The king, of much experience and weighty with age, did not understand the true God, to the knowledge of whom one comes only by hearing through faith; but that these were false he had clearly seen by the light of reason itself, attributing one thing to custom and another to his own mind. 'If you exist,' he said, 'O gods'—this is to say: I, perceiving that there is over man a power more powerful than man himself, moved by the necessity of praying, commend my diligence and excuse my ignorance; I invoke Him who is, while I address those who are not. Wherefore it must be considered with grief and fear:
with what penalty or by what judgment will they be deemed worthy who, against the prohibition of a truth now made open and public, follow and worship those gods—about whom even those men could already then doubt who as yet could know nothing besides these very gods? Nevertheless, let me briefly reflect: what kind of times did the whole East then seem to face, when for forty years the wretched nations were ground down by the alternating devastations of such great commanders; when each city, caught in the midst of such great clashes, was inevitably imperiled, destined presently to be set ablaze by the one side from which it had spared itself the other, and to suffer as punishment what it had for a time obtained as remedy;
when the trembling embassies of the various provinces were tossed to and fro, between the succeeding Roman commanders and Mithridates—more savage than his reputation—alternately to one and the other, as the fortune of war exalted each, and with uncertain submissions, increasing the dangers which they sought to heal? For what Pompey did—and indeed Pompey, the most moderate of Romans—throughout very many parts of the East, once the Mithridatic war was ended, I will set forth in few words. In the 689th year from the founding of the City, in the consulship of Marcus Tullius Cicero and Gaius Antonius, Pompey, on receiving news of the death of Mithridates, attacked Coele-Syria and Phoenicia in war, first subdued the Ituraeans and Arabs, and took their city which they call Petra;
from here he sends Gabinius with an army against the Jews, over whom Aristobulus, having driven out his brother Hyrcanus, ruled as the first king from among the priests, and against their city Jerusalem. He himself, following close behind, was received into the city by the elders but repulsed from the wall of the temple by the common people, and set about its assault. This place, fortified not only by the nature of the site but also by a huge wall and a very great ditch, when he compelled legions to relieve one another day and night without rest, he scarcely took in the third month. Thirteen thousand Jews are said to have been slain there; the rest of the multitude came over into submission. Pompey ordered the walls of the city to be razed and leveled
to the ground, and when he had struck down some of the leaders of the Jews with the axe, he restored Hyrcanus to the priesthood and led Aristobulus a captive to Rome. Pompey himself related before the assembly that he had waged this war of the East against twenty-two kings. Meanwhile the conspiracy of Catiline against the fatherland, formed and betrayed in the City during those same days, was extinguished in Etruria by civil war; at Rome the accomplices of the conspiracy were put to death. But since this history, with Cicero conducting the affair and Sallust describing it, is sufficiently well known to all, it is enough that it has now been briefly touched upon by us. A disturbance also arose among the Paeligni, stirred up by the Marcelli, father and son, through Lucius
Vettius—betrayed when the conspiracy of Catiline was uncovered, it was suppressed as though at the root being cut off; and vengeance was taken upon both, by Bibulus among the Paeligni and by Cicero among the Bruttii. In the 693rd year from the founding of the City, in the consulship of Gaius Caesar and Lucius Bibulus, by the Vatinian law three provinces with seven legions were given to Caesar for five years: Transalpine and Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum; the senate afterwards added Gallia Comata. This history Suetonius Tranquillus has set forth most fully, from which we have plucked our suitable little portions.
A certain Orgetorix, a chief of the nation, had kindled to arms the spirits of the Helvetii—the most warlike of all the Gallic peoples for this very reason above all, that they were almost perpetually at war with the Germans, from whom they are separated only by the river Rhine—with the hope of invading the whole of Gaul. Though the other nobles seized him and forced him to death, yet they could not restrain the commons, once roused for plunder. These, having formed a conspiracy and fixed a day, burning their own villages and houses so that there might be no longing born of the hope of returning, set out. When Caesar had met them in his path at the river Rhône, he twice defeated them in a great and difficult war and forced the defeated to surrender.
