All the Britons dye themselves with vitro, which sets a bluish color upon them and makes them more terrible to behold in battle.”
“All the Britons dye themselves with vitro, which sets a bluish color upon them and makes them more terrible to behold in battle.” So wrote Julius Caesar around 50 B.C. in his Commentaries on the Gallic War, describing the people he and his army encountered in Britannia. The earliest translation to English rendered the Latin word “vitro” as “woad,” and that is how the text is commonly quoted. According to modern scholars, however, the word is more properly translated as “glass” or “glazes,” and the “color” that Caesar observed was likely caused by tattooing as well as dye. Regardless, the image of wild, fearsome, blue-painted Briton warriors remains. For the Romans of Caesar’s time, Britain was at the edge of the known world, a place “where land and nature end,” a place inhabited by dyed and tattooed savages clothed in animal skins. Horace called them “the furthest people of the world.” In Roman society, tattooing was equated with barbarism, and other than limited use within...