Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/106

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100
The Greek Trade-Routes to Britain.

standing, on others a Pegasus; on some the head of the Pegasus is fancifully formed like a little winged Eros seated in a stooping posture, with arms stretched forward, downwards (Heiss, op. cit., pl. ii). Again, instead of this fanciful head, we find a genuine human head attached to the equine body, in fact, a regular Centaur. Heiss shows that of the six main types according to which he classifies them, the Gauls imitated five. But they were not satisfied with imitating individual types, but must needs blend two or more together to get new varieties of their own; thus No. 21 is a Gaulish blending of types 1 and 2 (Heiss, p. 92).

Heiss has no doubt that the Centaur, with the addition of the drawn sword, is a development of the human-headed Pegasus, but he feels somewhat uncertain whether to regard it as struck at Emporiæ, or as a Gaulish imitation. Now all through the south and west of Gaul we find a remarkable type; it is an anthropocephalous figure, having undoubtedly the body of a horse, but undergoing many variations amongst various tribes. Coins bearing such a type have been found at Toulouse (Tolosa), the capital of the powerful nation of the Volcæ Tectosages (Lelewel, Type Gaulois, c. 31), a region where we shall find likewise evidence of the influence of Rhoda; among the Turones (Hucher, L’Art Gaulois, Pl. 24), Pictones (ibid., Pl. 9), Namnetes (Pl. 81), Redories (Rennes, ibid., Pl. 47), and all the peoples of the Armorican peninsula; they are likewise found in the Channel Islands, and in the south and west of England, as at Portsmouth, at Mount Batten, near Plymouth, and in Devonshire (Evans, British Coins, p. 129).

Follow the peoples enumerated above on the map of Gaul, and we shall find them all lying in the basins of the Garonne and Loire. We find the Namnetes (whose name is preserved in Nantes) occupying the situation at the mouth of the Loire, where most probably stood the city of Corbilo, the great emporium on the ocean shore in the time of Pytheas, and whose name, perhaps, still appears in the