With the Gauls exhausted and subdued, Caesar, secure, returned with his legions into Italy, fearing no uprisings of the Gauls behind him, knowing for certain that he had left behind hardly any who would either dare to stir or, if they did stir, were to be feared. I should now wish to set before my eyes Gaul, bloodless and worn out, how she fares after those most burning fevers and those inward heats that scorched her vital parts: with what gauntness and what pallor she lies, how downcast and unstrung she is prostrate, how she dreads even the movements of necessary duty, lest they should recall the same onslaught of evils. For the Roman army rushed upon her in a sudden assault, like a plague stronger than the strongest body, which is kindled the more grievously the more impatiently it is borne.
The wretched land thirsted, when, with the sword pressing upon her, she was compelled to profess the bond of eternal servitude, with hostages besides torn away from her; she thirsted, as I have said, for that sweetness of liberty, marked by all and most delightful as the sweetness of cold water, and the more she perceived it being withdrawn, the more greedily she longed for it. Hence that presumption, so frequent, against what was forbidden: an importunate liberty was assailed in defence of liberty, and the license of possessing, snatched insatiably away, which seemed to quench the ruin ill-conceived, she only increased. Hence the Roman before the battle was a craftier plotter, hence in the battle a more savage enemy, hence after the battle a more merciless victor, hence everything grew crueller toward the taming of her impatience, hence now not even remedies were trusted.
And so, if I were able to question this nation of which we speak, what then, while she was enduring these very things, she would have judged concerning those times, she would answer, I think, saying: 'So did that fever then render me bloodless and make me cold, that even this present calamity, which has well-nigh grazed all peoples, has not been able to heat or move me; and so the Romans laid me low, that I shall not rise even against the Goths.' But not even Rome herself escaped the disasters which she inflicted: the powers of the generals and the strength of the legions, long exercised and increased through every quarter of the world, clashing among themselves, conquered to the harm of that very state by whose peril they were conquered.
For civil wars accompanied Caesar the victor on his return from Gaul, and other most grievous evils: the Crassi slain among the Parthians and their armies butchered. These had been preceded by... In the year 697 from the founding of the City, Crassus, holding the consulship with Pompey as his colleague and having drawn by lot the province against the Parthians, a man of insatiable greed, when he heard of the wealth of the temple at Jerusalem which Pompey had left untouched, turned aside into Palestine, went to Jerusalem, broke into the temple, and plundered its riches. Thence making his way through Mesopotamia into Parthia, wherever he went he levied auxiliaries upon the allied states.
He exacted ransoms, and presently, as soon as he had crossed the Euphrates, he straightway met Vagises, an envoy sent to him by Orodes king of the Parthians, by whom he was vehemently rebuked, why, against the treaty of Lucullus and Pompey and led by greed, he had crossed the Euphrates. Wherefore, without delay, it would come to pass that, in place of Parthian gold, he would be loaded with Seric iron. And so, when they had come near to Carrhae, the Parthians, suddenly assailing them with their commanders Surena and Silaces, overwhelmed the Romans with arrows. There fell very many senators, several even of consular and praetorian rank; Crassus too, the son of Crassus, a most choice youth, was slain in the battle line. Besides, four cohorts with the lieutenant Vargunteius were caught in the midst of the plains and killed.