Of these, when it first set out, the whole multitude of the Helvetii, Tulingi, Latobrigi, Rauraci, and Boii, of both sexes, amounted to a hundred and fifty-seven thousand persons. Of these, forty-seven thousand fell in the war, the rest were sent back to their own lands. Afterwards Caesar defeated, among the Sequani, Ariovistus, the king who was rousing and bringing with him incredible forces of Germans, by whom he boasted that he had lately subdued all the peoples of the Gauls—this after Caesar's army, long terrified by the multitude and valor of the Germans, had shrunk from battle. At once Ariovistus, seizing a little boat and carried across the Rhine, fled; his two wives and as many daughters were captured.
Now in Ariovistus' army there were the Harudes, Marcomanni, Triboci, Vangiones, Nemetes, Eduses, and Suebi. The fighting was especially severe from the phalanx of the Germans, which—their column packed into one mass and their shields interlocked over their heads—they had built up as a defense on every side, safe against the breaking-in of the Roman line. But after some Roman soldiers, notable for agility and daring, leaped up onto the drawn-up tortoise-formation and, prying apart the shields one by one as if they were scales, pierced from above the bared shoulders of those thus caught and exposed, the enemy, terrified by this new peril of death, dissolved their fearsome interlocking.
From there, turned to flight, they were slaughtered insatiably over fifty miles, nor could the number of the Germans be reckoned, either how great a host was present at the battle or how great the number of the slain. After this the nation of the Belgae, which is a third part of the Gauls, blazed up against Caesar; their forces, by separate divisions, were these. The Bellovaci, who seemed to surpass the rest in number and valor, had sixty thousand picked armed men; the Suessiones, from twelve towns, fifty thousand; the Nervii, whose untamed ferocity was so famed that down to that time they had never admitted merchants to bring in wine and other wares for sale, lest the pleasure thus introduced should bring on a slackening of valor, had likewise fifty thousand;
the Atrebates and Ambiani likewise ten thousand, the Morini twenty-five thousand, the Menapii nine thousand, the Caleti ten thousand, the Velocasses and Veromandui equally ten thousand, the Aduatuci eighteen thousand; the Condrusi, Eburones, Caerosi, and Caemani, who are called by the one name 'Germani,' forty thousand. Thus they are reported to have been 272,000 picked armed men. When these suddenly burst forth from the woods, Caesar's army, thrown into confusion and put to flight with very many of its men lost, at last, at the commander's urging, stood firm and, attacking the victors, almost destroyed them to the point of annihilation. Therefore Caesar, having done great deeds in Gaul, when he had decided to set out for Italy, sent Galba with the twelfth legion against the Veragri and Seduni.
When Galba had taken up winter quarters in a village of the Veragri called Octodurus, and had ceded to the inhabitants the middle part of the town, which was divided by a torrent, one day he sees that these same people had departed during the night and had taken up position on the nearest hill. For they, despising the scanty force of barely half a legion, supposed it a voluntary prey that would fall to them with no trouble, and had summoned their neighbors into this partnership of slaughter and plunder. Therefore Galba, hemmed in by such present dangers and alarmed, and uncertain of any sure plan amid vain deliberations, suddenly sees the Gauls, pouring down in a rush from the mountain, surround the unfinished camp and load the few defenders along the rampart with stones and missiles.
And when the camp was already being broken into, on the advice of Pacuvius the chief centurion and Volusenus the tribune, all the Romans burst out of the gates, and suddenly attacking the unwary enemy, first threw them into confusion, then, when they were turned to flight, scattered them in pitiable slaughter. For more than thirty thousand of the barbarians are reported to have been slain then. Therefore Caesar, when he already thought all the nations of the Gauls pacified, was drawn back to a new and very great war. For while Publius Crassus, a young man, was wintering with the seventh legion as far as the Ocean among the Andecavi, the Veneti and the other neighboring peoples suddenly conspired to arms, bound the Roman envoys, and declared to the Romans that they would only return them if they got back their own hostages.
