the Iron Age societies of Western Europe that emphasizes their "barbaric" qualities. The second of these two groups is termed the "Alexandrian" group, being centred on the scholastic traditions of Alexandria, Egypt; she notes that it took a more sympathetic and idealized attitude toward these foreign peoples. Piggott drew parallels between this categorisation and the ideas of "hard primitivism" and "soft primitivism" identified by historians of ideas A. O. Lovejoy and Franz Boas. One school of thought has suggested that all of these accounts are inherently unreliable, and might be entirely fictional. They have suggested that the idea of the druid might have been a fiction created by Classical writers to reinforce the idea of the barbaric "other" who existed beyond the civilized Greco-Roman world, thereby legitimizing the expansion of the Roman Empire into these areas. The earliest record of the druids comes from two Greek texts of c. 300 BCE: a history of philosophy written by Sotion of Alexandria, and a study of magic widely attributed to Aristotle. Both texts are now lost, but are quoted in the 2nd century CE work Vitae by Diogenes Laërtius. Subsequent Greek and Roman texts from the 3rd century BCE refer to "barbarian philosophers", possibly in reference to the Gaulish druids. Julius Caesar The earliest extant text that describes druids in detail is Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, book VI, written in the 50s or 40s BCE. A general who was intent on conquering Gaul and Britain, Caesar described the druids as being concerned with "divine worship, the due performance of sacrifices, private or public, and the interpretation of ritual questions". He said they played an important part in Gaulish society, being one of the two respected classes along with the equites (in Rome the name for members of a privileged class above the common people, but also "horsemen") and that they performed the function of judges. Caesar wrote that the druids recognized the authority of a single leader, who would rule until his death, when a successor would be chosen by vote or through conflict. He remarked that they met annually at a sacred place in the region occupied by the Carnute tribe in Gaul, while they viewed Britain as the centre of druidic study; and that they were not found among the German tribes to the east of the Rhine. According to Caesar, many young men were trained to be