Surena, seizing the cavalry, set out to pursue Crassus, and, having surrounded him and while he in vain sought a parley with him, killed him, although he would have preferred to carry him off alive. A few, freed by the favour of night, fled to Carrhae. When the disaster of the Romans became known, many provinces of the East would have fallen away from the alliance or fidelity of the Roman people, had not Cassius, gathering up a few soldiers from the flight, with outstanding courage and self-restraint of spirit checked the swelling unrest of Syria; he both conquered and slew Antiochus and his huge forces in battle, and likewise drove off by war the Parthians sent by Orodes into Syria, who had already entered Antioch, and killed Osaces, their leader. Therefore there is ever in the Roman state an alternating change, and a kind of form
the form of the Ocean sea, which every day, unequal, now rises with successive increases over seven days, now over as many days following is drawn back by natural loss and inward ebbing. For, to begin with the nearest examples: when the Cimbri and Tigurini were victorious and the Roman army perished near the river Rhone, Rome felt the most extreme straits; but when at once the disaster of the Cimbri reversed it, lifted up by great advances she forgot her former failings. Then this boasting of her most recent prosperity the Italian war and the Sullan dismemberment chastised. Again, after this domestic and intestine ruin, by which she was almost disembowelled and gnawed away even to the marrow,
in well-nigh equal spaces of time she was not only restored but even extended, when Lucullus subdued Asia, Pompey Spain, Caesar Gaul, and the Roman empire was propagated almost to the farthest bounds of the earth. This now most ample enlargement a most vast ruin follows. For among the Parthians a Roman consul is killed and an army destroyed, that most atrocious civil war of Pompey and Caesar is set in train, and amid these things Rome herself, seized by a sudden conflagration, is burned up. For indeed in the year 700 from the founding of the City, a fire, kindled none knows whence, invaded the greatest part of the City, and they say that never before had the State been seized and laid waste by so great a conflagration.
For it has been handed down to memory that fourteen districts, together with the Jugarian quarter, were consumed. Hence now the civil war is begun, which had long been in preparation through great dissensions and intrigues. For Caesar, returning victorious from Gaul, demanded that a second consulship be decreed to him in his absence. This was opposed by the consul Marcellus, with Pompey backing him; then it was decreed by the senate that Caesar should not come into the City except with his army dismissed, and on the authority of the consul Marcellus, Pompey was sent with command to the legions which were at Luceria. Caesar betook himself to Ravenna. Marcus Antonius and P[ublius]
Cassius, tribunes of the plebs interceding on Caesar's behalf, being barred from the senate-house and the forum by the prohibition of the consul Lentulus, set out to Caesar, with Curio and Caelius accompanying them at the same time. Caesar, having crossed the river Rubicon, as soon as he came to Ariminum, instructed the five cohorts, which he then alone possessed, with which, as Livy says, he assailed the whole world, what needed to be done. Deploring his own injuries, he attested that the cause of the civil war was for the restoration of the tribunes to their fatherland. Then through Antonius he received seven cohorts, which were lingering at Sulmo, from Lucretius, and he brought over to his own side three legions which were lingering with Domitius at Corfinium.
Pompey and the whole senate, alarmed at the growing strength of Caesar, as though driven from Italy, crossed over into Greece and chose Dyrrachium as the seat for waging the war. Caesar came to Rome and, the money from the treasury being refused him, broke down the doors and seized it, and brought forth from it four thousand one hundred and thirty-five pounds of gold and nearly nine hundred thousand pounds of silver. Then, departing to the legions at Ariminum, presently crossing the Alps he came to Massilia, and, leaving Trebonius with three legions to besiege it, because he had not been admitted, he hastened to the Spains, which Lucius Afranius and Marcus Petreius and Marcus Varro, Pompeian leaders, held with their legions. There, after many battles, he dismissed Petreius and Afranius, overcome, with a compact arranged.
But in Further Spain he took over two legions from Marcus Varro. Likewise his lieutenants too, that is, Curio drove Cato out of Sicily, Valerius drove Cotta out of Sardinia, and Varus drove Tubero out of Africa. Caesar, returning to Massilia, subdued by siege, granted only life and liberty, but stripped it of all else. But indeed Dolabella, of Caesar's party in Illyricum, defeated by Octavius and Libo and stripped of his forces, fled to Antonius. Basilus and Sallustius, each with a single legion which he commanded, and likewise Antonius, and Hortensius too, hurrying up from the lower sea with a fleet, all alike set out against Octavius and Libo and were defeated.
