PICTS, an ancient people of North Britain, whose origin and history are singularly obscure, and have furnished matter for endless specula tion and controversy. The name does not occur in the enumeration of the British tribes given by Ptolemy in the beginning of the 2nd century ; nor are the Picts noticed by his successors Dion Camilla and Herodian, the latter of whom wrote about A.D. 250, any more than they are by his predecesors Juliue Cigar and Tacitus. This has not prevented some writers from maintaining that the Pieta were settled in Britain before Qesar'e invasion ; that is, for instance, the opinion of Pinkerton ; but it is certainly at least in the highest degree improbable that they should have been passed over by Ptolemy if they were hero in his time. The earliest mention of them by any ancient writer occurs in an oration addressed by the rhetorician Eumeniun to the emperor Constantius Chlorus, on his return from his victory over the usurper Alleetus, in the year 296. Eumenius them speaks of the Britanni in the time of Julius Cresar (according to the best reading of the passage) as " Solis ... Pica' modo et Hibernia adsucti bostibus' —having been used only to the Picts and Irish as enemies.
After the time of Eumenius we have frequent mention of the Pieta in the Roman writers. Ammianus 3iareellinus, under the year 360, speaks of the invasion of the borders of the Roman province in Britain by those wild nations the Scots and Pieta—" Sector= Pictorumque, gentium fcmrum." Again, in 364, he enumerates the " Picti, Sax onesque, et Scotti, et Attacotti," as harassing the Britanni with inces sant attacks. We may just observe that the Scoti or Scotti mentioned in these two passages were in all probability not yet inhabitants of any part of Britain any more than were the Saxones. But the most im portant passage in Illarcellinus relating to the Pieta, although it refers to another probably still more important, which is unfortunately lost, occurs in his annals of the year 368, where he says that, in relating the actions of the emperor Constans (A.D. 337-350), he had already de scribed as well as he could the sitnation of Britain, and that therefore it is necessary for him only to observe now, that at that time " Picti, in dues gentee divisi, Dicaledonas et Vecturiones, itidemque Attacotti bellicose hominum natio, et Scotti per diverse vagantes, mutts popula bantur." It thus appears that about the middle of the 4th century
the Picts were understood to be divided into two tribes, the Dicaledonx, or Dicaledones, and the Vecturiones. These two names have however occasioned much perplexity. The Vecturiones, or Vectinenes, indeed, are mentioned by Richard of Cirencester, whose work however is pos sibly nothing more than a modern forgery ; but the name Dicaledones occurs nowhere but in this passage of Marcellinus. Skeno (` The High landers of Scotland, tre.; 1837) maintains that the Piet)! and Caledonians were the same. The Veeturioucs are admitted to be Picts, and if for Dicaledones we should read, as has been proposed, Deucaledoues, tho meaning of which is "genuine Caledonians," as in Du Albinnach, genuine Scotsman, the two tribes would appear to include the whole population.
It is very doubtful indeed in how far wo are to understand the Roman writers as meaning at all the same people we now call the Picts by their term Picti. That term seems always to have been used by them in the sense simply of painted men, rather than as the name of any particular people. At least this notion, which we find Claudian indicating in his " nee false nomino Pictos " (` De Text. Cons. Honorii'), and in other passages, seems always to have been suggested to them by the name, and to have therefore induced them to apply it loosely to all the wild inhabitants of the north of Britain who were in the habit of painting their bodies, or rather among whom they supposed that prac tice to exist; and they were probably the descendants of a primitive ' race, or the oldest of which we have any trace, the Albionea of Festus Avienus, and the Albinnach of the Welsh and native writers. More over, a derivation has been more recently traced iu the Welsh pcith, to fight of scream, whence pic-t-a, a fighting man.