The Highlanders of Scotland - Clan Strachan Society

6 THE HIGHLANDERS [part i
part of the nation of the Scots, who made their appearance
in these islands about or shortly after the time of Caesar.
Their appearance, situation, and the tradition of a Spanish
origin, which they appear to have possessed in common with the
Scots of Ireland, would lead us to adopt the latter supposition ;
but, as an enquiry into the origin of this tribe would be somewhat
foreign to the object of the present work, and would
lead to considerable digression, we shall proceed to the con-
sideration of the subject more imediately connected with it,
namely, the origin of the inhabitants of the northern part of
Britain.
We have thus seen that the Caledonians, or inhabitants
of the country extending to the north of the Firths of
Forth and Clyde, were the remains of the Albiones ; and
that, in the time of Tacitus, the only other inhabitants of
Britain, besides the Silures, were the Britanni, a people who
acknowledged a Gallic origin. The next author from whom
we can derive any important information on the subject
of their origin is Dio. Cassius, who wrote about
In the third A. I). 235. Hc states that the barbaric Britons consisted
un'^!)nquerej of two great natious called Caledonii and Ma^atai,!
divided Tntn and as provincial Britain unquestionably extended
c^edonil" at that time to the Firths of Forth and Clyde, both of
these nations must have inhabited the country north
of the wall of Antonine. It is equally clear from the words of
Dio., that these two nations were but two divisions of the same
race ; and he adds, that the Ma^atae lay next to the wall and the
Caledonii beyond them, and that to one or other of these two
nations might be referred all the other tribes.
We can only consider them then as the same people who
inhabited Caledonia in the days of Tacitus, and we thus see that
no new people or race had arrived in North Britain down to the
but that it still continued to be
beginning of the third century,
inhabited by the same Caledonii who opposed the march of
Agricola in the first century, and who, we may infer from the
Roman authors, were a part of the ancient nation of the Albiones,
the oldest inhabitants of the island. Of the internal state of the
•
Dio. Cass., 1. 76, c. 12.