Attacotti,Atticoti,Attacoti,Atecotti,Atticotti, andAtecutti were Latin names for a people first recorded as raidingRoman Britain between 364 and 368, alongside theScoti,Picts,Saxons, Roman military deserters and the indigenousBritons themselves. The marauders were defeated by Count Theodosius, father of Roman EmperorTheodosius I, in 368.
The exact origins of the Attacotti and the extent of their territory are uncertain, although historians usually place them in eitherScotland orIreland.[1][2][3] In about 400, Roman units recruited among the Attacotti were recorded in theNotitia Dignitatum, and one tombstone of a soldier identified as such is known. Their existence as a distinct people is given additional credence by two incidental claims that they practisedcannibalism andpolyandry (taking multiple husbands) in the writings of SaintJerome.
The historianAmmianus provides an account[4] of the tumultuous situation in Britain between 364 and 369, and he describes a corrupt and treasonous administration, native British troops (theAreani) in collaboration with the barbarians, and a Roman military whose troops had deserted and joined in the general banditry. The situation arose as a consequence of the failed imperial power-grab (350–353) byMagnentius (303–353), followed by a bloody and arbitrary purge conducted byPaulus Catena in an attempt to root out potential sympathisers of Magnentius in Britain, and aggravated by the political machinations of the Roman administratorValentinus.
Ammianus describes the marauders as bands moving from place to place in search of loot. Nevertheless, one Roman commander was killed in a pitched battle and another was taken prisoner in an ambush and killed. (SeeGreat Conspiracy.) As there was no longer an effective military force in the province, a substantial one was sent fromGaul underCount Theodosius, who quickly and ruthlessly restored order. Theodosius then focused his efforts on the repair of political problems within the province.
TheNotitia Dignitatum is a list of offices of the early 5th centuryRoman Empire, and includes the locations of the offices and the staff (including military units) assigned to them. The names of severalauxilia palatina resemble that of the Attacotti who were mentioned by Ammianus, and in an 1876 publication, historianOtto Seeck assigned the nameAtecotti to various spellings ("acecotti", "atecocti", "attecotti", "attcoetti", "[illegible]ti", and "arecotti") in the Notitia Dignitatum, and documented his assignments within the publication.[5] This produced four conjectural occurrences of Atecotti-related units:
The discovery of a contemporary funerary dedication to a soldier of the "unit of Atecutti" (emended from "Ategutti") at Thessalonica, in the RomanDiocese of Illyricum, supports this reconstruction,[6][7] as theNotitia Dignitatum places one Atecotti unit in thatdiocese.
St. Jerome was aChristian apologist whose writings contain two incidental references to the Attacotti. His account is particularly noteworthy because he was in RomanGaulc. 365–369/70, while the Attacotti were known to be in Britain until 368 and may have entered Roman military service soon after. Thus it is credible that Jerome had seen Attacotti soldiers and had heard Roman accounts of the recent fighting in Britain.[8][9]
In hisLetter LXIX. To Oceanus, he is urging a responsible attitude towards marriage, at one point saying that one should not be "like the Scots [i.e., the IrishScoti] and the Atacotti, and the people ofPlato'sRepublic, to have community of wives and no discrimination of children, nay more, to be aware of any semblance even of matrimony".[10]
In his treatiseAgainst Jovinianus he describes the dietary habits of several peoples and includes a statement that he had heard that the Attacottiate human flesh.[11] Earlier in the same passage he describes a different people as eating "fat white worms with blackish heads", and others as eating "land-crocodiles" and "green lizards". Ancient writers sometimes ascribed exotic habits to far-away peoples in their works.Strabo, for example, said in passing that someSarmatians andScythians were cannibals, while others ate no meat at all.[12]
De Situ Britanniae was a fictitious account[13][14] of the peoples and places ofRoman Britain. It was published in 1757, after having been made available inLondon in 1749. Accepted as genuine for more than one hundred years, it was virtually the only source of information for northern Britain (i.e., modernScotland) for the time period, and some historians eagerly incorporated its spurious information into their own accounts of history. The Attacotti were mentioned inDe Situ Britanniae, and their homeland was specified as just north of theFirth of Clyde, near southernLoch Lomond, in the region ofDumbartonshire.[15][16]
This information was combined with legitimate historical mentions of the Attacotti to produce inaccurate histories and to make baseless conjectures. For example,Edward Gibbon combinedDe Situ Britanniae with St. Jerome's description of the Attacotti by musing on the possibility that a ‘race of cannibals’ had once dwelt in the neighbourhood ofGlasgow.[17]
Perhaps as early as the 17th century, and certainly in the 18th and 19th centuries, someIrish scholars (Charles O'Conor andJohn O'Donovan, for example) had suggested that the origin of the Attacotti might lie inIreland. This was based on the perceived similarity betweenLatinAttacotti and theOld Irish termaithechthúatha, a generic designation for certain Irish population groups, usually translated 'rent-paying tribes', 'vassal communities' or 'tributary peoples'. In the context of well-attested Irish raids on the western coast of Britain in the late Roman period, it was suggested that one or more of these population groups might be the raiders reported by Ammianus in the 360s.
The thesis was given impetus when historian Charles O'Conor promoted it in the late 18th century. However, this remained controversial among scholars into the late 19th century.
Later scholarship has criticised the possible connection between LatinAttacotti andaithechthúatha onetymological grounds.[20][21] Early scholars had based their arguments on the Old Irish that was known from medieval manuscripts rather than on the largely hypotheticalPrimitive Irish used in the 4th century when the Attacotti were in Britain.
Knowledge and understanding of the history of the Irish language were revolutionised from the end of the 19th century, largely owing to the efforts ofRudolf Thurneysen (1857–1940). He hypothesised thatAttacotti andaithechthúatha are unconnected, and that the Primitive Irish equivalent toaithechthúatha would be *ateûiācotōtās. This, in his opinion, is too far removed from the Latin formAttacotti in Ammianus.[22] More recent research has shown that some of the Irish population groups involved in the raiding and settlement of Roman and/or sub-Roman Britain could be classified asaithechthúatha;[23] however, problems of chronology and identification persist.
If, in the neighbourhood of the commercial and literary town of Glasgow, a race of cannibals has really existed.
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