PRECURSOR – A CYCLOPEAN PERSPECTIVE

The origins of the term ‘Celt’ are in classical literature, though its usage there had little to do with modern notions of race. In Michael Chapman's account The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (1992), the Celtic identity in classical literature is understood not as a product of any biological or even cultural reality but in terms of the rationalising that a more powerful culture makes about a much weaker one. Thus the term ‘Celt’ meant something like ‘non-Greek speaking uncivilised barbarian in the north and west’ and the disappearance of the ‘Celt’ became the result not of massacre and destruction, but of assimilation where ‘the clear distinction between civilised Greek and Rome and the barbarian’ disappeared. It is for this reason, according to Chapman, that between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries, and with a few ‘fantastic scholarly exceptions’, no one ‘called themselves or anybody else Celts’.