When Antonius had surrendered himself to Octavius with fifteen cohorts, all were led off by Libo to Pompey. Curio crossed over from Sicily into Africa with his army: him King Juba, receiving him at once, butchered with all his forces. Octavius, attempting to besiege Salonae, lost almost all the forces he had led there. Caelius revolted from Caesar and joined himself to Milo the exile; and when both were endeavouring to assault Capua with a band of slaves, they were killed. Bibulus at Corcyra, overcome by shame because the enemy had mocked the guard which he stretched before sea and town, wore himself out with starvation and sleeplessness. Appius Claudius Censorinus, who by Pompey's order was guarding Greece, wished to test the now abolished credit of the Pythian oracle:
indeed, the priestess, driven by him to descend into the cave, is reported to have answered to him as he consulted about the war: 'This war, O Roman, in nothing concerns you; you shall hold the hollows of Euboea.' Now they call the Euboean gulf 'the hollows.' Thus Appius departed uncertain, perplexed by the ambiguous oracle. This consulter of his admonishes us to consult something against our detractors. They complain, at any rate, that by the faith of the Christians their sacred rites have been forbidden them and their ceremonies abolished, and on this account especially, that, with the inspection of entrails and prophesying having ceased, future disasters, because they cannot be known, are not avoided. Why then, long before the rule of Caesar and the birth of Christ, as their own authors testify, had the credit of the Pythian oracle been abolished? And it was abolished for this reason, because it was despised.
And further, why was it despised, except because it was either false or empty or doubtful? Whence the poet wisely forewarned: 'Unconsulted they depart and loathe the seat of the Sibyl.' And lest perhaps they make light of this, that it was by contempt abolished and antiquated — that is, either the divinity or the seat —
that Pythian Apollo it was — whom they say, after that great serpent Python, the author and chief of all prophecy, had been killed, came forth as heir both of the seat and of the divination and of the divinity, and chose to render his responses there, where the divination itself, together with its author, was thought to have arisen; whom, moreover, through other parts of the earth too, with foaming mouths and frenzied raving, all the madness of the possessed belches forth; to whom very many kings of the lands hastened, as if to consult the living voice of the divinity; to whom very often the Romans themselves also sent most opulent gifts.
But if that Pythian Apollo, gradually as experience discerned the truth, was despised, abandoned, and abolished, what living thing can be hoped for from a dead beast, what truth from a raving little woman? What, finally, when 'the fat Tyrrhenian blew upon the ivory at the altars,' the entrails of the rich victim being laid out, will the hungry man not invent, if, as they themselves confess, by saying things either obscure or false Apollo himself misleads? Wherefore let them bear with equanimity — even if for now they refuse to imitate it — that we too forbid, by the judgement of truth, that which their own forefathers were able to despise even by experiencing it. Meanwhile, at Dyrrachium many kings of the East assembled to Pompey with auxiliaries. When Caesar had come thither, he girded Pompey in vain with a siege, himself building fifteen miles of
a trench in front, while the seas lay open to Pompey. Pompey overthrew a certain fortress near the sea, which Marcellinus was guarding, and killed the garrisons of Caesar which were stationed in that same place. Caesar attacked Torquatus and a single legion, to storm it. When Pompey learned of this peril to his allies, he drew together all his forces thither: against whom Caesar at once turned, abandoning the siege. But Torquatus, bursting out on the spot, pursued him as he turned away. Thus Caesar's soldiers, terrified by the twofold danger, fled, with Caesar himself resisting in vain. But Pompey, victorious even by Caesar's own testimony, recalled his army from pursuing.
Four thousand of Caesar's soldiers, twenty-two centurions, and a good many Roman knights were slain in that battle. Caesar from there, with his column at quick march, proceeded through Epirus into Thessaly; Pompey followed with very great forces, and battle was joined. And so the line of battle was drawn up on both sides. Pompey placed eighty-eight cohorts in a triple order: there were forty thousand foot, six hundred horse on the left wing, five hundred on the right, besides many kings, very many senators and Roman knights, apart from a great supply of light-armed troops. Caesar likewise arranged eighty cohorts in a triple order, who had fewer than thirty thousand foot and a thousand horse.