They take as allies for this war the Osismi, Lexovii, Namnetes, Ambiliati, Morini, Diablintes, and Menapii; they summon auxiliaries also from Britain. Caesar, informed through Crassus of the rebellion of the surrendered peoples, although he understood that the difficulty of undertaking the war was great, nevertheless judging that a matter of such moment must not be neglected, lest license for such daring be loosened to the rest by an example of this kind—and so, having vainly attempted to pursue the enemy in a land battle (since the enemy were defended by tidal estuaries flowing in from the Ocean and by inaccessible recesses within the safe bays of the land)—he orders warships to be built on the river Loire:
these, brought down through it into the Ocean, as soon as they were seen by the enemy, two hundred and twenty of the enemy's ships, at once made ready and most fully equipped with every kind of armament, advanced and took up position over against them in the harbor. To Brutus, surveying the matter, the conflict of ships was by far an unequal one, because the barbarians' ships, woven of solid oak and hardened with very strong hollows, blunted like rocks the driven blows of the beaked vessels; this was the first aid, that he had prepared very sharp hooks fixed not firmly upon poles but tied beneath to ropes, with which, when there was need, having grasped the enemy's halyards at a distance, by drawing back the hook along the rope with the shafts withdrawn, they might cut them. With these quickly made ready, he ordered the rigging of the enemy's yards to be torn apart:
thus, as the yards came crashing down, he rendered several ships immobile on the spot as though captured. Others, terrified by this danger, with sails hoisted, trying to flee wherever the wind drove, when the wind presently dropped and they were left stranded, became a mockery to the Romans; and so, all the ships being burned and those Gauls who had fought being killed, all the rest surrendered themselves. But Caesar, chiefly because of the injury to his envoys and in order to brand a nation prone to every kind of design with the mark of a terrible example, having killed all the chiefs by torture, sold the rest under the crown (into slavery). In those same days Titurius Sabinus, by a sortie, destroyed with incredible slaughter the Aulerci Eburovices and the Lexovii, who had killed their own leaders because they were unwilling to be authors of rekindling the war.
But Publius Crassus, when he had come into Aquitania, was received with war. For the Sontiates, attacking the Romans with a great force of cavalry and very strong infantry, long and grievously threw them into disorder; afterwards, defeated and forced into the town of the Sontiates and besieged, when they saw themselves being stormed, surrendered their arms and were received in submission. The Aquitani, alarmed by this disaster, drew together an army from all sides; they also summoned auxiliaries from Hither Spain; they appointed as commanders for the war chiefly those who had served with Sertorius. All these, while they were preparing a siege against Crassus, were destroyed in their own camp by Crassus overwhelming them; for of the Aquitani and Cantabri, of whom fifty thousand had then come to their aid, thirty-eight thousand are reported to have been slain.
Caesar, attacking in war the Germans who had crossed the Rhine with immense forces and were at the same time preparing to subject the whole of Gaul to themselves, cut them down to the point of annihilation. Their number is said to have been about four hundred and forty thousand. Then Caesar, having made a bridge, crossed into Germany, freed the Sugambri and Ubii from siege; he terrifies the Suebi, the greatest and fiercest nation, of whom many have recorded that there are a hundred cantons and peoples, and the whole of Germany by his coming; presently, the bridge having been cut down, he withdraws into Gaul. From there he comes to the Morini, from whom is the nearest and shortest crossing into Britain. Having prepared about eighty ships, both transports and pinnaces, he crosses over into Britain.
There, first wearied by a bitter battle, then caught by an adverse storm, he lost a very large part of his fleet and no small number of foot-soldiers, but of cavalry almost all. Returning into Gaul, he dismissed the legions into winter quarters and ordered six hundred ships of both kinds to be built. With these, carried across again into Britain at the first of spring, while he himself advanced against the enemy with his army, the ships standing at anchor, caught by a storm, were either dashed together among themselves or driven onto the sands and broken up: of these forty perished, the rest were repaired with great difficulty. Caesar's cavalry, in the first encounter, were defeated by the Britons, and there the tribune Labienus was killed.
