Author: David Rankin
Publisher: Routledge (an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group)
Publishing History: First published in 1987 by Croom Helm Ltd, first published in paperback in 1996 by Routledge, the edition I am using for this review was published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
ISBN: 0-203-75022-5 (Adobe eReader Format)
Synopsis: To observe the Celts through the eyes of the Greeks and Romans is the first aim of this book.
Review: The book is divided into fifteen chapters plus an appendix which covers the Romans and Ireland. It also has an extensive bibliography.
As a whole this book is pretty hard to rate and review. To me it was a mix of the book Heroic Age and a generic Celtic history book, but in an abridged form. It does however, look at a section of knowledge about the Celts that most people who study them tend to ignore OR not take into account for varies reasons and that is the Latin and Greek texts. The author takes the time to put the quotations from the Classical authors in the context of time and place and of the peoples around the Celts at the time and how these quotations could have been feasible in light of their contact with these peoples. He also looks at these texts in light of available archeological, and vernacular data where available.
But to tell you the truth I was a little bored at the beginning with all the repeated historical information. It seemed that the author was repeating the same data over and over but taking it from different perspectives or “eyes” each time. It was not until chapter ten that I started to wake up and then chapter twelve when I started to REALLY get interested. These final chapters talked about the Celtic Women, the druids and the Celtic religion and the different Celts (Galatians, Gauls and so on).
Of course the appendix was great and the bibliography is amazing.
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