There one might see and groan that the forces of the Romans, drawn together on the Pharsalian plains, had taken their stand for mutual slaughter — forces which, had concord governed them, no peoples, no kings could have withstood. At the first encounter Pompey's cavalry, driven back, laid bare the left flank. Then, when for a long time they were being cut down on both sides with doubtful fortune, and on one side Pompey amid his exhortations said 'Spare the citizens' and yet did not do it, while on the other Caesar did this which he urged, saying 'Soldier, strike the face,' at last the whole army of Pompey fled, and his camp was plundered. There were slain in that battle fifteen thousand of the Pompeians and thirty-three centurions. This was the outcome of the battle at Palaeopharsalus.
Pompey, fleeing, having got a merchant ship at the mouth of the river Peneus, crossed into Asia. Thence through Cyprus he came into Egypt, and there, as soon as he touched the shore, by the order of the young Ptolemy, to win the favour of the victorious Caesar, he was killed. Pompey's wife and sons fled; the rest of the Pompeian fleet was plundered, with all who were in it most cruelly butchered, and there too Pompey Bithynicus was killed. Lentulus, indeed, a man of consular rank, was slain at Pelusium. Caesar, having settled affairs in Thessaly, came to Alexandria, and, when Pompey's head and ring were brought to him and beheld, he wept;
and when he had withdrawn into the palace, he was mocked by the guardians, so that he might not receive money, since they craftily despoiled their own temples, in order both to show that the royal treasures were empty and to stir up the people to hatred of Caesar. Besides, Achillas, the royal commander, once stained with Pompey's blood, was plotting Caesar's murder also. For, ordered to dismiss the army which he commanded, of twenty thousand armed men, he not only scorned the command but even drew up his battle line. In the very battle the royal fleet, which chanced to be drawn up, was ordered to be set on fire.
When that flame had also invaded a part of the city, it burned up four hundred thousand books stored by chance in the nearest buildings, a singular monument indeed of the zeal and care of the ancients, who had heaped together so many and so great works of illustrious geniuses. Whence, however much there yet stand today in the temples bookcases — which we ourselves have seen — and they relate that these were emptied by the plundering of men of our own race in our own times — which indeed is true — yet it is more honourably believed that other books were sought out which might rival the ancient pursuits of study, than that there was at that time any other library which is believed to have existed and so to have escaped beyond those four hundred thousand books. Caesar afterward took the island where Pharos is.
Thither Achillas came with the Gabinian soldiers. A huge battle was joined: a great multitude of Caesar's soldiers fell there, and all the murderers of Pompey too were killed. Caesar, hard pressed by the force of the enemy bearing in upon him, climbed into a skiff; and when this was presently weighed down by the weight of those following and sunk, he swam for two hundred paces to a ship with the papers, which he held raised up in one hand, and presently, buffeted in a naval contest, with great good fortune he either sank or captured the royal fleet. To the Alexandrians, who asked for it, he gave back their king, admonished that he should be eager to try Roman friendship rather than arms; who nevertheless, as soon as he was free, made war, but at once was himself also destroyed with his whole army.
For twenty thousand men are reported to have been slain in that war, twelve thousand with seventy warships surrendered, and five hundred of the victors are said to have fallen. The young king himself, taken up in a skiff that he might flee, was sunk and killed as many leapt in upon it; his body, rolled to the shore, was recognized by the token of his golden cuirass: by sending this ahead to Alexandria, Caesar compelled all the Alexandrians to surrender through despair, and gave the kingdom of Egypt to Cleopatra. Thence, having roamed through Syria, he conquered Pharnaces in Pontus. But afterward, when he came to Rome, made dictator and consul, he crossed into Africa and fought at Thapsus with Juba and Scipio, and there killed a very great multitude of men.
The camps of both were plundered, sixty elephants captured. Cato killed himself at Utica; Juba offered his throat to an assassin for a price paid; Petreius ran himself through with the same sword; Scipio, in the ship in which, striving to flee to Spain but forced back by the wind into Africa he had returned, cut his own throat. In the same ship Titus Torquatus also was slain. Caesar ordered the grandsons of Pompey the Great and his daughter Pompeia, and along with these Faustus Sulla and Afranius and Petreius's son, to be killed.
