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[Expositions 13.1 (2019) 1–17] Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

Divico in Oil and Metal: Caesar and the Helvetians in Nineteenth-Century  

Swiss Painting and Contemporary Folk-Death Metal 

 

CHRISTOPHER M. MCDONOUGH 

The University of the South 

 

 

“Needless cruelty and bloodshed at times stained his conduct, but these cannot obscure the 

greatness of his personality or essentially alter the measure of his achievements” (Bennett xiii). So 

wrote classicist Charles E. Bennett about Julius Caesar in the introduction to his standard edition 

of Gallic Wars (1903). The Helvetii (Helvetians), an ancient people who suffered much needless 

cruelty and shed much needless blood at his hands, might have felt differently about the greatness 

of Caesar’s personality. As their viewpoint has no ancient literary account and no standard edition, 

however, how the Helvetians felt about Caesar can never be recovered. Instead it must be imagined 

and, as an effort of the imagination, is the work of painters and musicians and not of historians. 

This essay concerns conjectures about those unrecorded perspectives by two artists who, though 

separated by more than a century, are united by place: Charles Gleyre (a French artist of the 

nineteenth century) and Chrigel Glanzmann (the frontman and principal songwriter of the 

contemporary folk-metal band Eluveitie) both hail from Switzerland, the nation the Helvetii once 

occupied and which even today refers to itself as Helvetia or Confoederatio Helvetica on its stamps 

and coins. With free use of poetic license in supplying emotion to ancient events, and the 

employment of unusual supplementary material to add texture to their work, both Gleyre and 

Glanzmann try to supply the missing Helvetian half of the story told in Gallic Wars.1 

Recovering the lives of any ancient people is a daunting task, even more so when those lives 

have been deliberately effaced by a work like Gallic Wars, the purpose of which is to justify and 

even glorify its author. History, as Bennett’s quotation above shows, has largely exonerated Caesar 

of his wrong-doing in Gaul, and the record beyond his own casting of events is mostly mute about 

the Helvetians. Generations of Latin students have read Caesar in Bennett’s edition or others like 

it and, perhaps beset by the grammatical complexities of the author’s style, not stopped to question 

the validity of the assumption about “the measure of his achievements.” Gallic Wars is a book 

about Gaul and war, of course, but even more, it is a book by Caesar and about Caesar. The non-



Divico in Oil and Metal 2 

  

Romans encountered in Gallic Wars, not being the heroes of the narrative, are rendered in quick 

thumb-nail sketches and, though some notable enemy figures stand out, command no more of our 

sympathy than do the countless storm-troopers killed in Star Wars.  

“Propaganda?” asked historian Hubert Martin, Jr., in his treatment of Caesar’s text fifty years 

ago. “Certainly, and we can be sure that [the Gallic leaders] Orgetorix, Dumnorix, and Ariovistus 

would have told a different story” (67). What the story might have been for Divico, the Helvetian 

chieftain who subjugated the Romans in 107 BC but lived to see his own people cut down in 

retaliation fifty years later, has fired the imagination of both Gleyre (1806–1874) and Glanzmann 

(born 1975). To render an alternative version to Caesar’s account of the events in a way that is 

more than simple guesswork requires that recourse be made to evidence beyond what is found in 

Gallic Wars. Gleyre and Glanzmann permit themselves, in the ancient situations described by 

Caesar, to react emotionally, whether it is the Schadenfreude of triumph or the fury felt in defeat. 

In addition, for both of these artists—the one a nineteenth-century painter schooled at Paris’s École 

des Beaux-Art, the other a broadly-trained musician of both folk and metal—the desire to 

transcend the limits of the Roman sources leads them to incorporate non-traditional “Celtic” 

materials into their work: in his large-scale painting, Les Romains Passant sous Le Joug (1858), 

Gleyre reproduces weapons known from Swiss archaeology to give some sense of local flavor to 

his work, while Eluveitie interweave Irish, Scottish, and other folk-tunes into their often angry 

songs narrated from an ancient Helvetian perspective. The value of using anachronistic 

archaeological or musical material in this way will be discussed more fully below.  