In the second battle he turned the defeated Britons to flight, with great peril to his own men. From there, setting out to the river Thames, which they say is fordable at only one place, on its farther bank an immense multitude of the enemy had taken position under the leadership of Cassivellaunus, and had fortified the bank of the river and almost the whole ford beneath the water with very sharp stakes. When this was detected and avoided by the Romans, the barbarians, unable to bear the onset of the legions, hid themselves in the woods, from where by frequent sallies they grievously and often harassed the Romans. Meanwhile the very strong city of the Trinovantes, with their leader Mandubracius, surrendered itself to Caesar, giving forty hostages.
Following this example, several other cities came into alliance with the Romans, and with these same people pointing it out, Caesar at last, in a heavy battle, took the town of Cassivellaunus, situated between two marshes, fortified moreover by the screen of woods and crammed with all manner of things. Thereupon Caesar, having returned from Britain into Gaul, after he sent the legions into winter quarters, was on every side surrounded and beset by sudden tumults of wars. For Ambiorix, conspiring with the Eburones and Aduatuci, emboldened by the counsel of the Treveri, by an ambush surrounded and killed the legates Cotta and Sabinus among the Eburones, together with a whole legion utterly destroyed.
Ambiorix, elated by this victory, hastily draws together the Aduatuci and Nervii and very many others to arms, and presses on to Cicero the legate, who likewise was then in command of a legion in winter quarters. The multitude of the enemy could be gathered from this, that when, during the siege of the camp, they were taught by Roman captives that a rampart had to be thrown up all around, and they had no farming tools, by cutting the earth with their swords and carrying it off in their cloaks, in scarcely three hours they completed a rampart ten feet high and a ditch fifteen feet deep over a circuit of fifteen miles. Besides, they built a hundred and twenty towers of marvelous height.
And when now for seven days and nights the relentless wedges of the enemy fought, and a very great wind suddenly arose, they hurled red-hot potsherds with their slings and missiles set ablaze at the hearths, and presently, the fire having caught, threw them glowing within the camp. By this means the wind, pressing in over the thatched roofs, swiftly stirred the scattered conflagration to life. But not even thus did the Romans, though overwhelmed on every side, yield to wounds, toils, sleeplessness, hunger, or fires. At last it was announced to Caesar that one legion had been destroyed, another now almost finished off. As Caesar drew near with two legions, the enemy abandon the siege and all rush upon him with their forces hastily seized. Caesar settled himself
deliberately in a very small camp, and having sent the cavalry ahead with orders to feign flight, so that by contempt of him he might lure the enemy to the crossing of a valley which lay between and seemed perilous to him. As these drew near, he moreover ordered the gates to be barred. Seeing this, the Gauls, as though they had already conquered, turned to building up a rampart on the outside. Caesar suddenly poured out the prepared army from all the gates at once, and the Gauls being turned to flight, finished them off with most vast slaughter. For sixty thousand are reported to have been there then, of whom a few escaped through trackless marshes.
Indutiomarus, chief of the Treveri, having great forces of armed men, after he was made certain of the consent of the whole of Gaul, resolved to destroy the camp and legion of Labienus, over which he was in command—a thing he judged easy to do—and then, joined with the Eburones and Nervii, to advance to the crushing of Caesar. Labienus, by what arts he can, feigns fear, and so, by a sudden sortie, laid low Indutiomarus, who was rather careless and was roaming with insolent forces before the rampart. By this victory of Labienus the remaining attempts of the Gauls were checked, and Caesar was a little more at peace for the rest of the winter.
But understanding that greater tasks of war remained for him, especially because, with a very great part of his army lost and others gravely wounded, he seemed suited not even to hold out, much less—I will not say—to crush the onset of the Gauls, he asked the proconsul Gnaeus Pompey that legions be enrolled and sent to him as a reinforcement: and so, before the winter was over, three legions came into his camp. Therefore Caesar, before the enemy's forces could come together into one, at the beginning of spring prepares to attack the alarmed and to crush them scattered within their own territories. And so first he plunders the territory of the Nervii, but grants the booty—which was very plentiful—to the army.