Thence, having entered the City in four triumphs, with the state of the recovered commonwealth arranged, he straightway set out into the Spains against the Pompeys, the sons of Pompey, and on the seventeenth day after he had gone forth from the City he reached Saguntum, and at once waged many battles with varying fortune against the two Pompeys and Labienus and Attius Varus. The last battle was fought at the river Munda, where the fighting was with such great forces and so great a slaughter wrought, that Caesar too — his veterans not even blushing to give ground — when he saw his own battle line being cut down and forced back, thought to forestall by death the coming disgrace of the vanquished, when suddenly the army of the Pompeys, turned to flight, gave way.
Indeed this battle was fought on the very day on which Pompey the elder had fled from the City to wage war, and for four years this civil war thundered ceaselessly throughout the whole world. Titus Labienus and Attius Varus were slain in the battle line. Gnaeus Pompeius fled with a hundredth part of his cavalry. His brother Sextus Pompeius, having quickly gathered no small band of Lusitanians, joined battle with Caesonius, was defeated, and while fleeing was killed. The city of Munda, after an immense slaughter of men, was scarcely taken when Caesar stormed it. Caesar returned to Rome. There, while contrary to the example of his ancestors he was mercifully restoring the condition of the commonwealth, at the instigation of Brutus and Cassius, with very many of the senate also privy to it, he perished in the senate-house, pierced through by twenty-three wounds.
They say that more than sixty men were privy to this conspiracy. The two Bruti and Gaius Cassius and their other associates, with daggers drawn, withdrew to the Capitol. It was long debated whether the Capitol ought to be burned together with the authors of the murder. The people, goaded by grief, seized his body and burned it in the Forum with fragments of the tribunals and benches. Rome surveyed the breadth of her own dominion by her own calamities, and, turned to her own slaughter, took vengeance on each several nation in the very place where she had subdued it. Throughout Asia, Europe, and Africa—I do not say in the three parts of the world, but in all the corners of those three parts—she brought forth her gladiators, and, her enemies keeping holiday, she heaped upon them the spectacle of a wretched vengeance.
And yet it was not enough that the very causes had been consumed along with their authors; recurring seeds sprouted in the same field, destined forthwith to yield a great increase of evils to those who reaped them with great toil: the victor of the civil war, Caesar, is slain by his fellow citizens, and into the slaughter of one man the ranks of the conspirators are dragged. For it was certain that Caesar, unworthily slain, could have many avengers; and a very great part of the nobility is bound together in one and the same chain of crime, lest perchance so great a material of evils should not be supplied by the magnitude of war but diminished by the brevity of vengeance. The fables tell that Medea once sowed the teeth of a slain serpent, from which, as though a crop matched to its seed, armed men sprang up out of the earth and soon laid one another low by fighting.
Indeed these things the inventions of the poets have fashioned; but our own Rome, when Caesar was slain, how many armed bands she brought forth from his ashes! How great wars, as a testimony of her wretched fecundity, she stirred up—not to be read of by boys, but to be beheld by whole peoples! And yet the beginning of all these evils is pride: thence civil wars blazed up, thence again they sprang afresh. Therefore the slaughter of those who unjustly pursue it is not unjust, if the rivalry of ambition is both carried on and punished through them and in them, until those who scorned partnership may learn to bear domination, and, the sum of all power being reduced to one man, all men may take up a far different manner of living, so that all may strive humbly to please, not insolently to give offense.
But for so wholesome a doctrine of humility a teacher is needed. And so, when affairs had opportunely been set in order under Augustus Caesar, the Lord Christ was born, who, though He was in the form of God, humbly took on the form of a servant, so that the teaching of humility might then at last become more fitting, when already throughout the whole world the punishment of pride stood as an example to all. In the year 710 from the founding of the City, Julius Caesar having been killed, Octavian—who by the will of his great-uncle Julius Caesar had taken up both the inheritance and the name, and who afterward, when he had gained mastery over affairs, was called Augustus—as soon as he came to Rome while still quite young, devoted his natural disposition to civil wars. For, to set forth briefly the heaping-up of evils, he waged five civil wars:
the war of Mutina, of Philippi, of Perusia, the Sicilian, and that of Actium. Of these, two, namely the first and the last, he waged against Marcus Antonius, the second against Brutus and Cassius, the third against Lucius Antonius, the fourth against Sextus Pompeius, the son of Gnaeus Pompeius. Antonius, having been declared a public enemy by the senate, had shut up Decimus Brutus in a siege at Mutina. The consuls Hirtius and Pansa, and Caesar with them, were sent to free Brutus and to overcome Antonius. Pansa, coming up first, was caught in an ambush, and amid the disaster of his men was himself also gravely wounded by a javelin, and after some days had passed died of that same wound. Hirtius, bringing aid to his colleague, destroyed great forces of Antonius with vast slaughter. Caesar meanwhile guarded the camp.
