Look now how mortals are blaming the gods, for they say that evils come from us, but in fact they themselves have woes beyond their share because of their own follies....

All men have need of the gods....

Olympus, where they say there is an abode of the gods, ever unchanging; it is neither shaken by winds nor ever wet with rain, nor does snow come near it, but clear weather spreads cloudless about it, and a white radiance stretches above it....

The gods, likening themselves to all kinds of strangers, go in various disguises from city to city, observing the wrongdoing and righteousness of men....

So it is that the gods do not give all men gifts of grace-neither good looks nor intelligence nor eloquence....

-From the Odyssey Which crafty Greek hero can't wait to get home?

Home is a powerful idea-as anyone who has seen E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial knows. But the little alien had it easy compared to the most famous homebound traveler in literature, Odysseus, the cunning king of Ithaca. He is the star of the Odyssey, one of the most influential works in Western history and among the greatest adventure stories ever told. Scholars still fight over its origins, but, traditionally, the Odyssey is thought to have been composed by Homer, probably in the 700s BCE. The poem describes Odysseus's long journey home to Ithaca, an island off the northwest coast of Greece, after he fights against Troy. One of the heroes of the Iliad, Odysseus (changed in Latin to "Ulixes" and translated into English as "Ulysses"), is credited with the idea of the Trojan horse, and just as he used trickery to end the ten years of fighting, he relies on his wits to defy even greater odds in the Odyssey.

Like the Iliad, the Odyssey consists of twenty-four books, but it is considerably shorter, running some 12,000 lines long, and takes place over a period of about ten years. Unlike the Iliad, which is more of a tragedy, the Odyssey is an adventure tale, and in many ways more "fun." It has been called a "comedy," in the original sense of the word, which meant order was restored with the reuniting of a family. The good guys and bad guys are easily identifiable. Very different from Achilles or Hector, Odysseus is the crafty hero-resolute, curious, but mostly devoted, like E.T. or Dorothy Gale of Kansas, to getting back home after nearly twenty years away-ten of them fighting at Troy, three lost at sea, and seven more on the island of Calypso, where his tale begins.

Odysseus has been the prisoner of the sea nymph Calypso (whose name means "concealer"), when the gods of Mount Olympus decide that the time has come for him to return to Ithaca and his loyal wife, Penelope. During his long absence, she has been under pressure to accept that her husband is dead, and marry again so that Ithaca has a new king. Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, resents his mother's noblemen suitors, and the goddess Athena suggests that he go to seek news of his father. Telemachus sets off in search of him.

Meanwhile, the tale returns to Odysseus's adventures. When Calypso releases Odysseus, he sails away on a raft, but Poseidon-angry at Odysseus for reasons that will emerge-sends a storm that shipwrecks him. Washed ashore on a beach, he is discovered by Nausicaa, the beautiful daughter of the Phaeacian king. Sheltered by the Phaeacians, he recounts for them his years of wandering since the Trojan War when he set out for home with twelve ships carrying fifty men each.

First, he tells of his escape from the lotus-eaters, who consume a drug that makes men forget home and purpose. Next, he recounts his blinding of the Cyclops Polyphemus with a hot wooden stake. Odysseus had cleverly told Polyphemus that his name was "Nobody," so that the other Cyclopes would be befuddled when the wounded Cyclops roars that "Nobody" is trying to kill him. Concealing his crewmen under some sheep so they can pass by the blinded Cyclops, Odysseus and the crewmen eventually escape-but Odysseus then makes the mistake of taunting the giant and reveals his true name. Cyclops then prays to his father, Poseidon, who avenges the creature by vowing to make Odysseus's homecoming a nightmare come true.

After being blown off course, Odysseus sails on to the island of the enchantress Circe, who changes all of the crewmen into pigs but wants Odysseus for a lover. Protected from the spell of Circe by a magical herb, Odysseus beds Circe and subsequently learns how to return his crewmen to human form and sail past the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis. The sorceress also tells Odysseus how to navigate past the Sirens, sea nymphs who use their beautiful singing to lure sailors to death on a magic island. Finally, she warns the men not to eat the sacred cattle of Helius (the sun).

