tions which the Romans would have regarded as more properly belonging to Mars.
Such a god as I have alluded to must have once been the greatest of all the Celtic gods, the chief of the Celtic pantheon, a conjecture which is favoured by the natural interpretation of some of the attested epithets of the Celtic Mars. Take, for instance, the dative Rigisamo,[1] which occurs in an inscription found in this country, in the county of Somerset. The word seems to be a superlative, meaning most royal or kingly. A still more remarkable epithet was Albiorix, applied to him in an inscription[2] in a museum at Avignon. The compound should mean king or ruler of Albio, a word which may be identified with the Welsh word 'elfyᵭ,' used by Welsh poets in the sense of the world or the universe: so we may suppose that Albiorix signified king of the world. Lastly, the war-god's associate is called Nemetona on the monuments, as, for instance, on one at Bath.[3] She has been identified by M. Gaidoz[4] with Nemon, the wife, according to Irish tradition, of Nét, the war-god of the ancient Irish. Another tradition, however, gives to the latter as his wife the
- ↑ Hübner, 61.
- ↑ Orelli-Henzen, Vol. iij. No. 5867; J. de Wal, Mythologiae Septentrionalis Monumenta epigraphica Latina, No. ccxcij.; L'Institut for 1841, p. 160.
- ↑ Hübner, 36.
- ↑ Esquisse, p. 10; but this is not certain, and the name seems to be the same that was meant by Niámán in the Bk. of Leinster, 81b, printed in O'Curry's Manners, &c., iij. 418-9. The former, I may say in passing, is a MS. of the 12th century, and my reference is to the lithographed facsimile published with an introduction by Prof. Atkinson, Dublin, 1880.