In the second battle against Antonius great slaughter was done on both sides. For then and there the consul Hirtius was slain, Antonius was defeated and fled, and Caesar obtained the victory; to him Decimus Brutus, confessing his part in the conspiracy that slew Julius Caesar, poured out prayers of repentance. Dolabella slew Trebonius, one of Caesar's assassins, at Smyrna. The senate declared Dolabella a public enemy. Both armies of the slain consuls obeyed Caesar. Afterward Decimus Brutus was captured by the Sequani in Gaul and killed. Basilus too, likewise one of the assassins, was put to death by the hand of his own slaves. When Lepidus had busied himself in the matter, Caesar received Antonius back into favor, and as a pledge of the reconciled favor obtained the latter's daughter in marriage.
Then, when they had drawn near to the City and a rumor of a coming proscription had arisen, Gaius Thoranius, a man of praetorian rank, fearing nothing of the kind, was killed in his own house by an onrush of soldiers, and very many others were butchered. And so, lest the unrestrained slaughter should be carried on more widely and more unbridledly, the names of one hundred and thirty-two senators were posted up on a tablet, first by the order and in the name of Lepidus, then of Antonius, thirdly of Caesar. There Antonius had proscribed Tullius Cicero his enemy, there Lucius Caesar his own uncle and—what was added to heap up the crime—with his mother still living; there Lepidus had cast his own brother Lucius Paulus into the same herd of the proscribed. Afterward thirty Roman knights were added to the number of the proscribed.
Many and various slaughters were carried on for a long time, and the houses of the proscribed, after all had been plundered, were demolished. Meanwhile Dolabella waged many wars in Syria with Cassius, and, defeated by him, killed himself. Brutus and Cassius, having mustered great armies, met together at Athens and laid waste the whole of Greece. Cassius, assailing the Rhodians by land and sea, compelled them to surrender, leaving them nothing except their lives. Then Caesar and Antonius pursued these same men into Macedonia with great preparations of war and drove them to death; although most evidently that battle was then brought to an end not by the valor of your side, Antonius, but by Caesar's good fortune.
For Caesar, then being sick, when he had resolved to keep himself in camp for the sake of taking rest, at the urging and entreaties of his physician—who confessed that he had been warned in a dream to lead Caesar out of the camp that day for the sake of his very safety—went out with difficulty into the field among his troops; and soon his camp was captured by the enemy. But again the Caesarian soldiers captured the camp of Cassius. Wherefore, driven to despair, Brutus and Cassius brought upon themselves an untimely death before the end of the war. For, having invited men to strike them, Cassius offered his head, Brutus his side.
But at Rome Fulvia, the wife of Antonius and mother-in-law of Caesar, wielded dominion like a woman; it is uncertain in this transition from consular to royal pre-eminence whether her power is to be reckoned the last of a failing power or the first of one beginning—at any rate insolent even toward those through whom she was made to grow insolent. For she assailed Caesar on his return at Brundisium with insults, factions, and plots. Repulsed by him, she withdrew to Antonius in Greece. Sextus Pompeius, after he learned that he had been entered among the number of the proscribed, turned to brigandage and devastated the whole coast of Italy with murders and plunderings. Having snatched away Sicily and obstructed the grain supplies, he afflicted Rome with famine. Soon the triumvirs—not to call them tyrants—that is, Lepidus, Caesar, and Antonius, made peace with him.