Odysseus's ship survives most of these dangers and seems ready to reach Ithaca without further trouble until some of his men ignore Circe's warnings and eat the sacred cattle of the sun. As punishment, the ship is destroyed by a thunderbolt. All the men drown, except Odysseus, and he is washed up on the island of the beautiful nymph Calypso, who promises Odysseus eternal life if he marries her. After seven years on Calypso's island, Odysseus goes to the shore one day and weeps for his beloved wife, Penelope. Seeing this, Athena takes pity on him and asks Zeus to release Odysseus from his suffering. Odysseus builds a raft and lands on the island of the Phaeacians, where the young princess Nausicaa discovers him, naked, save for a strategically placed tree branch. The princess takes Odysseus to her father's court, where he begins to recount his adventures.

After Odysseus finishes his story, he returns home. Reunited with his son, Telemachus, Odysseus goes to the palace, dressed in beggar's rags. Penelope has spent years tricking her suitors by promising that she will choose one of them when she finishes a weaving, a project she unravels each night. The exasperated suitors demand that she finally choose among them, and she finally agrees to marry the man who can string Odysseus's great bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axes. Taking the bow himself, the disguised Odysseus wins the contest, then kills all 108 of the unarmed young suitors and is reunited with Penelope.

Did the Romans take all their myths from the Greeks?

The "Greek Miracle" in Athens-highlighted in the works of the three tragedians who based most of their works on the myths-soon came crashing down. A series of wars with rival Sparta began in 431 BCE. A great plague struck Athens, killing Pericles, among many others, in 429 BCE. In 404 BCE, Athens surrendered to Sparta, concluding the disastrous Peloponnesian Wars that had split Greece. Oligarchy, the rule of a few wealthy aristocrats, returned to Athens.

The doom of the Golden Age was sealed in 338 BCE, when King Philip from the northern province of Macedonia united all Greece under his rule. An era had ended. The curtains and lights had gone down on the glorious age of the city-state and all its remarkable accomplishments. But a new act was about to open in the drama of Greek glory when Philip was assassinated and replaced by his ambitious son, Alexander, a student of Aristotle, who, as Alexander the Great, spread Greek culture, language, and ideas throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Establishing his namesake city, Alexandria in Egypt, Alexander made it the center of Greek culture, a position it held for the next three hundred years. In the Hall of the Muses there, the classics of Greek literature were gathered, and science flourished as scholars took up the serious study of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. In Alexandria, Greek-speaking Jews translated the ancient Hebrew writings into the first Greek version of the Bible, known as the Septuagint, and Apollodorus collected his library-the most complete and straightforward accounting of Greek myths from the creation of the world to the death of Odysseus. Alexander's massive effort to "Hellenize" his empire continued even beyond his death in the city of Babylon in 323 BCE.

But a new star was rising in the Mediterranean. A small tribe of Indo-European speakers*on the Tiber River, living near the future city of Rome, had begun to build an unparalleled empire that would, over the course of the next three hundred years, dominate and control the entire Mediterranean world and well beyond. These warriors first entered Greece in 229 BCE, and, in 146 BCE, sacked Corinth, and soon all of Greece became a Roman province. Instead of forcing their own myths and gods on the people they conquered, the Romans quickly absorbed the ideas and cultures of the conquered, especially the Greeks, whose glorious legends and stories they adopted as their own.

Roman mythology, in fact, largely seems a copy of Greek mythology. As Thomas Cahill put it, "Of the many people of Earth, the Romans may have had the most boring religion of all.... Contact with the impressive stories of Greek mythology and the thrilling art that accompanied them-a contact that began as a result of the Greek colonization of southern Italy-encouraged the Romans to dress up their own religion in Greek fashions."

From ancient times, the earliest Romans did possess a mythology of their own. In fact, many of the basic similarities between Roman and Greek mythology can be traced to the common Indo-European heritage shared by Rome and Greece. Before the Romans came into contact with Greek culture, they worshipped the gods of their direct ancestors, the Latini, who may have arrived on the Italian peninsula around 1500 BCE and were on the future site of Rome by about 1200 BCE. The native Romans had many of their own gods, including three major deities-Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus-who are known as the "archaic triad." Jupiter ruled as god of the heavens and came to be identified with Zeus. Mars was god of war and occupied a much more important place in Roman mythology than did Ares, the war god of the Greeks. Quirinus, an agricultural god, eventually faded from prominence, absorbed by the Greek gods.

