Professor Ronald Hutton

speaker

248 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 2 Aug

Professor Ronald Hutton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Empire: World History · 383. Romans vs Druids: The War For Celtic Britain (Ep 1) · 2 Aug 2026 podcast

Who can turn down Christopher Lee and drag?

But the image of the Wicker Man is possible as history, but it's unstable.

It occurs in just two sources, one of which may have taken it from the other.

The big one is Julius Caesar, who actually campaigned among tribes that had druids.

He knew somebody whom somebody else says was a druid.

The trouble is that the passage in which he describes druids

is an odd one in Caesar's book.

It doesn't fit in with the rest.

It's actually contradicted in places by things that Caesar himself said.

And we know that Caesar left his book unfinished when he got knifed.

And so it could be that his successor, the guy who finished the book, decided he was getting boring at that stage and chucked in extra material of unknown reliability.

The person who finished his book didn't go to Gaul with Caesar, and so his knowledge would have been very sketchy.

And that's the only place where you find the burning alive in big wicker images.

There's a later Greek geographer called Strabo.

He's in Alexandria, wasn't he?

Yes, that's right.

He may have gone as far as Sicily, but that's still a very long way from Druids.

And he repeats the same information, maybe from an independent source, maybe from Caesar.

So it's all very shaky.

The problem for us is that the word druid just means an expert in religion and magic.

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