Text Note: In his Agricola (c.AD 98), Tacitus's famous account of the battle between Roman and Caledonian armies at Mons Graupius c.AD 83 contains perhaps the most influential heroic speech in Scottish history. In poetically-polished Latin, Tacitus glosses the words of Calgacus, the Caledonian leader, in a set-piece that became the literary model for such moments, from Burns's Bruce's address to his Army at Bannockburn to Braveheart's Wallace at "Stirling". However, Tacitus's original also includes the earliest-known (very brief) written reference to a Scottish music — the Caledonian cantus ("singing") with which Calgacus's army clamorously responds to his call-to-arms.
"The Caledonian Cantus"
— excerpt from Tacitus, Agricola (§§32-33)
(Translation Copyright © 2010 by Steve Sweeney-Turner)
Notes on this 2010 Edition: Obviously, this "edition" is only of one short excerpt from the Agricola (§§32-33), because: (1) it's the only passage on Caledonian music; (2) a fair few ScotMus.com readers will already know the famous Mons Graupius section anyhow; (3) good full online editions already exist, not least at the Perseus Digital Library (Latin & English).
The translation I've given above is my own. My overall strategy was to try and retain cross-language etymologies where possible, and where not, to tease the original resonances out a bit (within rhyme and reason), particularly without inserting modern idiomatic anachronisms of the kind that would obfuscate Tacitus's resonantly pagan-heroic conceptual field. Paragraphs are numbered tacitly, appearing when you hover your mouse over a given stanza. Boldface highlighting of the crucial musical term is added.
One of the strikingly-poetic features of Tacitus's Latin prose here is the evocative sound of his narration, achieved firstly by the clattering alliteration of strings of hard "K" & "T" consonants (fremitu cantuque et clamoribus), and secondly in the juddering beat he establishes between them through otherwise redundant repetitions of the two Latin forms of "and" — the word et and the suffix -que (not least in cantuque et clamoribus), which themselves contain both clattering consonants (et and -que). Of course, in English, we only have "and" to translate either et or -que. However, since the given MS form of et is & (see above left), I've tried to at least graphically-signify the difference in my translation by giving et as "&" and -que as "and". Unfortunately, of course, the English pronunciation of both is the same, and rather soft-sounding compared to the Latin — in English, we unavoidably lose Tacitus's clattering verbal tone-painting that, I'm sure, was designed to bring to the ear the sound of an army metallically-clashing its weapons and armour while it was doing the "shouting and singing and battle-cries". Most translators have ignored this poetic touch, cutting down on the narratively-"redundant" repetitions of "and... and... and...". But to my (admittedly musical) mind, this isn't the right approach at all, and we should try to retain as much of Tacitus's "music" as we can. Incidentally, more of the alliteration could be retained by translating etmyologically — "shouting and chanting and clamouring", although idiomatically, that would risk warping the actual sense of the words. So like I say, it's a question of trying to find some kind of workable balance between both rhyme and reason. ;-)
My source for the Latin text was the oldest-known manuscript copy, which is in a C9th Carolingian work (with C15th insertions) identified in 1902 within a collection currently in Italy's Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome. This was previously known as "Codex Aesinas Latinus 8", but is now catalogued as MS. Vittorio Emanuele 1631 (MS. Vitt.Em.1631). The full extent of its Agricola is catalogued as running from ff.52rA-65vB, with the crucial cantus section appearing on f.61vA, ll.23-30 (see above-left). The Italian National Library's affiliated ICPAL website has an official online facsimile based on photographic plates from 1938, but, unfortunately, has so far only published the latter half of the manuscript (ff.65v-76v), representing merely the final section of its Agricola (approx. §§44-46) followed by its C15th copy of Tacitus's Germania. So my source for the source was Rudolf Till's facsimile edition, Handschriftliche Untersuchungen zu Tacitus Agricola und Germania mit einer Photokopie des Codex Aesinas (Berlin: Ahnenerbe-Stiftung Verlag, 1943) — a particularly rare book, and I'm immensely grateful to Stan Wolfson for generously allowing me access to his copy of it.
