speak with a voice of the delicacy of the lily, a voice well covered, so to say, with bloom;[1] a for the bloom of flowers, if my memory does not fail me, has the term lilies applied to it. So if this old man Heracles, the power of speech, draws men after him, tied to his tongue by their ears, you have no reason to wonder, as you must be aware of the close connection between the ears and the tongue. Nrv is there any injury done him by this latter being pierced; for I remember, said he, learning while among you some comic iambics, to the effect that all chattering fellows have the tongue bored at the tip. In a word, we Celts are of opinion that Heracles himself performed everything by the power of words, as he was a wise fellow, and that most of his compulsion was effected by persuasion. His weapons, I take it, are his utterances, which are sharp and well-aimed, swift to pierce the mind; and you too say that words have wings. Thus far the Celt.
According to this account, Ogmios, or the Gaulish Heracles, was the personification of what the Greeks understood by λόγος: he was the god of speech and all that conduced to make speech a powerful agency—eloquence and wisdom, the craft of Hermes, and the varied experience of the travelled old man who had seen many peoples and visited many lands. Now if we wished to discover the equivalent of Ogmjos in the languages of the
- ↑ I am not quite sure that I comprehend this allusion to the lily; but here is the original for those who may object to being led astray: καὶ οἱ ἀγορηταὶ τῶν Τρώων τὴν ὄπα τὴν λειριόεσσαν ἀφιᾶσιν εὐανθῆ τινα· λείρια γὰρ καλεῖται, εἴ γε μέμνημαι, τὰ ἄνθη. The whole prolalia is No. 7 (pp. 23—25) in Bekker's edition, and No. 55 (pp. 598—600) in Dindorf's; extracts from it will also be found in Zeuss's Grammatica Celtica, edited by Ebel, pp. 1, 2.