But, while we might rightly question the validity of Gleyre’s and Glanzmann’s inclusion of 

rather extraordinary evidence in building up a portrait of Divico and the Helvetians, another more 

fundamental set of questions arise: If we do want to know this half of the story—and those who 

live in the areas once conquered by the Romans have always been interested in the prehistory of 

the indigenous peoples—how, in the absence of evidence, is it possible to be told? If the historical 

record is known to be incomplete, with what can it plausibly be augmented? Consider, for instance, 

a comic version of this problem. In Asterix in Switzerland, a 1973 comic book by René Goscinny 

and Albert Uderzo, the ancient residents of Helvetia are represented as modern Swiss stereotypes 

with a marked fondness for fondue, chocolate, and cuckoo clocks. The projection onto the past is 

meant to be amusing and, understandably enough, there is no real attempt to visualize the lives of 

the ancient people.2 But while there is certainly much to learn about modern Europe from the 



3 McDonough 

  

Asterix series—the resistance of the indomitable Gauls seems to be more about the local 

experience of the Nazi invasion than that of Rome—ancient Helvetian ethnography, like so much 

other ethnographical works, seems inevitably bound up with the subjective position of the 

ethnographer. If such subjectivity is that of a painter or musician, what of it? What we will see in 

Gleyre’s painting and hear in Eluveitie’s recordings are not a portrait of the Helvetians and their 

leader as he was (for Caesar has made sure that such a portrait is unrecoverable), but instead a 

portrait as he might have been, rendered not with the assurance of historical fact but instead in the 

suggestive media of image and song: we have not a Divico of flesh and blood, but rather a Divico 

in oil and metal. 

Before we proceed on to a further discussion of these very different Swiss receptions of Caesar 

and the Helvetians, let us recall what we find in Gallic Wars itself about the encounter. As anybody 

who has read Caesar knows, his accounts of military matters are sharp and succinct, but beneath 

them lurks a larger political agenda.3 So it was that, in 58 BC, the Helvetii had sent a delegation to 

him, the newly arrived commander in Gaul, to explain their intention of passing through Roman 

territory, a passage Caesar denied them “because he remembered that the consul Lucius Cassius 

had been killed and his army routed and sent under the yoke by the Helvetians” (Gallic Wars 

1.7.4).4 To send captured enemy soldiers sub jugum, “under a yoke” made of spears, was 

considered an act of particular humiliation in antiquity, and of course, the death of a consul, the 

highest political office in Republican Rome, was especially an outrage.5 But, all of this had 

happened when Divico had been the Helvetian chieftain, fifty years earlier, a fact that Caesar does 

not mention.  

The Helvetians are not content with this answer, and feeling strongly the desire to migrate, 

unwisely decide to push on through. When it comes to Caesar’s attention that they are at that very 

moment crossing the river Arar (the modern Saône), he takes advantage of the opportunity both to 

enforce his decision as well as to right a wrong from half a century earlier. Although three-quarters 

of the Helvetians had already crossed, Caesar fell upon the remaining fourth, a tribe called the 

Tigurini, and destroyed them. “It was this very tribe,” writes Caesar “that, in our fathers’ memory, 

had killed Lucius Cassius and subjugated his army. So it was either by chance or by divine design 

that these one, who had brought such calamity upon the Roman people, were the first to pay the 

penalty” (Gallic Wars 1.12.5). Afterwards, Caesar adds that a matter of personal honor had been 

at stake, because Cassius had been a member of his wife’s family. The wholesale destruction of a 



Divico in Oil and Metal 4 

  

largely civilian population would be a shocking event to those back in Rome, of course: only a few 

years later, Cato would call for Caesar to be handed over to the enemy after another such atrocity, 

in order to avoid divine wrath.6 But in 58 BC, Caesar was careful to depict the attack not as a 

massacre but rather as an act of reprisal.  

What we see in the attack on the Saône is a strategy of “moral equivalence” that likens, and 

thus justifies, the Roman response: this tribe killed the consul, and so it was killed in turn. As so 

often happens with the rhetoric of reprisal, however, matters of scale have been deliberately 

obscured. It is a gambit depressingly familiar in modern history: “The Japanese began this war 

from the air in Pearl Harbor,” said Harry S. Truman in announcing the destruction of Hiroshima. 

