Divico

Divico was a leader of the Helvetii named by Caesar in his account of the Gallic War. Under his command the Tigurini, one of the Helvetian cantons, destroyed a Roman army under the consul Lucius Cassius Longinus near Agen in 107 BC, during the Cimbrian War, and sent the survivors under the yoke. Caesar makes Divico the head of the Helvetian embassy that came to him in 58 BC, at the opening of the Gallic War, and the same man who had led the Helvetii half a century earlier. Whether one person can span both events is doubted, and the figure has been read as part of Caesar's literary self-fashioning. In the 19th century Divico became a hero of the Swiss national myth. Divico is named only by Caesar, in the first book of his Bellum Gallicum. The name Diuico means 'the avenger'. It is derived from the Gaulish stem diuic- ('to avenge, to punish'), a compound of the preverb di- and the root ueic- ('to conquer'). It is cognate with Old Irish do-fich ('he avenges, he punishes'). The name belongs to a well-attested Gaulish onomastic family that includes Diuicius ('avenger'), the druid Diviciacus and the compound Touto-diuicis ('who avenges the tribe').