258 BRITISH ETHNOLOGY v 



The Baron de Belloguet remarks upon this 

 passage : 



"It was in the very north of Gaul, and near the sea, that 

 Caligula got up this military comedy. And the fact proves that 

 the Belgae were already sensibly different from their ancestors, 

 whom Strabo had found almost identical with their brothers on 

 the other side of the Rhine. " 



But the fact recorded by Suetonius, if fact it be, 

 proves nothing ; for the Germans themselves were 

 in the habit of reddening their hair. Ammianus 

 Marcellinus l tells how, in the year 367 A.D., the 

 Roman commander, Jovinus, surprised a body of 

 Alemanni near the town now called Charpeigne, in 

 the valley of the Moselle ; and how the Roman 

 soldiers, as, concealed by the thick wood, they 

 stole upon their unsuspecting enemies, saw that 

 some were bathing and others " comas rutilantes 

 ex more." More than two centuries earlier Pliny 

 gives indirect evidence to the same effect when 

 he says of soap : 



"Galiiarum hoc inventum rutilandis capillis . . . apud 

 Germanos majore in usu viris quam foeminis." 3 



Here we have a writer who flourished not 

 very long after the date of the Caligula story, 

 telling us that the Gauls invented soap for the 

 purpose of doing that which, according to Sue- 

 tonius, Caligula forced them to do. And, further 



1 Res Gestoc xxvii. * Historia Naturalis, xxviii. 51. 



