Orcades: incaluit Pictorum sanguine Thule:
Scotorum cumulos flevit glacialis Ierne (viii. 26).
It has generally been supposed that the province had at this time only extended to the wall between the Solway and the Tyne, and that Theodosius added the additional territory, which now for the first time became a province under the name of Valentia. But the words of the historian are directly opposed to this: ‘Recuperatamque provinciam, quæ in ditionem concesserat hostium, ita reddiderat statui pristino.’—Am. Mar. B. xxviii. c. 3.
[94]. The Notitia Imperii, compiled subsequently to this expedition, has the following bodies of Atecotti in the Roman army who were stationed in Gaul:—
Atecotti.
Atecotti juniores Gallieani.
Atecotti Honoriani seniores.
Atecotti Honoriani juniores.—
Not. Dig., ed. Böcking.
St. Jerome says that he saw in Gaul the Atticotts, a British nation, which implies that they were inhabitants of Britain. He says (Adv. Her. ii.), ‘Quid loquar de cæteris nationibus, quum ipse adolescentulus in Gallia viderim Atticotos, gentem Britannicam, humanis vesci carnibus.’ As St. Jerome says that he was then ‘adolescentulus,’ and was born in the year 340, it is supposed that this could not have been later than 355; but this is a mistake arising from overlooking the lax sense in which Jerome uses the word ‘adolescentulus,’ which he stretches into very mature age. He uses the expressions of ‘puer’ and ‘adolescens’ for himself when he was at least thirty years old. St. Jerome was in Gaul at only one period of his life, and that we know from other circumstances must have been about the period of Theodosius’s conquest. That the Atecotti were inhabitants of the district between the walls appears from the fact that they only joined the invading tribes after the latter had been four years in possession of that territory; and that no sooner was it again wrested from the invaders by Theodosius, than we find them enlisted in the Roman army.