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Julius Caesar and the Scots
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
Cicero, in his Brutus, remarked of the Gallic War that while Caesar had written it so that “others who wanted to write history should have materials from which to work ready to their hands, he perhaps put in his debt only the pedants who like to frizzle such things with curling irons, and deterred sensible men from writing at all.” But Pollio Asinius, another of Caesar's contemporaries, disagreed with this opinion; according to Suetonius (Julius 56), Pollio considered Caesar's commentaries “to have been composed with little care and little unbiased verity, for Caesar was usually too ready to believe the reported achievements of others and, whether deliberately or through lapse of memory, to relate his own deeds falsely; and he thought that he had intended to rewrite and correct them.” Both were wrong—Cicero in believing that chroniclers would be content with ornamenting Caesar's data and Pollio in assuming that the major departures from fact in Caesar's biography would be due to his own slips. A choice demonstration of both kinds of error is the legend of Caesar's relations with the Scots.
It is clear from the Gallic War that in Britain Caesar did not have time to go farther north than what is now Essex or Hertford, but by the fifth century a story was current that he had conquered the entire island. In the verse panegyric that Sidonius Apollinaris addressed to his father-in-law, the Emperor Avitus, a personification of Rome tells Jove that Julius Caesar “led his victorious standards even against the Caledonian Britons; and though he vanquished Scot, Pict, and Saxon, he still sought foes even where nature forbade him to seek farther for mankind” (11. 88-92).
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- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1974
References
1 The romance is extant in a 15th-century MS and two 16th-century printings (1528, 1532). For the date of composition see Paris, Gaston, “La Conte de la Rose dans le Roman de Perceforest,” Romania, 23 (1898), 81–83Google Scholar. Julius Caesar appears in three of its episodes, but the third (Bk. V, ch. 4) has nothing to do with Scotland.
2 It may be a mistake to look for any attempt at historical accuracy in an author who telescopes the eight centuries between Alexander the Great and the Arthurian era into three generations: Perceforest, whose son is king of Britain at the time of Caesar's invasion, was appointed King of “England” by Alexander. In fact, this Julices who fights the Scots in the third book may be a different person in the author's mind from the Julius who invades Britain in the fourth book; there are also two Julius Caesars in the prose Merlin (English version, ed. Wheatley, , EETS, 10, part 2, p. 420Google Scholar).
3 Keeler, Laura, Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Late Latin Chroniclers: 1300-1500, University of California Publications in English, 17, no. 1 (1946), p. 79.Google Scholar
4 At the opening of his account of Caesar (VI. 7) Orosius says, “Suetonius Tranquillus has most fully unfolded this history, the relevant portions of which I have extracted”: but his material patently derives from the Gallic War. Apparently he was using a MS in which Caesar's commentaries had been prefixed to Suetonius's Twelve Caesars, which begins with the life of Julius. Possibly the leaf bearing the identification of the Gallic War, if any, had become detached and the assignment of the whole thing to Suetonius was made hastily by someone unaware that the MS contained more than one work.
5 Skene, William K., ed., John of Fordun's Chronicle in Historians of Scotland, IV (1872): 390.Google Scholar
6 Bartholomew's Survey Gazetteer of the British Isles (7 ed., Edinburgh, 1927)Google Scholar, s. v. “Callendar House.”
7 Chronicles of the Picts, Chronicles of the Scots, and Other Early Memorials of Scottish History, ed. Skene, William F. (Edinburgh, 1867), pp. 382 and 186Google Scholar. Students of Macbeth might be interested to know that there is no reference to the legend of Caesar in Andrew of Wyntoun's metrical chronicle.
8 Nearly all the extant English MSS of this work (over a hundred, the earliest dating from c 1400) represent a translation of the second of two 13th-century French redactions. See Brie, Friedrich W. D., Geschichte und Quellen der mittelenglischen Prosachronik The Brute of England oder The Chronicles of England (Marburg, 1905), pp. 51–52.Google Scholar
9 William Stewart, in his metrical translation of Boece (ed. Turnbull. Rolls Series), mentions “Weremund” and Campbell among the authors represented in the library of the abbey of Iona.
10 Turnbull, William B., ed., The Bulk of the Croniclis of Scotland (Rolls Series), I, vii and xiv.Google Scholar
11 Dalrymple trans., ed. E. G. Cody, Scottish Text Society, V (1888), p. xx.
12 Bibliotheca Latina, ed. Ernesti, (1773), I: 273Google Scholar. Cassivellaunus, as Caesar spells the name, was the uncle of Shakespeare's Cymbeline: See CYM III, i.