My editorial method was to begin by making a digital diplomatic transcription from the Till facsimile (see above-left). This was encoded in XHTML/CSS using the excellent Junicode font by Medieval literature scholar, Prof. Peter Baker. However, since few folks have Junicode installed on their computers, I then took a screenshot of my results and added it to this page as a conventional graphic to ensure browser-compliance. I also faded the text preceding the cantus passage on the first line of the transcription, and spaced all words to allow for easier reading. Nonetheless, I have to say (in its defence) that Junicode is not specifically designed to handle Carolingian minuscule script, so although my diplomatic transcription preserves the layout of lines and paragraphs, scribal contractions, and so forth, the actual forms of individual text-characters is not 100% accurate. These slight wobbles are not Junicode's fault, but can be blamed on my choice of it for a purpose that it wasn't specifically designed for. Nonetheless, I reckon the final result ain't all that bad, and certainly allows you to: (1) get a feel for what the manuscript source looks like; (2) scrutinize what I've done with its text in my expanded edition above.
In preparing my final, expanded edit, I consulted Henry Furneaux's edition of the Latin text, in his Cornelii Taciti Opera Minora (Oxford: Clarendon, 1899). Furneaux, of course, was working a couple of years prior to the re-discovery of the C9th copy that I'm working from. So, like all other editors prior to 1902, Furneaux edits his text from the set of later, C15th copies. Nonetheless, these Renaissance copies are now generally thought to derive directly from the C9th one. In fact, the only difference between it and Furneaux's text of the cantus passage is the word-order of Tacitus's list of Caledonian noises — Furneaux gives cantu fremituque et clamoribus ("singing and shouting and dissonant battle-cries"), while the C9th version reads fremitu cantuque et clamoribus ("shouting and singing and dissonant battle-cries"). Although this difference is apparently very minor, I'm working on a theory that it may in fact very subtly affect the range of potential musical meanings of the clause. However, in order to assess this possibility, I'll first have to check whether Furneaux's word-order is his own editorial tweak, or taken directly from his C15th sources (which I haven't had access to yet). Much tedious nit-picking is required here...!
Acknowledgements: My very grateful thanks are due to Stan Wolfson for giving me access to his copy of Till's controversially-"Nazi" facsimile of the C9th manuscript. However, I must also thank him for his detailed comments and wise criticisms of some of the initial drafts of this page (which amongst other things, were full of typos and other dull-witted blunders) — and also for his incredibly patient tolerance of my many pestering e-mails on the subject. His own work on Tacitus can be found in his online essays at: Tacitus, Thule & Caledonia: A Critical Reinterpretation of the Textual Problems, which is well worth a read.
Warm thanks are also due to Prof. Peter Baker for his excellent Junicode font, which is (at least currently) available for use on a freeware license. If you fancy a go with this font yourself, note that it's under long-term development, and handy updates with additional characters do appear from time to time. Peter's project is affiliated with the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative, which is also worth checking out if you're trying to grapple with weird old scribal scribbles in any digital context.
And finally, I'm starting to work vaguely towards writing a full article on what Tacitus is actually on about here, and what kind of information about Caledonian music we might (or might not!) be able to glean from such a short, passing reference. So, in the meantime, the following random blethers are some of my (very draughty) draft-notes —
Straining to Hear Tacitus's Caledonian Cantus
1: Probably "Singing"
I've fairly conventionally translated Tacitus's grammatical form here, cantu[s], as "singing", rather than using its actual etymological derivative, "chanting". In general usage, this form of cantus is most fully-comprehended in the sense of "chanting"-as-singing (as in plainchant, for example). In other grammatical contexts, cantus can mean "song" (the product of "singing", rather than the doing of it), while a more common alternative word for "song" (or "poem") is carmen, which Tacitus also uses elsewhere (including in other Barbarian contexts). But one way or another, "singing" would imply a "song" anyway. Or, in our specific case at Mons Graupius (and this is where our problems of interpretation start), "singing" could just as easily mean more than one "song". And, to make matters worse, it could mean several songs sung either simultaneously, or in sequence — which in turn leads to the further possibilities of several songs being sung either simultaneously by several groups of Caledonians, or in sequence by either a single group or several groups together. Or individual singers, or all of the Caledonians together. The more you think about it, the more vague the reference gets. It's also hard to tell which Caledonians are doing the "singing" — the troops or professional singers, for example? And teasing out some of the alternative meanings of cantus throws up even more possibilities.