“They have been repaid manifold.” The fact that 2,300 military personnel were killed on December 

7th, 1941, while over 200,000 Japanese civilians died as a result of the atomic bombings in 1945 

is hidden beneath the president’s faux-Biblical “manifold” (Taylor 45). In similar fashion, Caesar 

wonders whether the slaughter at the Saône took place “by divine design,” not specifically noting 

that his army slew 90,000 Helvetians, mostly unarmed civilians, in retaliation for the death of a 

consul and one of his officers, killed five decades earlier.7 This utterly disproportionate response 

is the sort of thing that led Charles Bennett, in the quotation with which I began above, to remark 

upon (though not to condemn) Caesar’s “needless cruelty and bloodshed.” 

The death of Cassius and the Helvetian subjugation of the Roman army is the subject of Charles 

Gleyre’s Les Romains Passant sous Le Joug, “The Romans Passing Under the Yoke,” a 

masterpiece of the Academic School in which Neoclassical topics were rendered in a decidedly 

Romantic manner. A native of Lausanne, Gleyre had been commissioned by the authorities of the 

Swiss canton of Vaud in 1850 to produce a new work that “should visualize an aspect of Swiss 

national history” although “the choice of subject was left to the painter’s discretion.”8 Avoiding 

hackneyed themes such as the legend of William Tell, Gleyre chose to depict the Helvetian 

chieftain Divico celebrating his victory over Lucius Cassius. A large painting (measuring 94.5 × 

75.6 inches), Les Romains features over forty individual human and animal figures, at the center 

of which can be seen the humiliated Roman soldiers being forced beneath an oxen-yoke alongside 

the heads of Cassius and one of his officers on stakes. Around them dozens of Helvetians are 

celebrating—a set of trumpet-blowing warriors in the upper left hand is balanced by a bacchic 

female group making mocking gestures with singing Druid bards in the upper right, before whom 

are depicted various cherubic children taunting the Romans. His face partially obscured by a 



5 McDonough 

  

sword-bearing arm, Divico himself sits on a horse in a commanding position down front; above 

him rises a large oak, a tree sacred to the Druids, decorated with Roman spoils, to dominate the 

scene. Behind the throng of people in the far background is painted the Dents du Midi, thus 

situating the scene by the southeastern shore of a just visible Lake Geneva.9 

  

  
Charles	Gleyre,	Les	Romains	Passant	sous	le	Joug	(1858)	

 



Divico in Oil and Metal 6 

  

While the passage of Gallic Wars in which the subjugation is described is brief, Gleyre sought to 

impart to Les Romains a sense of credibility by the meticulous use of authenticizing detail. In order 

to supplement the scant literary record, Gleyre made creative use of both Celtic and classical 

images in his replication of the scene. Most prominent is the face of one of the soldiers, modeled 

after the Capitoline Brutus—“the source and the allusion are unmistakable” (1.227), remarks 

William Hauptman, in his magisterial study of Gleyre’s oeuvre—but also identifiable is the 

Chimera of Arezzo in the form of Divico’s snarling dog. Other ancient busts, of the emperors Nero 

and Caracalla, can be picked out among the soldiers as well. In addition to allusions to classical 

portraiture, however, Gleyre included numerous items of Celtic archaeological material in the 

painting, among them “a variety of Helvetian daggers and dagger handles from excavations in 

Vidy and Oleyres, both near Lausanne, which he has in fact incorporated into the canvas” 

(Hauptman 1.229–230). Other objects, including musical horns and sword handles, also derive 

from verifiable Celtic prototypes.  

Much of his knowledge of Vaudois archaeology derived from the work of the eminent local 

historian, Frédéric-Louis Troyon, with whom Gleyre apparently conferred at great length. Troyon 

possessed a large personal collection of locally excavated artefacts; in addition, he travelled 

throughout Scandinavia and Russia, making sketches and watercolors of ancient Celtic weapons 

and articles of dress that he collected into extensive albums for reference. A careful look at Les 

Romains reveals the artist’s clear debt to the images found in Troyon’s albums, and indicates 

visually his ambition to depict the ancient Helvetii not as Caesar’s exotic tribesmen but as cultural 

characters in their own right. “Gleyre opted to include details that were specifically Swiss in origin 

which added significantly to the local historical consciousness that imbues the imagery,” 