By the late 500s BCE, the Romans replaced the archaic triad with the "Capitoline triad"-Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva-a name that came from the Capitoline Hill in Rome, where the main temple of Jupiter stood. In this new triad, Jupiter remained the Romans' chief god. They identified Juno with the Greek Hera, and Minerva with Athena. It was during the 300s BCE, as the Romans came into increasing contact with Greek ideas, that they began to worship Greek gods and goddesses, gave them Roman names, and built temples and shrines in their honor.

Between the 500s and 100s BCE, additional Roman mythological figures appeared, nearly all of them based on Greek divinities. Besides Greek-inspired divinities, the Romans worshipped many native gods and goddesses, including Faunus, a nature spirit later connected to Pan; Pomona, goddess of fruits and trees; Terminus, god of boundaries; and Tiberinus, god of the Tiber River.

The earliest Romans had believed that gods and goddesses had power over agriculture and all aspects of daily life. For example, Ceres was the goddess of the harvest and became associated with the Greek Demeter. Her festival was the Cerealia, a ceremony held in April (and the source of the word "cereal"). Her daughter Persephone became the Roman Proserpina. The goddess Vesta guarded the hearth fire and was associated with Hestia. The god Janus stood watch at doors and gates. As such, Janus looked both ways and controlled beginnings, which is how his name gets connected with the first month in the Roman calendar, January. Jupiter, later the supreme Roman god, was first worshipped as a sky god with power over the weather, which, obviously, connected him with Zeus. (Their names are also connected, according to most linguists, by the same Indo-European root words for "sky.") Liber, the ancient Roman god of wine, became associated with Dionysus and was also called Bacchus.

Despite the connections to Greek myths and deities, as Rome grew into a republic and then an empire, its religion was very different from that of the Greeks. It is true that, like the Greeks and other ancients, average Romans frequented temples, made sacrifices, embraced superstition, believed in the power of "augury," or divination, became fixated on astrology, and honored household deities. But the Romans were far less interested in myth or theology than they were in raw power, order, and Roman glory-enforced through military superiority and the rule of law known as Pax Romana. This is what made Rome tick, as the empire came to dominate the European and Mediterranean world. The Romans were far more concerned with building good roads on which their legions could travel than imposing their mythic traditions on the people they conquered. In fact, historian Charles Freeman notes, "Roman tolerance to local cults and even their readiness to join them was one important way in which the empire was cemented." When Julius Caesar and Augustus were both deified after their deaths, ushering in an era of emperor worship, it was a consolidation of political power, not a new theology. But it was one which the Roman citizen was wise to acknowledge.

Who were Romulus and Remus?

Unlike the Greeks, the Romans considered their divinities historical persons and used the myths to explain the founding and history of their nation. The best example of this historical emphasis is found in the story of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome.

Romulus and his brother, Remus, were the twin sons of the war god Mars (Greek Ares) who had raped Rhea Silvia, the first of the vestal virgins, as she was bathing. For breaking her vow of chastity, Rhea Silvia was imprisoned and her babies taken from her, set afloat on the Tiber River in a small boat.* When the boat came to rest, the infant boys were found and rescued by a woodpecker and a she-wolf-the sacred animals of Mars. The she-wolf cared for the pair until a shepherd discovered the twins and raised them.

The pair became hunters and warriors who were so respected that men agreed to live under their rule in a new city. Romulus and Remus decided to build a city at the spot on the Tiber where the she-wolf had found them. But at the founding, a bitter quarrel erupted between the brothers, and they fought. Romulus killed his brother and wept over his corpse. Recovering from his grief, Romulus built the new city of Rome, supposedly in 753 BCE.

In the city at first settled only by runaway slaves, bandits, and murderers, and with a dangerous shortage of women, the Romans realized that they needed wives. When a nearby group called Sabines came to a religious festival, the Romans rushd through the crowds, seizing the young Sabine women as captive brides, an incident frequently depicted in classical art as The Rape of the Sabine Women. This episode was followed by a fight between the Sabine tribes and Rome. At the request of Jupiter, the Sabine women stood between the opposing armies and demanded peace. The Sabines eventually joined Rome.

The Romans believed that Romulus became the city's first king, and, according to Roman mythology, he ruled for forty years before vanishing in a thundercloud. Romulus was supposedly the first of seven legendary kings who ruled Rome from its founding until the early 500s BCE. There is little evidence that these seven kings actually existed or that any of the events connected with their reigns ever took place. But it made for a good ending to the story of Rome's epic foundation.

