Julius Caesar and the Scots

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).