Roman conquest. In Britain, too, the districts that were in touch with
continental commerce had, as Caesar tells us, also developed in the same
direction. The religious counterpart of this development in civilisation
is the growth in many parts of Gaul, as attested by Caesar and by many
inscriptions and place-names, of the worship of gods identified with
Mercury and Minerva, the deities of civilisation and commerce. It is no
accident that one of the districts most conspicuous for this worship was
the territory of the Allobrogic confederation, where the commerce of the
Rhone valley found its most remarkable development. From this sketch of
Celtic civilisation it will readily be seen how here as elsewhere the
religious development of the Celts stood closely related to the
development of their civilisation generally. It must be borne in mind,
however, that all parts of the Celtic world were not equally affected by
the material development in question. Part of the complexity of the
history of Celtic religion arises from the fact that we cannot be always
certain of the degree of progress in civilisation which any given
district had made, of the ideas which pervaded it, or of the absorbing
interests of its life. Another difficulty, too, is that the accounts of
Celtic religion given by ancient authorities do not always harmonise with
the indisputable evidence of inscriptions. The probability is that the
religious practices of the Celtic world were no more homogeneous than its
general civilisation, and that the ancient authorities are substantially
true in their statements about certain districts, certain periods, or
certain sections of society, while the inscriptions, springing as they do
from the influence of the Gallo-Roman civilisation, especially of Eastern
Gaul and military Britain, give us most valuable supplementary evidence
for districts and environments of a different kind. The inscriptions,
especially by the names of deities which they reveal, have afforded most
valuable clues to the history of Celtic religion, even in stages of
civilisation earlier than those to which they themselves belong. In the