MYTHIC VOICES.

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate, And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate, Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore.

Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore, And in the doubtful war, before he won The Latian realm, and built the destin'd town; His banish'd gods restor'd to rites divine, And settled sure succession in his line, From whence the race of Alban fathers come, And the long glories of majestic Rome.

-VIRGIL, The Aeneid (c. 19 BCE, translated by John Dryden) Was Homer on the Romans' reading list?

Apparently so. Those Romans knew a good thing when they saw it. The national epic of ancient Rome, the Aeneid, is largely modeled on the great Greek epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

A complex poem celebrating Roman virtues and giving the new empire a glorious past, the Aeneid was written by the Roman poet Virgil (also sometimes spelled Vergil) between 30 and 19 BCE. Virgil chose the mythical Trojan hero Aeneas, son of the goddess Aphrodite and Anchises, a prince related to the royal house of Troy, as a way of expressing Rome's ancient moral and religious values. Composed to honor Augustus, the first emperor, who was later believed to be a descendant of Aeneas, the Aeneid comprises twelve books. The first six of these books imitate the Odyssey by describing Aeneas's adventures at sea following the capture of Troy by the Greeks.

As the Aeneid begins, Aeneas and his Trojan followers have survived a shipwreck and reach Carthage, a city actually founded by the Phoenicians in North Africa about 800 BCE-hundreds of years after the Iliad's Troy might have fallen. Once ashore, Aeneas meets and falls in love with Carthage's Queen Dido, and recounts for her court the fall of Troy: the well-loved story of the wooden horse, the tales of Sinon and Laocoon; and his own escape. Then, just as Odysseus had regaled the Phaeacians with his tales in the Odyssey, Aeneas spins the long history of his adventures.

Dido and Aeneas are soon caught up in a steamy romance, but the gods have Roman destiny to worry about. They order Aeneas-the soul of that destiny-to leave Dido. In despair and anger, Dido commits suicide, cursing Aeneas and his descendants with her dying words. Later, after reaching Italy, Aeneas goes down to the underworld-where he encounters Dido and his dead father-and learns about his future descendants, the Romans. He returns to the upper world and, with his followers, lands at the mouth of the Tiber River in Latium.

Virgil based the last six books of the Aeneid on the Iliad, and these begin as Aeneas arrives near the future site of Rome. There, the local king, Latinus, offers him land for his people and marriage to his daughter, Lavinia, who had already been promised to a local king. War erupts between the locals and the Trojan survivors. The battle is hotly contested, and finally Aeneas and the rival king agree to settle the conflict by single battle. Aeneas wounds his opponent, and is about to show him mercy when he sees a reminder of a friend he had lost-as Achilles had lost Patroclus. He plunges his sword into the breast of the warrior king.

Aeneas founds a town called Lavium, after his wife, Lavinia, before he dies in battle. Aeneas's son, Ascanius, later moves the town to Alba Longa, where twelve generations-or 450 years-later the twins Romulus and Remus are born.

MYTHIC VOICES.

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. Some said, "What does this babbler want to say?" Others said, "He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities." (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.) So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus [a hill west of the Acropolis] and asked him, "May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means." Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, "Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, 'To an unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him-though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For 'In him we live and move and have our being' as even some your own poets have said."

-The Acts of the Apostles, 17:2228 What were the Bacchanalia and the Saturnalia?

Following a miraculous conversion, the Apostle Paul, a Jew from Tarsus (in what is now Turkey) who had once persecuted followers of Jesus, spent years traveling the Greco-Roman world of the first century, preaching the gospel, or "good news," of Jesus Christ. This biblical passage described his experience in Athens, where he tried to convince first-century Athenians that Jesus was the one god.

This scene was followed by another interesting episode, in which Paul caused a riot. During a trip to Ephesus, home of the temple to Artemis, known as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Paul continued to preach against idols. But the silversmiths and other craftsmen, who made a good living crafting idols and statues in that Greek city, were not happy with a man preaching a religion that said, "Get rid of your false idols". The silversmiths started a riot and captured two of Paul's traveling companions. A reasonable town clerk stepped in and quieted the crowd, ultimately giving the tradesmen some very modern advice: If they wanted to do something about Paul and the other Christians, they should sue!