Hauptmann aptly observes (1.230).10 

As a sort of cultural pastiche, the older materials from classical and Helvetian contexts are 

masterfully gathered by Gleyre into a whole that rises above its collection of individual artistic 

references to offer an image of national pride that the nineteenth-century Swiss, newly liberated 

from Napoleon, took instantly to heart. It was a “painting representing the united resistance of the 

Swiss people against foreign domination in an earlier age, crucially situated in a local (and clearly 

identifiable) Vaud,” as classicist Richard Warren explains (11). The painting was celebrated with 

fireworks at his unveiling and remained popular for many decades, but today Les Romains is not 

so well-known. When I went to visit the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne in 2015, Les 



7 McDonough 

  

Romains was no longer on display and museum officials were not quite sure where it had been 

stored. That is not to say that the picture lacks for admirers, however. When asked about it recently 

by e-mail, musician Chrigel Glanzmann called Les Romains a “really awesome painting” and “one 

of my favorites.”  

While for Gleyre the story of the Romans’ subjugation near Lake Geneva was an aspect of 

Swiss history to be wrested from its presentation in the Gallic Wars, the encounters with Caesar 

himself a half-century later have been of greater interest to Eluveitie, the band which Glanzmann 

fronts.12 Formed in 2002, Eluveitie is a contemporary folk-metal band whose music fuses the usual 

growling, drum, and guitar-work of metal with traditional folk-tunes played on Celtic instruments. 

In 2012, the band released Helvetios, a concept album based on the imagined Helvetian reaction 

to the Roman incursion of 58 BC, which reached the top ten on the Swiss charts, top hundred in 

other European countries and Canada, and #143 in the United States (Wikipedia). In Helvetios, it 

seems, a current generation has discovered what older generations had found appealing about Les 

Romains, a reimagined engagement with the ancient history of middle Europe as told only by its 

Roman conquerors. Asked by an interviewer for Metal Underground about how he imagined fans 

would react to the album’s subject matter, which is “somewhat removed from our everyday 

twenty-first-century lives,” Glanzmann responded:  

 

I would say, in a way, the lyrics ARE connected to here and now. Especially with 

the songs we’ve written about the Gaulish wars, for example. Digging into history, 

it’s kind of striking to see how many parallels to today you can find. It’s sometimes 

quite shocking to realize how little we learned in the past 2,000 years, because it’s 

the same crazy things going on, over and over again. So I wouldn’t say the things 

we’re singing about don’t have anything to do with our everyday lives; I think they 

actually do. (OverkillExposure) 

 

At first glance, we might expect to be able to single out one-for-one correspondences between 

ancient and modern events in Eluveitie’s work, the way that Warren was able to do with Les 

Romains as an anti-Napoleonic allegory. When I pressed Glanzmann recently to be more specific 

about the parallels, however, he evaded a direct answer. This is not entirely surprising, for as 

Michelle Phillipov remarks, “Metal fans’ reluctance to channel their disaffections toward 



Divico in Oil and Metal 8 

  

identifiable political goals” is a cause of concern among critics, yet remains a defining feature of 

the genre (58).  

Thus, though a metal band like Eluveitie avoids the highly-politicized comments common to 

punk or hip hop, there remains in their historically-aware, almost erudite lyrics an expression of 

deeply-felt rage about events in antiquity that fans find entirely applicable to modern society. Such 

passionate anger can certainly be sensed in songs like “Meet the Enemy,” about the slaughter of 

the Tigurini described above: 

 

There at these ominous shores of river Saône 

There at these shores the die has been cast 

Valor and honor were stripped of their meaning 

We will not know innocence again 

At somber nightfall the defenseless 

Were bestially run down 

Saône stained with Helvetic blood 

You will not shake hands with arrant beliers 

You’d rather die than turn into minions.  

 

Beneath the fury conveyed by the rapid-fire drumming and distorted guitars, it is clear that 

Eluveitie have read and ruminated upon the massacre described so dispassionately by Caesar in 

Gallic Wars. Caesar may well be looking at the Helvetians with a cold, strategic eye, but the songs 

on Helvetios reflect a Caesar who is a brutal blood-thirsty monster. 

