to look at him as an Irish Mercury: we should be wrong, no doubt, as a wider view of his character serves to show, but this helps us to see how it was possible to call father and son by the one name of Lugoves.
Before leaving this part of the subject, a word more has to be said of the name Lugdunum, and the various ways in which it has been explained. (1) The pseudo-Plutarch De Fluminibus speaks of it in these words: "There lies close by it [namely, the river Arar] a mountain called Lugdunos, and it had its name changed from the following cause: Momaros and Atepomaros having been driven from the government by Seseronis, wished to found a city upon this hill according to the direction, and suddenly, while the foundations were being dug, there appeared ravens fluttering about, and they filled the trees all round. Now Momaros was skilled in augury, and named the city Lugdunon; for in their idiom they call a raven λοῦγος, and an eminence they call δοῦνον, as Klitopho narrates in the 13th book of his Foundations."[1] Mountain or hill may do as the translation of the sort of town or acropolis which the Grauls called dūnon; but that they had a word lugos, meaning a raven, is a statement which the vocabularies of the Celtic languages seem to leave open to doubt:[2] it was most likely a guess founded on the alleged appearance of the ravens during the found-
- ↑ Plutarch, ed. Dübner (Paris, 1855), Vol. v. p. 85 (Pseudo-plutarchea de Fluviis, vi. 4): see also Midler's (Didot) Frag. Hist. Gr. iv. p. 367.
- ↑ The nearest word known to the alleged lugos, 'a raven,' would be the Irish luch, 'a mouse;' luglíath, 'grey as a mouse,' Bk. of Leinster, 120a; lochrúna, 'dark secrets,' so rendered in the Stokes-O'Donovan Cormac, p. 100, where lochdub is also translated 'all black;' Welsh, llyg, 'a shrew or field-mouse;' llygoden, 'a mouse;' llygliw, 'of the colour of a mouse.'
