Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, De bello civili trans. J.D. Duff (Loeb, 1951), 36-7 (Book I, lines 447-62): You also, O bards, who by the praises of your verse transmit to distant ages the fame of heroes slqain in battle, have poured forth at ease your lays in abundance. And you Druids, laying down your arms, have gone back to the barbarous rites and weird ceremonies of your worship. To you alone is granted knowledge, or ignorance it may be, of gods and celestial powers; you dwell in deep forests with sequestered groves; you teach that the soul does not descend to the silent land of Erebus and the sunless realm of Dis below, but that the same breath still governs the limbs in a different scene. If your tale be true, death is but a point in the midst of continuous life. Truly the nations on whom the Pole star looks down are happily deceived; for they are free from the king of terrors, the fear of death. This gives the warrior his eagerness to rush upon the steel, his courage to face death, and his conviction that it is cowardly to be careful of a life that will come back to him again ...'. [In the Latin, this passage is presented as an address to the Druids, but Duff's translation makes it descriptive, beginning `The Bards also ...'. The translation has been adapted here so as to revert to Lucan's original.]