Beyond calling for resistance and channeling rage, Glanzmann is also drawing connections with 

the rest of Caesar’s career and making a variety of incisive allusions in “Meet the Enemy.” A 

decade after the events sung of here, Caesar will famously say Alea iacta est, “The die is cast,” 

upon crossing the Rubicon river to initiate the Roman civil war. Even as he began his tenure in 

Rome, Glanzmann indicates, the general was already predisposed toward ignoring legal 

boundaries. It is a valid point of international relations, as scholars have noted before. “The modern 

reader, sensitive to legality, notes at once that the war-making crossing of the frontier is set down 

without a word of apology,” writes classicist John H. Collins of Caesar at the Saône. “[This] would 



9 McDonough 

  

suffice to hang him in a modern war-crimes trial” (927). Later in the same song, another allusion 

to Roman culture is made: 

 

It was like playing ludus latrunculorum 

The pieces were made of flesh and of blood 

Valor and honor bereft of their meaning 

The blood on your hands will forever stay 

 

The reference to the board-game, ludus latrunculorum, “the game of brigands,” is a surprisingly 

apt description of Caesar’s treatment of the Helvetians.13 After they sue for peace, in fact, Caesar 

is quite clear about preventing the migration “because he did not want the place that the Helvetii 

had left behind to be abandoned, for fear that the Germans, living on the other side of the Rhine, 

would cross over from their own territories into those of the Helvetii” (Gallic Wars 1.28.3). That 

is to say, Caesar blocks the Helvetians as part of a larger strategic desire to preserve a “buffer 

state” between the powerful Germans and Roman Gaul. In his bitter reference to the ludus 

latrunculorum, Glanzmann is quite right, then: Caesar has in fact treated the Helvetii as pawns in 

a game of geopolitical chess. 

After the attack at the Saône, Caesar writes, “the Helvetians sent a delegation to him, at the 

head of which was Divico, who had been the leader of the Helvetians in the war with Cassius” 

(Gallic Wars 1.13). While it is quite surprising that the old leader would still be living these many 

years later, he has evidently lost none of his hard-bitten determination, and a tense diplomatic 

exchange follows. Divico warns the Roman leader not to make too much out of defeating an 

unarmed tribe taken by surprise, and indicates that Helvetians “fight more with courage than 

relying upon deceit and trickery.” With sangfroid, Caesar proposes that the Helvetians ought to 

offer hostages, given the situation; with equal sangfroid, Divico responds that his people were 

more accustomed to receive than to give hostages. Later in “Meet the Enemy,” Glanzmann 

imagines still further the exchange:  

 

It’s not us to go under the yoke 

Of that fact the Roman people are witness 

We will not bow (meet the liar) 



Divico in Oil and Metal 10 

  

 

In these lines, it is hard not to think of the ferocious leader with his people gloating over the 

subjugated soldiers in Les Romains. Whatever happened to Divico, beyond his vowing no 

surrender, we do not know. Caesar does not mention his end, and presumably he died in the ensuing 

battle of Bibracte. Glanzmann features him again in an eponymous song that, while not found on 

the Helvetios album, was released as a single concurrently in 2012 to great success. In it, 

Glanzmann channels the Helvetian chieftain’s thoughts at the end of his days:  

 

[Choir:] 

I was king 

[Singer:] 

Like the ancient oak 

Like the raven soaring 

Across your meadows 

Like the bear 

Roaming through your woods 

[Choir:] 

I was king 

[Singer:] 

Like the ancient oak 

Standing enthroned 

This old man 

I have become 

 

As with “Meet the Enemy,” the lines here are sung with the ferocious guttural growl that is 

characteristic of the death metal subgenre.14 The fury of the vocal style is entirely fitting the subject 

matter—while the anger in metal can sometimes seem unfocused, Eluveitie’s rage rather offers a 

powerful and appropriate response to Caesar’s violent military recklessness. That such fury applies 

not just to atrocities committed in antiquity seems clear enough, and fans no doubt supply their 

own analogies to current events. 



11 McDonough 

  

It should be noted that, as musicians, Eluveitie are interested equally in the genres of death 

metal and Celtic folk: in addition to guitars, bass, and drums, they employ traditional instruments 

such as fiddles, tin whistles, uilleann pipes, flutes, bagpipes, hurdy-gurdies, bodhráns, and the like. 