Because cantus can also mean "chanting" in the sense of "incantation", especially in religious or ceremonial contexts (and there's a definite hint of that in any pagan warrior engagement, as Calgacus's resonant invocation of the "great ancestors" demonstrates). So perhaps it's a druidic or bardic moment we're dealing with — maybe a blessing of the troops, or a ritual cursing of the enemy, or (echoing the end of Calgacus's speech) an invocation of heroic ancestors, or just a general supplication to the gods for a great victory? In a similar vein, cantus can also imply making a "prophecy" — if so, in this context, presumably a prophecy of victory (although that would be hubristically incautious). Any of these more ceremonious possibilities would probably imply a more formal, ordered musical event, and so maybe involve only one song after all (or at least only one song at a time), possibly without any participation by the troops themselves. However, this would be hard to reconcile with the fact that there's a lot of other noise going on, possibly all at once — "shouting and singing and dissonant battle-cries".
But, more vaguely, cantus can just mean "music-making" in general, including purely-instrumental music without any "singing" at all. So, strictly speaking, for all we know, there's actually no "singing" per se, and the Caledonians are blasting away on war-horns or war-trumpets here (perhaps even a Pictish carnyx or three). Or some other instrument(s) entirely.
And finally (just to thicken the plot even further), at the opposite end of the scale, cantus can even mean just "reciting" a text entirely outwith any musical context at all...
So, one way or another, not only is Tacitus's reference to the Caledonian cantus both short and short on detail, it's also incredibly ambiguous and thus virtually impossible to draw any monumental musicological conclusions from — aside from the obvious no-braner that Caledonians made a fair bit of (probably) musical racket immediately prior to the charge of battle. Which plenty of other ancient warrior-cultures also did anyhow, along with plenty of their more recent counterparts (after all, as the famous military dictum clearly states, "It scares the sh** outta the Gooks").
2: Probably Not "Dissonant Singing"
Musically-minded readers will no doubt have noticed Tacitus's adjective disson[u]s ("dissonant"). But even though I've translated this one by common etymology, it needs to be approached by modern minds with a fair amount of caution. Clearly, dissonus relates to sonus, which is simply "sound", of any kind, whether musical or not. And at the most basic level, the Latin prefix dis- generally means something fairly negative. So the simplest translation of dissonus is along the lines of "bad-sounding" or "unpleasant-sounding". But dis- can also imply something split in two (it is related to di- as in "divided"), so another side of dissonus could be two sounds "grating" or "jarring" against each other — in a more technical musical sense, two sounds that are not harmonious in combination (which is approximately its modern musicological meaning). And I'm sure that most musically-minded readers will be thinking along these lines, if not wondering whether, at an outside grammatical possibility, the adjective could apply to the whole list of Caledonian sounds, along the lines of "dissonant shouting and singing and battle-cries", which would perhaps (vaguely) take it into a potentially more specific, musical meaning. This would also have the advantage of telling us something about what Tacitus actually thought of the Caledonian cantus itself, in specifically-musical terms — an aesthetic judgement, based on a technical description. For example, it might mean that the Caledonian singing at Mons Graupius was heterophonic (like a modern Hebridean Psalm). Something like that would be a good thing to be able to know. However, before getting overly-excited about this possibility, it's worth briefly peeling back some of the historical layers that have slowly built up over both the word and the concept of dissonus ("dissonance").
