HISTORY OF SCOTLAND TO THE CLOSE OF THE 13TH CENTURY. CHAPTER I. THE EARLY HISTORY--BEFORE A. D. 843. Britain, dimly recognisable in the vague accounts given by Hecatæus of a large island off the coast of Gaul inhabited by a sacred race of _Hyperboreans_, and sometimes even disputing with Iceland the questionable honour of having been known as _Ultima Thule_, owes her first introduction within the pale of authentic history to the ambitious policy of the Cæsars. The historian, however, finds little worth recording about the northern districts during the Roman occupation of the island, and that little belongs rather to the province of the antiquary. A transitory gleam of light is shed upon the subject by the pen of Tacitus; [Sidenote: A. D. 80–4.] but the campaigns of Agricola were unproductive of results, and northern Britain again sinks into obscurity until the Emperor Hadrian deemed it necessary for the protection of the Roman province to throw up a turf rampart across the narrowest portion of the island, extending from the Solway to the Tyne. [Sidenote: A. D. 120.] Twenty years later another was added between the Forth and Clyde, connecting the old line of forts erected by Agricola, and known, from the reign in which it was built, as the Wall of Antonine; but after a fruitless struggle of sixty years the whole of the district between these walls was abandoned by Severus, when he raised a third rampart, built of stone, immediately to the northward of the original bulwark. [Sidenote: A. D. 208.] From this period the Roman province was bounded by the southern wall, and though towards the close of the fourth century the energy of Theodosius reasserted the dominion of the empire over the district between Forth and Tyne, [Sidenote: A. D. 369.] which now received the name of Valentia in honour of the Emperor Valens, the newly-established province was soon relinquished, and about the opening of the following century Britain was finally abandoned by her ancient masters. Long before this period the incursions of the northern tribes upon the Roman province [Sidenote: A. D. 407.] had become incessant, and some idea may be formed of the distance to which they occasionally penetrated, from the account left by Ammianus Marcellinus, that Theodosius, after landing at _Rutupe_, the modern Richborough, was obliged to fight his way through Kent, swarming with their hostile bands, before he could reach the capital, Augusta, described by the historian as “an old town formerly known as London.” Their earlier title of Caledonians had by this time disappeared, and they were generally known as Picts, a name including the two great divisions of Vecturiones and Dicaledones, answering apparently to the later confederacies of northern and southern Picts.[1]