As he was liberal to the bards, they did not forget his merits.
Moreover, he wrote an article in the Edinburgh Review of July 1805 criticizing Sir William Gill's Topography of Troy, and these circumstances led Lord Byron to refer to him in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers as "the travell'd thane, Athenian Aberdeen."
We are, however, informed by Diodorus and Strabo that this class was composed of Druids, bards and soothsayers.
The functions of Caesar's Druids we here find distributed amongst Druids, bards and poets (fili), but even in very early times the poet has usurped many of the duties of the Druid and finally supplants him with the spread of Christianity.
It was also used by a class of bards or itinerant soothsayers known by the name of vates, of whom the most famous was one Marcius, and in the "Fescennine verses," as sung at harvest-homes and weddings, which gave expression to the coarse gaiety of the people and to their strong tendency to personal raillery and satiric comment.