The Western world had reached another crossroads: the introduction of the Apostle Paul and the New Testament. Although the Romans crucified Jesus in Jerusalem for treason c. CE 30, his followers spread Christianity throughout the empire. Paul, a Roman citizen, would eventually go to Rome, where he was imprisoned and, legend has it, killed. Peter, one of the original twelve disciples of Jesus, also supposedly died in Rome during the persecution of the early Christian Church. But Rome was about be transformed. And when it was, some ancient practices would collide head-on with Christianity.

During the time of the Roman Empire (roughly from 27 BCE to 476 CE), Roman religion in the empire increasingly centered on the imperial house, and Emperor Augustus himself was deified after his death, as his uncle Julius Caesar had been deified after his assassination. Yet, as Thomas Cahill writes in Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, "Roman religion was basically a businessman's religion of contractual obligations.... Notonly were there few Roman myths, there was virtually no theology...the very enigmas that sparked the speculations of the earliest Greek philosophers."

The exception to the "boring" Roman religion might have been the Bacchanalia, wild and mystic festivals celebrating the Roman (and Greek ) wine god Bacchus. Introduced into Italy around 200 BCE, the Bacchanalia were held in secret and attended first by women only. Admission to the rites was later extended to men, and the notoriety of these festivals, which from earlier Greek times had an air of drunken revelry and probably sexual liberty attached to them, came to be viewed as a threat. In Rome, the cult grew to the point that it was thought that crimes and political conspiracies were being hatched at the Bacchanalia. That led in 186 BCE to a decree of the Senate that severely restricted the festival. In spite of the harsh punishment inflicted on those found in violation of this decree, the Bacchanalia were not stamped out, particularly in the south of Italy, for a very long time.

Another popular Roman festival was the ancient celebration of Saturnalia, a thanksgiving holiday marking the winter solstice and honoring Saturn, the god of agriculture. The Saturnalia began on December 17, and while it only lasted two days at first, it was eventually extended into a weeklong period that lost its agricultural significance and simply became a time of general merriment. Even slaves were given temporary freedom to do as they pleased, while the Romans feasted, visited one another, lit candles, and gave gifts.

All of the similarities between Saturnalia and Christmas are no accident. Christians in the fourth century assigned December 25 as Christ's birthday because pagans already observed the day as a holiday. This would sidestep the problem of eliminating an already-popular holiday while Christianizing the population. In 350, Pope Julius I declared that Christ's birth would be celebrated on December 25. There is little doubt that he was trying to make it as painless as possible for pagan Romans to convert to Christianity; the new religion went down a bit easier with them when they realized that their feasts would not be taken away from them. (Another mythical connection to this special Christian date is the birth of Attis, a vegetation god from Asia Minor who was the consort of a goddess known as Cybele, another "foreign" goddess that the Romans were drawn to worship. Her temple in Rome, appropriated by Christians in the fourth century, was on the site of the Vatican.) From the time Rome had conquered Greece, even more exotic religions were finding their way into the empire, including the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis and Mithraism, a Persian mystery religion of male initiates that flourished in the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries CE. Roman soldiers may have brought this cult of the Persian god Mithra back to Rome, one of a whole crowd of mystery religions competing for converts in the empire. The historian Plutarch (46125 CE) reported that the worship of Mithra was introduced to Rome by captive pirates brought back from Cilicia. By around 100 CE, it had become widely popular among Roman bureaucrats, soldiers, and slaves. Among the legions, this was especially so, with Mithraism's strong emphasis on honor and courage, the brotherhood of the Good combating Evil. It had several similarities to Christianity, including a holy day celebrated on December 25, and was popular enough to warrant suppression by the Christian fathers by the fourth century.

It was in this rather fertile ground of competing cults that Christianity made its debut in the Roman world. Despite persecutions, usually at times of civic tensions beginning with Nero-who was, according to many biblical authorities, the "Beast" with the infamous number 666 in the Book of Revelation-Christianity steadily gained converts. Things changed permanently with the reign of Constantine I, who was named emperor of Rome's western provinces in 306 CE. In 312, Constantine defeated his major rival after having a vision promising victory if he fought under the sign of the Christian cross. In 313, Constantine and Licinius, emperor of the eastern provinces, granted Christians freedom of worship. And after Constantine defeated his coemperor in 324, he moved his capital to Byzantium in 330, renamed the city Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey), and made Christianity the officially supported religion in the Roman state.

