter, Mercury, Apollo, Mars,* and 
Minerva. *‘ That occurred to him,” it 
isadded, ‘‘ which daily happen to mo- 
dern travellers, who when they per- 
cerve men falling down at the feet of 
monstrous and misshapen jdols, never 
Retrospect of French Literature-— History. 
fail to tell us, that these worship the 
devil, and for no better reason, than 
that in our own religion we represent 
that malignant spirit under the most 
hideous forms.” 
‘The authority of the Roman gene- 
ral has contributed not a little to per- 
petuate this error: for not only all 
the translators have rendered the word 
Dis, Pluto, but the learned aiso have 
in general subscribed to the same idea. 
M. Simon (Mem. de PAcad. des Ins: 
tom. 4. p. 264.) after having ohserved 
that it is a principle common to all 
religions to recognise a sovereign 
being, to whom the nation is indebted 
for its existence, and for whom their 
lives were to be offered up, if he should 
redemand them,adds <“‘ that the. ancient 
inhabitants of Palestine, who were 
imitated. by the Hebrews, consecrated 
their children to Moloch, by means of 
fire ; that the Carthaginiays sacrificed 
in the same manner to Saturn; and 
that the ancient Gauls burnt men alive, 
in honour of Dis, or Pluto.” M. Man- 
del also (Ibid. tom. 9, p. 142.) in his 
‘¢ Explanations of some Inscriptions 
found at Langres during the -two last 
centuries,” mentions one composed 
only of the five following initial letters: 
D. M.S. Q. D. These, he adds, “ are 
usually explained by these words: 
Diis Manibus Sacrumque Diti; 
and remarks that they confirm what 
Cesar remarks about the veneration 
which the Gauls had for Pluto, whence 
they believed themselves to draw their 
origin, in allusion to which they 
counted by nights, and not by days, 
like other nations.” 
In reply to this, our author main- 
tains that the inscription in question 
proves nothing, unlessit had been en- 
graven before the arrival of the 
Romans in Gaul, for anterior to that 
period, the gods of Greece and Rome 
were necessarily unknown to them, 
according to the Dialogues ofLucian*. 
Three authors, M. Bullet, P. Pez- 
ron, and D. Martin, however, have 
searched the Celtic language for the 
true signification of the word Dis. If 
we are to give credit to the first of 
these (Mem. sur la Lang. Celt. p- 8.) 
the Dis of Cesar is not a divinity, but 
the earth, which is termed Dit or Tit 
in the Celtic language: according to 
this explanation then, the Gauls. pre- 
tended to have been born, or to have 
sprung out of the earth. The second 
ee 
* Jupit, Traged, 153, 