Beyond their careful reading of ancient history, Eluveitie employs older Celtic melodies as a way 

of conjuring a more vivid sense of the imagined ancient Helvetian past. Commenting on this 

phenomenon, Glanzmann explained in one interview,  

 

Of course, old traditions and ancient cultures and especially the one of our ancestors 

mean a lot to us. But we’re not that much into mead-blessed, corny hymns about 

brawny, unbelievably brave warriors jumping joyously at war and stuff like that. 

Also regarding musical aspects, I think we stand out from the masses to some 

degree. Our metal is pretty elaborate (for example the riffing) and not “old 

schoolish” at all (like it is often heard in Pagan Metal); the “folk aspect” in our 

sound receives a remarkable large room in our music—it’s on equal footing with 

the metal instruments and it’s also very important to us, that it’s implemented in a 

really traditional and authentic way.  

 

Much in the same way that Gleyre was eager to represent his Helvetians authentically by 

incorporating genuine archaeological items, the traditional melodies interwoven into the 

Eluveitie’s songs draw upon the putative “musical remains” of ancient Celtic culture in hopes of 

letting the ancients “speak” for themselves.  

No doubt this is a controversial, especially as many of the traditional instruments and tunes of 

the Celtic revival cannot be dated to a time any earlier than the eighteenth century, but Eluveitie 

are not alone in such fusion between musical genres. In a recent consideration of this phenomenon, 

Stephen P. Ashby and John Schofield commented on the incorporation of historically-attested 

melodies into their work of the pagan metal bands Týr and Heidevolk as a form of cultural re-

enactment. As they note, 

 

By following Týr and Heidevolk, young people can enjoy the music, the live shows 

and the festivals, but they also learn. For the bands, the recorded music, and the live 

shows, become opportunities to inform, and to promote. […] One should perhaps 



Divico in Oil and Metal 12 

  

not take this too seriously. This, after all, is entertainment, and many participants 

will see it only in these terms. But what is also happening here has happened over 

millennia. Old stories are being told and retold, invented, reshaped and recreated. 

(507) 

 

Allusions to and appropriations of older poetry or music help to situate newer works like those 

produced by folk metal bands within a deeper cultural milieu. In this context, we should recall the 

prominent place given to the Druid bards and their instruments in Les Romains sous le Joug. The 

melodies may well be different, but in all likelihood the themes are the same. 

While certainly even flagrantly anachronistic, these borrowings can interact with the inherited 

source material in a pointed and revealing fashion. This process can well be seen in Eluveitie’s 

“Divico,” which builds upon a Scottish tune called “The Haughs of Cromdale,” a historical ballad 

about the Battle of Cromdale in 1690. This particular battle was a highly emblematic one, 

representing the final showdown between the Scots loyal to the Stewart king, James VII, and the 

English troops fighting on behalf of William of Orange. Though in fact a humiliating loss for the 

Scots, the ballad recounts that “the great Montrose”—James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose 

and chief of the clan Graham—appeared suddenly to lead the Scottish troops to victory over the 

English: 

 

And the loyal Stewarts, wi’ Montrose,  

So boldly set upon their foes,  

Laid them low wi’ Hi’land blows 

Laid them low on Cromdale. 

 

There are two fundamental problems with the historical facts of the ballad, however. To begin 

with, the Scots did not lay anybody low but in fact were, as noted, badly beaten at Cromdale. 

Secondly, Graham did not participate in the battle, due to the fact that he had died in 1650. As the 

English folk singer and scholar, Ewan MacColl wrote of this ballad,  

 

Montrose, the hero of the song, was not present at the event. Some 45 years before, 

however, he won a victory at the battle of Auldearn against the Whig forces, and it 



13 McDonough 

  

is probable that the two events have been dovetailed to provide us with a fine, 

optimistic, if somewhat chronologically inaccurate song. (Silverman 56)15 

 

While one can certainly understand the desire of the original balladeers to engage in some wishful 

thinking about the battle’s outcome, the incorporation—should we call it a sample, an allusion, or 

a citation?—of “Haughs o’ Cromdale” within Eluveitie’s “Divico” suggests an intertextual 

reading.  

