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Caledonia Quotes

Browse 6 quotes about Caledonia.

Caledonia Quotes

“If, instead of Wainwright's question, we ask 'What were the Picts?', the answer is very simple. They were a nation created by the union of a number of tribes. This union, formed initially as a military alliance against the common enemy, stood the test of time and long outlived the Roman invasion. For the last seventeen centuries the peoples of this union have been known collectively as the Picts, a name first recorded by the Romans. The name itself is a familiar part of the problem: did Picti really mean 'the painted men, or was it simply the Latin form of a long-forgotten native name? Puting this question on one side for the moment, we might refer to the Picts as 'The United Tribes of Caledonia', or UTC for short, a name which tells us just what they really were.”

TribesRoman EmpirePictsCaledoniaFrederick Wainwright
Book:The Age of the Picts
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“So Scotland is to be thought of as a country different from England... the reader and perhaps still more the spectator of Macbeth are made to envisage unmistakably a 'Caledonia stern and wild', a chilly and thinly-populated land of mountains and shaggy woods rather than ploughed fields, of barren moors and battlefields and grim fortresses rather than towns, villages and farms. The elements in this most atmospheric of plays accord with the wild setting and with the wild deeds occurring in it. The weather is unpredictable, more often than not stormy and boistrous... with dark nights or ominous half-light predominant over brief glimpses of the day and the sun.”

ScotlandMacbethCaledonia
Book:Murder Under Trust, or The Topical Macbeth and other Jacobean Matters
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“A restatement of the primary evidence may therefore be helpful in understanding what the experience of having the Roman Empire on the doorstep may have meant for the early Caledonians. Firstly, no matter how it is framed, this was no mere interlude in Scottish history. The Roman Iron Age in Scotland spanned over 300 years of many recorded episodes of interaction, mostly violent, with one of the world's most powerful and expansionist empires. A third of a millenium that saw the presence of one of the highest concentrations of Roman military personnel - it has been estimated that at the height of occupation, at least one in eight Roman soldiers was serving in North Britain. The building of two great walls, the larger of which was maintained for a 300-year period and both with offensive and defensive characteristics of a magnitude not shared by any other Roman fronteir of its size. Unlike other zones of interaction, there is little evidence of regular trade and no manifestation of any meaningful civic development.”

Roman EmpireCaledoniaRoman Britain
Book:The Eagle and the Bear: A New History of Roman Scotland
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