Next he attacked the Menapii, who, on account of their boundless marshes and most impassable forests, believed themselves thoroughly fortified, falling upon them in three columns; and after slaughter had been driven everywhere among the common people, he received the survivors who sued for mercy into surrender. In the following engagement Labienus destroyed all the forces of the Treveri, having by stratagem provoked them into battle before they could be joined by the Germans who were drawing near, and immediately he took the city itself.
Caesar, wishing to avenge the death of his lieutenants Sabinus and Cotta, when he learned that Ambiorix and the Eburones, the authors of the destroyed legion, had fled back into the Ardennes forest — which is the largest forest of all Gaul and stretches from the banks of the Rhine and the borders of the Treveri all the way to the Nervii, extending in length more than fifty miles — judging that the affair would be of the greatest danger to his men if, unfamiliar with the terrain, they were scattered through obstructed and vast forests and sought an enemy thoroughly acquainted with the region, invited all Gaul by messengers, that each man at his own pleasure should seek out and plunder the booty hidden away in the Ardennes forest.
By this measure, with the Gauls dying on both sides, he avenged the greatest injuries done to the Romans without the loss of a single Roman. Thus, secure in this safest manner of conquering, he returned into Italy. Now, with Caesar gone back into Italy, Gaul once more conspired to take up arms, and many peoples gathered at once. Their leader was Vercingetorix, by whose counsel all the Gauls straightway set fire of their own accord to their cities: the first burned by its own people was Bituriga. Then they made an assault upon Caesar, who by forced marches had secretly hurried back to his army through the province of Narbonensis. At that time Caesar had shut in by siege a town named Cenabum:
this town, long besieged, was at last, after many disasters to the Romans, captured and destroyed on a rainy day, when the timbers and bowstrings of the enemy's engines had grown slack, by bringing up the towers. Forty thousand men are reported to have been there, of whom scarcely eighty, slipping away in flight, reached the nearest camp of the Gauls. Besides, the Arverni and the rest of the neighbouring peoples, with the Aedui too stirred up to join them, waged many battles against Caesar. When these, wearied with fighting, had withdrawn into a certain stronghold, the soldiers, greedy for plunder, bent their minds to storming the town, though Caesar protested in vain about the unfavourable nature of the ground. And so there Caesar, hard pressed by the enemy bursting out from above, having lost a great part of his army, was defeated and fled.
While these things were being done at Alesia, Vercingetorix, whom all by common consent had chosen as king, urged that out of all Gaul every man who could bear arms should be at hand for this war. For this, he said, was the one war by which would follow either perpetual liberty or eternal servitude or the death of all. And so, apart from that number, infinite in size, which he had previously assembled, about eight thousand horsemen and two hundred and fifty thousand foot were gathered. Then the Romans and Gauls took possession of two hills facing each other. Thence, often fighting in many sallies and with varying outcomes, at last the Romans prevailed, above all by the valour of the German horsemen, whom they had some time before won over as friends and had now summoned to their aid.
On another day Vercingetorix, having gathered together all who had escaped by flight, said that he had been in good faith the author of defending liberty and of breaking the treaty, and that now, whether they should all offer themselves to death before the Romans or whether they should hand over him alone in place of all, he would be ready in spirit. And so the Gauls, taking up as though from the king's counsel the inclination which they had for some time concealed out of shame, at once, begging pardon for themselves, surrendered him alone as the author of a great crime. The Bellovaci were reckoned, in their own opinion, the bravest of all the Gallic peoples.
These, under the leadership of Correus, renewed the war and joined to themselves in this undertaken alliance of war the Ambiani, the Aulerci, the Caleti, the Velocasses, and the Atrebates; and they seized a certain place enclosed and hemmed in on every side by marshes, and, joining battle, slaughtered a great band of the Remi who were aiding the Romans. Then, when they had occupied a place well suited for an ambush which they had provided, and the Romans, learning of this, had come up drawn up and arrayed against the place of ambush, battle being joined, the Romans shut in the fleeing Gauls within the very fortifications by which they had been enclosed, and cut them all down to utter destruction. There Correus, refusing either flight or surrender, by slaying the Romans who pressed in to take him alive, forced them to kill him.