If one sees the Scots as latter-day Celts and the English as latter-day Romans, then the great 

Montrose stands in as Divico himself, the leader who bridges half a century as a reminder of former 

glory. “Curious are the coincidences that throng human history!” Frederic Stanley Dunn had 

exclaimed in his still-useful study of the Helvetian leaders from 1909. “Forty-nine years after his 

first exploits on that same soil Divico now came as chief of an embassy to wait on Caesar. It is not 

often that Clio, in search of a hero, will turn back through the records of half a century” (194). 

Dunn is right—it is curious that the very chieftain who had defeated the Romans half a century 

before should now appear before Caesar, and not particularly credible upon reflection. The implied 

comparison of Montrose to the Helvetian leader in “Divico” prompts one to wonder whether 

Caesar ever really met with this individual at all. While this is not a matter that has been touched 

upon by classical historians, the subtle suggestion arising from the musical inference perhaps 

points to a genuine scholarly question. When I asked Glanzmann about the use of “Haughs of 

Cromdale” in “Divico” recently, however, he responded that he liked the tune, adding that the 

“original lyrics actually fit quite well too. ;)” 

It may seem odd, perhaps, to search for a better understanding of an ancient Gallic chieftain 

and his people either by considering a Scottish tune embedded within a twenty-first century death 

metal song or by examining the use of Vaudois archaeological material in an anti-Napoleonic 

painting. But in its attempt to comprehend antiquity more fully, classical studies have always 

benefited from challenging orthodoxies and experimenting with new modes of engagement. For 

Charles Gleyre, Les Romains offered a serious opportunity both to engage with the burden of 

classical archetypes by redeploying them in a non-triumphant (or perhaps more accurately, a 

reverse-triumphant) context and to represent local archaeological finds in the then-current genre 

of academic painting. That his work found a ready set of spectators among nineteenth-century 

Swiss, who took instant pride in a past so credibly and powerfully illustrated, speaks to the success 



Divico in Oil and Metal 14 

  

of his strategy of representation. A century and a half later, Chrigel Glanzmann and Eluveitie have 

sought to tap into the emotion of the same ancient past in a manner that resembles that of Gleyre. 

Applying their “inimitable brand of mournful, grinding Celtic fury,” as Metal Underground has 

called it, Eluveitie reads between the lines of Caesar’s account and fills it out with traditional music 

to give voice to a dispossessed ancient people; their record sales indicate as appreciative an 

audience as Gleyre found over a century ago, in Switzerland and beyond. If one goal of classical 

studies is to understand how ancient people lived, another is to uncover what has been obscured, 

like the Helvetians’ story, or what has been excused, such as Caesar’s own “needless cruelty.” 

Those things that investigations of a strictly scholarly nature may overlook, in other words, 

investigations of a more imaginative sort often can fruitfully bring to light. The ancient Helvetians 

may not be lost to history entirely if we look beyond the library and search as well in the museum 

and the mosh-pit.  

 

 

Notes 

1. The author gratefully acknowledges the help of Osman Umurhan, Matthew Taylor, Brian 

Swain, and the journal’s anonymous referees for all their insights and suggestions, and 

admits all errors to be his own. 

2. See Beard on taking Asterix seriously as a matter of reception. See also the inspired chapter 

of Almagor on Asterix and classical ethnography. 

3. On Caesar’s political agenda in Gallic Wars, see especially Collins and Riggsby 207–214. 

4. All translations from ancient authors are my own. 

5. On the ritual of subjugation (i.e., sending “under the yoke”), see Versnel 138–140, with 

discussion of older anthropological views. 

6. Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger 51.3–4, where Cato proclaims that “it was not the sons 

of Germans or Celts whom they ought to fear, but Caesar himself if they really thought 

about it.” 



15 McDonough 

  

7. At Gallic Wars 1.29.3, Caesar reports that, after the battle at Bibracte, census records were 

found in the Helvetian camp indicating that the entire population had numbered 368,000. 

8. Hauptman 2.380. Cf. Warren 248–249. 

9. Hauptman 1.218: “Although it was never certain that the battle was actually fought on 

Vaudois soil, in Gleyre’s time it was accepted as indisputable fact; only later was it 

determined through archaeological evidence that the battle was actually fought near Agen 

in France.” Cf. Warren 254 on this matter. 