After Constantine died in 337, his three sons and two of his nephews fought for control of the Roman Empire. One of the nephews, Julian-later called the Apostate-became emperor in 361. A student of the Greek classics, Julian had been drawn to the Greek gods and underwent a "pagan conversion." As emperor, he tried to check the spread of Christianity and restore the traditional Roman religion. In 363 CE, Julian was killed in an attempt to invade Persia. By the late 300s, Christianity was well established as the official religion of the empire, and Rome was becoming Christianity's central city. All cults, save Christianity, were prohibited in 391 CE by an edict of Emperor Theodosius I. The empire was permanently split into the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire after Emperor Theodosius I died in 395.

The Western Roman Empire grew steadily weaker. The Vandals, Visigoths, and other Germanic peoples invaded Spain, Gaul, and northern Africa. In 410, the Visigoths looted Rome, and the empire "fell" in 476, the year that the Germanic chieftain Odoacer forced Romulus Augustulus, the last ruler of the empire, from the throne. The Eastern Roman Empire survived as the Byzantine Empire until 1453, when the Turks captured Constantinople.

CHAPTER FIVE.

AN AGE OF AXES, AN AGE OF SWORDS.

The Myths of the Celts and Norse In this great carnage on Murtheimme Plain Cuchulainn slew one hundred and thirty kings, as well as an uncountable horde of dogs and horses, women and boys and children and rabble of all kinds. Not one man in three escaped without his thighbone or his head or his eye being smashed, or without some blemish for the rest of his life. And when the battle was over Cuchulainn left without a scratch or a stain on himself, his helper or either of his horses.

from the Tain,

translated by Thomas Kinsella

Break no more my heart today- I will reach my grave soon enough, Sorrow is stronger than the sea...

-"The Poem of Derdriu," from The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu An age of axes, an age of swords, shattered shields An age of tempests, an age of wolfs, before the age of men crashes down.

-Poetic Eddas The Romans, in their first encounters with these exposed, insane warriors, were shocked and frightened. Not only were the men naked, they were howling and, it seemed, possessed, so outrageous were their strength and verve. Urged on by the infernal skirl of pipers, they presented to the unaccustomed and throbbing Roman sensorium a multimedia event featuring all the terrors of hell itself.

-THOMAS CAHILL, How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995) How do we know what the Celts believed?

Did the Druids practice human sacrifice?

What did Druids have to do with Stonehenge?

Who's Who of the Celtic Gods What was The Cattle Raid of Cooley?

How does eating a mythical fish make you really smart?

What do the Celts have to do with Halloween?

What is the Mabinogion?

What mythology besides Celtic came storming out of northern Europe?

How do a giant's armpit and a cow help create the Norse world?

Who's Who of the Norse Gods Who is the most important hero in Norse myth?

MYTHIC MILESTONES.

Celtic and Northern Europe Before the Common Era 35003200 Stone circles and alignments and rows of standing stones are built throughout northern and western Europe.

Stonehenge begun in southern England (completed about 1500); its alignment with the sunrise on the summer solstice seems connected to its purpose. Sacrifice of some kind may have taken place there as well. The quarrying, mining, and transportation of these large stones over long distances suggests a sophisticated social organization, but no written records have been found.

c. 3000 Elaborate passage graves are constructed in Ireland.

c. 2300 European Bronze Age; bronze objects begin to appear in tombs.

c. 1200 Urnfield culture emerges in Danube area, so named because cremated ashes are placed in large urns in communal burial fields.

c. 1000 Earliest fortified hilltop sites in western Europe.

c. 800 Celtic Iron Age begins in Hallstatt (Austria).

753 Rome founded.

c. 500 Graves in France show Greek and Etruscan imports-indications of trade between Celts and Mediterranean civilizations; burials include chariots and weapons.

450 Celtic La Tene culture emerges in west and central Europe and a distinctive art style arises. The La Tene style emphasized elaborate patterns of interwoven curves and spirals and featured highly stylized plants and animals that had little resemblance to nature.

c. 400 Celts expand into British Isles.

Greece's Golden Age flowers in Athens.

390 Celtic tribes burn Rome.