[17]. It is usually supposed that true history in Ireland commences with the introduction of Christianity and the mission of St. Patrick, but this date is by no means certain. The author is more inclined to place the separation between those annals which may be depended on as consisting in the main of true history, and those which present the appearance of an artificial construction, into which fragments of history, legendary matter, and fabulous creations, have been interwoven, at the event termed the battle of Ocha, fought in 483. By that battle the dynasty of the Hy Neill was placed on the throne of Ireland. It separates the Pagan kings from the Christian. The marvellous and fanciful events which characterise the previous reigns here drop from the annals, and what follows has an air of probability and reality, and it was undoubtedly viewed as a great era by the older chroniclers; as, for instance, Flann of Bute, who wrote his Synchronisms in 1054, has ‘Forty-three years from the coming of St. Patrick to Erin to the battle of Ocha; twenty years from the battle of Ocha till the children of Erc, son of Echach Muindremair, passed over into Alban.’—Chron. Picts and Scots, p. 18.
[18]. The author has explained his views as to the authorities for this period of the history more anxiously, because he does not at all sympathise with Mr. Burton in his view of the authority of Tacitus as an historian, and the character of his narrative. The author is unable to see how the credibility of his narrative is impaired by the fact that his Life of Agricola was not included in the first edition of his works, and was unknown to our historians before Hector Boece. Mr. Burton hardly ventures to question the authenticity of the Life of Agricola. The view he appears to hold, that it was written more as a political manifesto than as a plain historical relation of facts, has been hastily adopted from a school of German critics, whose views have not, however, met with acceptance from the sounder class of them. The author holds the authenticity of the Life of Agricola to be unquestionable, and that its fidelity as a narrative cannot be reasonably assailed; and he considers any argument drawn from the presence or absence of local tradition as to the events it records to be irrelevant, as all genuine tradition of this kind in Scotland has perished under the influence of the immense popularity and general acceptance at the time of Hector Boece’s fabulous history, which has, in fact, created a spurious local tradition all over Scotland.
BOOK I.
HISTORY AND ETHNOLOGY.
CHAPTER I.
ADVANCE OF THE ROMANS TO THE FIRTHS OF FORTH AND CLYDE.
Early notices of the British Isles.
As early as the sixth century before the Christian era, and while their knowledge of Northern Europe was still very imperfect, the Greeks had already become aware of the existence of the British Isles. This comparatively early knowledge of Britain was derived from the trade in tin, for which there existed at that period an extensive demand in the East. It was imported by sea by the Phœnicians, and by their colony, the Carthaginians, who extended their voyages beyond the Pillars of Hercules; and was subsequently prosecuted as a land trade by their commercial rivals, the Greek colonists of Marseilles.
A Greek poet, writing under the name of Orpheus, but whose real date may be fixed at the sixth century, mentions these remote islands under the name of the Iernian Isles;[[19]] but in the subsequent century they were known to Herodotus as the Cassiterides, or Tin Islands,[[20]] a name derived from the chief article of the trade through which all report of their existence was as yet derived.
In the fourth century they are alluded to by Aristotle as two very large islands beyond the Pillars of Hercules; and, while the name of Britannia was now from henceforth applied, especially by the Greek writers, to the group of islands, of whose number and size but vague notions were still entertained, the two principal islands appear for the first time under the distinctive appellations of Albion and Ierne.[[21]]
Polybius, in the second century before Christ, likewise alludes to the Britannic Islands beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and to the working of the mines by the inhabitants.[[22]]
Besides these direct allusions to the British Isles, we have preserved to us by subsequent writers an account of these islands from each of the two sources of information—the Phœnician voyages and the land trade of the Phocæans of Marseilles—in the narratives of the expeditions of Himilco and Pytheas.