Therefore, when Caesar judged that all Gaul was pacified and would not dare aspire to any further uprisings, he sent the legions into winter quarters; he himself, however, laid waste with a dreadful slaughter of men the territory of Ambiorix, who had stirred up so many wars. But indeed the lieutenant Gaius Caninius found war among the Pictones: there a great multitude of the enemy surrounded a legion hampered on the march and brought it to the utmost peril. Furthermore, the lieutenant Fabius, on receiving Caninius's letters, set out into the land of the Pictones, and there, informed by captives of the favourable nature of the ground, overwhelmed the enemy when they least expected it, and, after great slaughters, carried off very much plunder.
Then, when he had given Caninius a signal of his arrival, Caninius suddenly leapt out from his whole camp and threw himself upon the enemy. Thus, with Fabius pressing on from one side and Caninius from the other, in a very great and long-drawn battle countless forces of the Gauls were slaughtered. From there Fabius set out into the land of the Carnutes; for he knew that Domnacus, that most ancient leader and instigator of the whole rebellion, had escaped from this war, and that, if he were joined to the Aremorican peoples, he would once again rouse the greatest disturbances in Gaul. But these, still trembling from the very novelty of the situation, he subdued with marvellous valour and speed. Meanwhile Drappes, together with Lucterius, when they saw that Caninius and the legions were at hand within their borders, gathering forces from every quarter, seized the town of Uxellodunum.
This town hung upon the loftiest summit of a mountain, on two sides girt by sheer slopes and by a no small river, and then, with a most copious spring in the midst of the descent, it was secure, and, made safe by a very great supply of grain stored within, it looked down upon the futile maneuvers of the enemy from afar. Caninius, doing the only thing that Roman foresight could do, lured both the leaders with the greater part of their forces out into the plain and overcame them in a very great battle. For one of the leaders being killed, the other fled with a very few; not one returned into the town, but for the storming of it Caesar's presence was needed. And so Caesar, informed by messengers, hurried up, and, having surveyed everything, sees that, if he should attempt to storm it by force, his army would have to be destroyed for the sport and spectacle of the enemy;
and that there was but one means of protection, if by some means the enemy could be cut off from water. But even this Caesar could not have done save with difficulty, since the spring which they used for drinking gushed out from the side of the mountain halfway down the slope. Caesar ordered the mantlets to be moved up to the spot nearest the spring and a tower to be built. At once a great rush was made from the town; and though these fought without danger and the Romans, however stubbornly they resisted and the more frequently came up, yet a good many were slaughtered. Therefore a ramp and a tower of sixty feet were built, whose top could come level with the place of the spring, so that either missiles might be hurled from an equal height, or the masses of stones flung down from above need not be feared.
But the townsmen, when they saw not only their cattle but even the more feeble ages of men perishing of thirst, filled casks with pitch, tallow, and shingles, and then, setting fire to them, hurled them down the slope; and they themselves, pouring out from the whole town, followed after. When Caesar saw the battle grievous and perilous for his men, with the engines burning, he ordered the cohorts swiftly and secretly to go around the circuit of the town and from every side suddenly to raise a vast shout. At this the townsmen, thrown into confusion, while they wished to run back to defend the town, withdrew from the assault upon the tower and the demolition of the ramp.
Those, however, who under the cover of the ramp were digging tunnels in safety to cut off the veins of the spring, by dividing into many channels the courses of water they found in their hiding place, caused them to be thinned out and to consume themselves within. The townsmen, with the spring dried up, seized by utter despair, made surrender of themselves. But Caesar struck off the hands of all who had borne arms, and left them their lives, so that the punishment of the wicked might be the more attested even to posterity. For an established example of punishment avails much to restrain audacity, when the very present form of the wretch yet living both admonishes those who share the guilt to remembrance and compels the ignorant to inquiry.