10. See also Warren 261 n.5 with further bibliography. 

11. For fuller discussion of Eluveitie, see Matthew Taylor, “Eternal Defiance: Celtic Identity 

and the Classical Past in Heavy Metal,” in Heavy Metal Classics, eds. Osman Umurhan 

and Kristopher Fletcher (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), forthcoming. 

12. As cited in Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars: Julius Caesar 33; see also Plutarch’s Life of 

Pompey 60.2.9.  

13. See Richmond for more on ludus latrunculorum. 

14. While the death growl vocal style has been mocked as “Cookie Monster” singing, 

nonetheless “unlike the garbled sound emanating from the lovable and occasionally 

frenetic Cookie Monster, death-metal vocals seem to come from a dark spot in a troubled 

soul, as if they were the narrator’s voice on a tour of Dante’s seventh circle of hell. Cute 

and funny they ain’t” (Fusilli). 

15. Silverman includes the lyrics and MacColl’s remarks, which are to be found originally in 

“the liner notes of Songs of Two Rebellions, a 1960 Folkways recording.”  

 

 

 

 



Divico in Oil and Metal 16 

  

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In Son of Classics and Comics. Eds. George Kovacs and C. W. Marshall. New York: 

Oxford University Press, 2016. 113–130. 

Ashby, Stephen P., and John Schofield. “‘Hold the Heathen Hammer High’: Representation, 

Reenactment and the Construction of ‘Pagan’ Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage 

Studies 21.5 (2015): 493–511. 

Beard, Mary. “Bonté Gracieuse!” London Review of Books 24.4 (February 21, 2002): 12–13. 

Bennett, Charles E. Caesar’s Gallic Wars: Books I-IV. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1903. 

Collins, John H. “Caesar as Political Propagandist.” Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen 

Welt 1.1 (1972): 922–966. 

Dunn, Frederic Stanley. “The Helvetian Quartet: IV. Divico.” Classical Weekly 2.25 (1909): 

194–195. 

Fusilli, Jim. “Cookie Monsters of Death-Metal Music.” Wall Street Journal February 1, 2006 

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113875020821161491 

Glanzmann, Chrigel. Personal correspondence with the author. July 7, 2015.  

Gleyre, Marc-Charles-Gabriel. Les Romains Passant sous Le Joug. 1858, Musée Cantonal 

des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne. Accessed May 18, 2019 from http://commons.wikimedia.org/ 

Hauptman, William. Charles Gleyre, 1806–1874. 2 vols. Zurich: Swiss Institute for Art 

Research/Princeton: Princeton University Press/Basle: Wiese Publishing Ltd., 1996. 

Martin Jr., Hubert. “The Image of Caesar in Bellum Gallicum 1.” Classical Journal 61.2 

(1965): 63–67. 

OverkillExposure (Mike S.). “Eluveitie Frontman: ‘It's Shocking To Realize How Little We 

Learned In The Past 2,000 Years.’” Metal Underground March 5, 2012 

http://www.metalunderground.com/news/details.cfm?newsid=78117 



17 McDonough 

  

Phillipov, Michelle. Death Metal and Music Criticism: Analysis at the Limits. Lanham, MD: 

Lexington Books, 2012. 

Richmond, John. “The Ludus Latrunculorum and Laus Pisonis 190–208.”  

Museum Helveticum 51.3 (1994): 164–179. 

Riggsby, Andrew. Caesar in Gaul and Rome: War in Words. Austin, TX: University of Texas 

Press, 2006. 

Silverman, Jerry, ed. Mel Bay Presents Songs of Scotland. Pacific, MO: Mel Bay Publications, 

1991. 

Taylor, Arch B. Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, & Beyond: Subversion of Values. Vancouver: 

Trafford, 2005. 

Versnel, H.S. Triumphus: An Inquiry into the Origin, Development and Meaning of the Roman 

Triumph. Leiden: Brill, 1970.  

Warren, Richard. “Charles Gleyre’s Les Romains: Classics and Nationalism in Swiss Art.” 

Nations and Nationalism 22.2 (2016): 248–265.  

Wikipedia. “Helvetios.” Last modified November 19, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 

Helvetios#Chart_performance 


