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Stilicho's Pictish War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2011

M. Miller
M. Miller
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55 Hamilton Drive, Glasgow
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Extract

Gildas's much-criticised sketch, outlining the perils of Britain after Maximus, lists three Pictish wars before the adventus Saxonum. Claudian's poem on Stilicho's consulate seems to allude to a recent encounter, which may be one of these wars. Now that the political and propagandist character of Claudian's verse has been analysed, and the poems accurately dated, a more useful survey of the references to Britain may be attempted. The result is no more than a footnote to the understanding of Claudian: its impact may be greater on the understanding of Gildas.

Type
Articles
Information
Britannia , Volume 6 , November 1975 , pp. 141 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © M. Miller 1975. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

1 Cameron, Alan: Claudian: Poetry and Propaganda at the court of Honorius (Oxford 1970)Google Scholar. Stilicho's activities in Britain are discussed by Frere, S. S., Britannia (London 1967), 235 ff., 362 ff.Google Scholar

2 Quotations are from the Teubner edition by J. Koch (1903), which generally follows the standard edition by Birt, T. in Mon. Germ. Hist. Auct. Antiq. x (1892). I have not noted variants where these are not germane to the present purpose, such as sensit for sentit in the second quotation, or cumulos for tumulos in the fourth.Google Scholar

3 ‘tamed the nimble Moors and the not ill-named Picts; his roaming sword pursued the Scot; his daring oars broke northern waves. Resplendent with twin trophies won beneath both poles, he trampled the tide-washed strands of either Ocean’.

4 ‘Britain feels the deadly sound’.

5 ‘the farthest Britons’.

6 ‘who pitched his camp in Caledonian snows; who, helmeted, endured a Libyan summer's heat; terror of the Moor, conqueror of Britain's shore, equal scourge of North and South. What avail the eternal snows, the frozen air, the uncharted sea? Orkney ran red with Saxon slaughter, Shetland glowed with Pictish blood, ice-bound Ireland bewailed the burial mounds of Scots’.

7 ‘savage Britain produced Maximus’.

8 ‘not with her wonted countenance, nor such as imposed laws on the Britons or subjected the frightened Indians to her rule’.

9 Frere, op. cit. (note 1), 352.

10 ‘The Spanish and German seas obeyed you, and Britain sundered from our world’.

11 ‘What I can do when you are prince is not far to seek: conquered Saxon, gentler seas; broken Pict, and Britain freed from care’.

12 ‘Then, wrapped in Caledonian garb, her cheeks tattooed, her azure train counterfeiting Ocean's surge to unprint her footsteps, Britain spoke: “When neighbouring peoples would have killed me, Stilicho gave me forts—for the Scot stirred all Ireland against me and my sea foamed beneath the hostile oars. Stilicho took such care, I do not fear the Scottic javelin nor tremble at the Pict, nor on all my coast search each doubtful wind for the approaching Saxon”’.

line 211: munivit: a single thirteenth-century manuscript, Paris 8082, reads me iuvit, which is adopted in Crépin's edition (1933), and translated (but not printed) by Platnauer (Loeb). Corruption either way would be easy, but me iuvit is against the text-tradition as given by Birt.

13 ‘When Ocean stopped her march, she took up oars and launched upon the deep, seeking to conquer the Britons of that other world’.

14 ‘Britons to break the mighty necks of bulls’.

15 Rumour… ‘brought terror from Cadiz to the British Ocean’.

16 ‘and there came the legion, shield of the frontier Britons, check of the grim Scot, whose men had watched life leave the tattoos on the dying Pict’

17 ‘the peoples nurtured by dreadful Britain’.

18 ‘who carried his standards across the British ocean’.

19 The standard text of de Exidio is T. Mommsen, Chronica Minora iii (Mon. Germ. Hist. Auct. Antiq. xiii).

20 Perhaps for the exemplaria armorum we should compare the uniforms imported in the fourth century, but British-made in the fifth: Frere, op. cit (note I), 359. The exemplaria should involve the abrogation of the lex Iulia de vi publica usually connected with Honorius's rescript. This letter would then have to be regarded as a confirmation of the legitimacy of the government established after the revolt against Constantine III: this would be needed not only from the British point of view after Constantine, but also in some respects from the Roman, after Stilicho.

21 The chief difficulty in Gildas's account is not his ignorance about the walls, which merely supports his own statement that he possessed no written history of Roman Britain (which could have told him about Hadrian, Antoninus and Severus): since he had to rely on observation and inference, his conclusion that the turf wall was post-Roman is merely a typological error arising, presumably, from knowledge of other post-Roman earthworks of considerable extent; and his date for the stone wall is almost certainly an inference from inscriptions: Stevens, C. E., ‘Gildas Sapiens’ in EHR lvi (1941), 359 n. 6. The major difficulty is his apparent belief that in 389/90 a frontier capable of support by Roman expeditionary forces was at the turf wall, and withdrawn to the stone wall in 398: Professor Frere emphasizes to me that this is entirely without archaeological support. However, Gildas thinks of his turf wall as not only built, but manned, by Brittonic forces, so that his account does not require a Roman re-occupation of southern Scotland. Moreover, we know that the later Brittonic view was unanimous: Romanity extended to the Forth-Clyde line—that is, the descendants of the client states of the Votadini and Dumnonii thought themselves to be as Roman as the descendants of the Brigantes within the diocese. If we could be certain, instead of merely reasonably sure, that the Coroticus addressed by St. Patrick was Ceredig wledig of Strathclyde, this Brittonic view would be evidenced well before Gildas's time, and could be attributed to him with considerable security. We do not know what politico-military arrangements were made by Maximus after his Pictish war, nor whether they were re-established or changed in 389/90: therefore we cannot say exactly what the affair of 398 involved from the Roman point of view, except that it was something which Claudian found himself unable to use for Stilichonian propaganda—a judgement which is certainly not controverted by Gildas.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 And it raises sharply the question of Bede's source for his two additions to Gildas's narrative of the second war. Bede says rursum mittitur legio instead of Gildas's cavalry and navy; and asserts that it arrived not only inopinata (agreeing with Gildas), but also tempore autumni. These additions have verisimilitude, but what was Bede's source?