Those were the Days

Those were the Days

“All the Britons dye themselves with vitro, which sets a bluish color upon them and makes them more terrible to behold in battle.”

So wrote Julius Caesar around 50 B.C. in his Commentaries on the Gallic War, describing the people he and his army encountered in Britannia. The earliest translation to English rendered the Latin word “vitro” as “woad,” and that is how the text is commonly quoted. According to modern scholars, however, the word is more properly translated as “glass” or “glazes,” and the “color” that Caesar observed was likely caused by tattooing as well as dye. Regardless, the image of wild, fearsome, blue-painted Briton warriors remains.

For the Romans of Caesar’s time, Britain was at the edge of the known world, a place “where land and nature end,” a place inhabited by dyed and tattooed savages clothed in animal skins. Horace called them “the furthest people of the world.” In Roman society, tattooing was equated with barbarism, and other than limited use within the army, tattoos were only used to mark criminals or recalcitrant slaves. That the Britons dyed and tattooed themselves only contributed to the Roman perception of them as barbarous.

The Roman perception of Britain as a land of uncivilized brutes continued long after Caesar’s time. The historian Herodian, writing in the third century, wrote: “Most of Britain is marshland because it is flooded by the continual ocean tides. The barbarians usually swim in these swamps or run along in them, submerged up to the waist. Of course, they are practically naked and do not mind the mud because they are unfamiliar with the use of clothing, and they adorn their waists and necks with iron, valuing this metal as an ornament and a token of wealth in the way that other barbarians value gold.

They also tattoo their bodies with various patterns and pictures of all sorts of animals. Hence the reason why they do not wear clothes, so as not to cover the pictures on their bodies. They are very fierce and dangerous fighters, protected only by a narrow shield and a spear, with a sword slung from their naked bodies. They are not familiar with the use of breast-plates and helmets, considering them to be an impediment to crossing the marshes. Because of the thick mist which rises from the marshes, the atmosphere in this region is always gloomy.”

The image is a 16th century drawing, depicting a pair of Celtic Briton warriors.