Now it's true, of course, that the history of harmonic theory and its many concepts goes right back to the earliest ancient Greek writings, and that Tacitus was more than aware of this heritage. It's also true that, particularly in the Pythagorean/Platonic traditions, harmonic theory was often dealt with very technically (not least mathematically) in ways that still resonate deeply within more modern music-theory (including acoustics). However, until late-Romantic chromaticism and Modernist atonality finally forced a revaluation of harmonic concepts, the primary focus had always been on consonance rather than dissonance. Earlier on, from the Renaissance through the Baroque and "Classical" eras, even where the role of dissonance was discussed, it was very much within the overall framework of how it can be used to make consonance structurally-dynamic within its own terms (not least within the technical context of counterpoint) — as in, for example, Alexander Malcolm's discussion of what he called (using two other, related Latinate terms) "concinnous Discords" in his influential Baroque tome, A Treatise of Musick (Edinburgh: 1721, §8.1). Another way of vaguely glossing Malcolm's concept here is "consonant dissonances". The general view was that the only functional or even legitimate forms of dissonance were those that didn't stray too far from consonance, and were only to be used to add a bit of piquant "spice" to the harmonic whole (significantly, words like "barbaric" were often used to describe anything that threatened to undermine the basic principles of harmonia — notoriously, the "Classical" composer, Kozeluch described the modality of the Burns songs he was arranging as a sign of une musique barbare...!). But, most pertinently to our Tacitean reference, this theoretical tradition is also presaged in the work of Malcolm's favourite late-Roman music-theorist, Boethius. Writing some 400 years after Tacitus, although Boethius does discuss both concepts, dissonance is generally something of a negative (to be avoided) — the proper goal of music is consonance:
— Boethius, De Institutione Musica, §I.8, c.AD 500 (St. Gallen, Kantonsbibliothek Vadiana, VadSlg MS.296, f.51r, C12th)
Overall, early-Medieval theorists often view dissonance as distinctly un-musical. And, returning back down four centuries to Tacitus, we find him mostly applying the word to non-musical phenomena. In fact, he has a general tendency to use dissonus in relation to the spoken word, rather than the sung word (and this is quite common pre-Medieval usage). One example that directly echoes the Calgacus passage in the Agricola also describes a large crowd within which Tacitus hears a dissono clamore (in this context, "dissonant clamour" rather than "battle-cries" per se; History §1.32). Elsewhere, we find two different political disputes involving dissonis questus ("dissonant murmurs") and dissonae voces ("dissonant voices"; Annals §1.34 & §14.45). And this kind of usage is paralleled in the Agricola itself, immediately preceding the cantus section, when Tacitus's Calgacus (again, very conventionally) applies the related word discordantia to the political "discord" produced among other Barbarian societies under Roman rule (Agricola §32).
Just to loosen the musical association yet further, we can even find Tacitus using phrases such as linguis moribusque dissonos ("dissonant languages and customs"; History §2.37). Here, he applies dissonus ("dissonant") metaphorically to things that may well not even have anything to do with sonus ("sound") at all — let alone music. For example, "dissonant customs" could even include "dissonant marriage contracts" (although there could be some wisdom in that observation!). Indeed, it's even possible that, in Tacitus's time, although the primary meaning of dissonus indisputably invokes the idea of sonus ("sound"), it may not yet have developed into a fully-technical concept of music-theory per se (although it's obviously getting there by Boethius's time). But one way or the other, it's certainly a fact that the metaphorical application of "musical" terms to non-musical contexts goes all the way back to the ancient Greek ideas of cosmic, social, moral, legal and even medical harmonia.
So, it's probably wisest just to leave its basic sense in Tacitus's cantus passage as "bad-sounding", and probably relating more to the fractious politics of the situation at Mons Graupius than to the (probably) musical component of it. If so, then it would relate the "dissonant battle-cries" of the Caledonians more directly to their definitely-non-musical "shouting" than to their (probably) more musical cantus. Additionally, the "singing" is listed in-between the "shouting" and the "battle-cries", which may even embed the musical noun itself within a rather generalised, non-musical meaning — the unharmonious politics of an angry mob. For Tacitus, bad noises are very consistently associated with political controversy. And particularly with the one thing that the Roman establishment continually fears throughout its entire history — the dangerous chaos of an angry mob that threatens to tear the very principles of well-ordered Roman society to the ground, reducing the Empire to ruins. It's a resonant threat that echoes all the way to the end.
Hence, unfortunately, Tacitus's dissonus probably says nothing directly about what kind of "singing" the Caledonians actually practiced. In fact, in the absence of any adjective directly describing their "singing", it seems that Tacitus even reserves judgement on its aesthetic merits, let alone its technical characteristics.