Why Is Conrad Poltis Wrong

Conrad Celtis is accused of willingly misleading the public about the origins of an architectural monument. I am of the opinion that he is not guilty. Even though he was wrong, Conrad Celtis saw something in the monument that, in his opinion, belonged to antiquity. He felt that it represented a history that was not its own, but that of another period. Whilst today we identify buildings/artifacts with the period when they were made, Conrad Celtis lived in a day and age when copying was normal and buildings/artifacts were valued not as much for their chronological age, as for their perceived links to the remote origins of religions, nations, monasteries, and families. Pre-modern Germans tended not to distinguish between older buildings and their newer
But the imaginative wanderer claimed that “nothing in these forests was more famous than the monasteries of the druids” – ancient German priests - when he discovered 6 sculpted stone images inserted in the wall of the portal of a temple. Each was 7ft tall with bare feet, uncovered head, a greek robe and hood and a little satchel, a beard reaching all the way down to the waist and bifurcated around the nostrils, with severe brow and solemn eyebrows, in the hands a book and a Diogenes-staff, with head bent forward and eyes fixed on the ground. Not one to take religion seriously, Conrad Celtis’ interpretation was based on his beliefs that embraced the realms of poetry. Yet no such images could have ever existed, for the druids, a pagan priestly fraternity who had played a major role in ancient Celtic societies, left no material relics. The Roman conquerors had outlawed the druids in the 1st century and only fragments of their oral learning survived in Irish and Welsh traditions. Furthermore, Julius Caesar had himself explicitly said that druids had never been in Germany at