Ogma is the Irish god of eloquence, language and learning, a champion and strongman of the Tuatha De Danann who unites in one figure the warrior and the poet, physical might and the power of words. He is credited in tradition with the invention of Ogham, the earliest system of writing for the Irish language, a script of strokes cut across a line that survives carved on standing stones from the early centuries CE; the script bears his name, and its origin is ascribed to him as the god of learned speech.
In the Second Battle of Mag Tuired he fights as one of the great champions of his people against the Fomorians, and he is remembered for feats of strength such as the hurling of a great flagstone. Ogma has an illuminating continental counterpart. The Greek writer Lucian, in the Roman period, describes a Gaulish god the Gauls called Ogmios, whom he saw depicted as an old, sun-darkened Hercules, but a Hercules who leads a happy crowd of men bound to him by fine chains of gold and amber running from the tip of his tongue to their ears.
When Lucian asks the meaning, a Gaul explains that the Gauls identify eloquence not with youth but with age, and that this Hercules draws men not by force but by the power of his speech, which binds their ears to his tongue. This memorable image of the god whose eloquence chains his listeners is generally taken to be the continental Celtic form of the same conception that the Irish knew in Ogma: the union of the strong champion and the master of persuasive, learned words. Ogma stands for the Celtic honouring of eloquence as itself a kind of strength.