SECOND COMMENTARY

57 BCE

The consuls have almost no role in what goes on this year. Caesar spends part of his winter enrolling two additional legions while he is in Cisalpine Gaul, stretching his finances until the Senate agrees more than a year later to pay them and the other two legions recruited in 58. He is now up to eight legions, twice what he was originally authorized.

The strategy for the year that we infer was a twofold movement. Caesar and his main force would first go north from their winter quarters among the Sequani to challenge and subdue the nations he had identified at the outset as the most threatening, those he called Belgae, facing the Rhine north of Strasbourg. There he was successful.

As that campaign progressed, he would send his legate Crassus west to Normandy and Brittany to make a show of force among peoples who would never present him or his successors with a serious challenge. At the end of the year, he decided to maintain his forces in north-central Gaul, strung out mainly along the valley of the Loire.

Two of Caesar’s generals loom into view in this commentary, men with futures important to Caesar. Quintus Titurius Sabinus is the lesser figure, son of a mint-master, barely mentioned here (2.5), but charged with putting down the rebellion of Viridovix in 56.¹ In 54, he will be attacked in winter quarters in the northeast and will be massacred with all his troops in Caesar’s worst defeat in the Gallic years. Titus Labienus, on the other hand, stood higher in Roman society and had served as tribune in 63 BCE, winning the favor of both Caesar (whose election as pontifex maximus he enabled) and Pompey. He is with Caesar for all of the Gallic years as his most senior, reliable, and successful general. At the outbreak of civil war in 49, all sides were startled to see him change loyalty completely to Pompey, fight on his side at Pharsalus, and eventually die fighting for the anti-Caesareans at Munda in 45. They brought his head to Caesar.

This may have been the quietest year at Rome of all Caesar’s time in Gaul, but no one observing the political life there would take much comfort. Gradually, gradually as the year unfolded, the tribunes Milo and Sestius, friendly to Cicero and holding office in the wake of Clodius, who had to step down in December 58, steered public opinion toward resolution. (Milo had his own street fighters, as Clodius had, and they mainly kept the peace this year.) On August 4, the centuriate assembly, a body in Rome’s governance where the urban underclass (whose favor Clodius had bought with the grain dole) was outweighed by other classes, voted Cicero’s return. Cicero had edged closer to Rome from his original exile haven in Thessalonica and was awaiting the news in Dyrrhachium, modern Durrës in Albania, the closest port to Bari and Brindisi on the heel of Italy. He made his way then promptly home and arrived in the city on September 4, doubtless timing his arrival for the great annual spectacle of the “Roman games” beginning on that day.

He found a city that had been enduring sporadic food riots since mid-July, when they broke out at the annual festival of Apollo. Just four days after his arrival, Cicero showed his gratitude and support by moving in the Senate that Pompey be put in charge of the grain supply. The motion was easily approved. Pompey was granted a five-year term—effectively a five-year monopoly on a role as the most visible and generous benefactor of the urban populace. By December, however, his opportunity would open a gap between him and Caesar, as Rutilius Lupus, one of Pompey’s tribunes, moved to suspend settlements in Campania under Caesar’s land law. The loss of revenues from public land that resulted from those settlements was straining Pompey’s ability to spend money on grain.

Working hard at being Pompey’s man, Cicero was still a trigger for Clodius’ gangs. In early November, Cicero was concentrating on rebuilding his house on the Palatine, which had been destroyed to allow the very ground to be consecrated for a temple devoted to Liberty on Clodius’ motion. Built afresh, the house would stand for Cicero’s restoration to full status, a restoration he shaped with a series of orations. On at least one occasion, there were demonstrations around the site, to keep Cicero aware of the hostility he still faced. Clodius wasn’t going away. As the year wound down, the generalissimos could look forward to a mixed year in 56 with consuls not to their liking.

And the Egyptian comedy continued. King Ptolemy was still unwilling to return home until his status was assured, while the philosopher who had led Ptolemy’s opponents from Alexandria to Rome was murdered at the senator’s house where he had been staying.

This is the setting in which the first of Caesar’s commentaries were being read in Rome, to dramatic effect. And Caesar’s war against Ariovistus was separately made the subject of a poem, the Bellum Sequanicum, by Varro, a young poet on the make from Narbonne in Caesar’s province, happy to be thought well of by the general and his supporters.

After Caesar headed north in June, his first campaign in northern Gaul stumbled through some confusion, but the battle of the Sambre was his first aggressive victory that went beyond the psychodramas of his relationships with old partners and rivals. If he could prevail in the north, he was now clearly a force to be reckoned with. Despite the victory, it was his first experience in taking significant casualties.

His time in the west was even more successful, where he clearly outclassed the collection of smaller nations he set out to awe and subdue. These people had done nothing to earn Caesar’s attentions and were clearly looking only to defend themselves in an asymmetrical conflict. Subjection at a price was their best option.

At the very end of the season, Caesar had one last demonstration of his power and relentlessness to make back in the north, subduing the Aduatuci. In full control, he decided to make an example of his victims and rounded up, at his count, 53,000 captives and sold them into slavery, an act as lucrative as it was brutal.

This is one of very few places in Caesar’s account where he lets us see him turning his campaign into significant financial advantage for himself. He needed the money to pay those legions and for more besides. To make this sale, he needed cash-rich slave traders in the pack of salesmen and whores who collected around the army. They needed reliable followers who could bring many thousands of people under control, keep them from escaping, keep them fed, and move them in suitable detachments to where they could be resold. Some may have had to go hundreds of miles on a trail of tears. (Slaves were a safer investment when they were far from any chance of reconnecting with their former lives.) Even if we were to discount the number 53,000 by 50 or 80 percent as a mental exercise, managing such a mob on its path to immiseration was a considerable logistical effort, one that made its own impression on all those who saw the trains of the recently enslaved trudging past.

Caesar was ready to take the troops into winter quarters by October. When his report that all Gaul had been pacified arrived, his management of public opinion at a distance won him a formal thanksgiving decreed by the Senate amounting to fifteen days’ holiday, three times the usual number. (The city’s working class must have been pleased!) The stories coming back were making a difference. Cassius Dio reports that Pompey, however, was heard to opine that it would be time for Caesar to come back soon, if all was really settled. Caesar would make the claim of total pacification several more times, unembarrassed then when the next uprising broke out. The thanksgiving decree effectively put a seal of approval on the whole of Caesar’s unlicensed escapades.

IN THE CONSULSHIP OF LENTULUS SPINTHER AND METELLUS NEPOS

1. While Caesar was in nearer Gaul, various stories and then a letter from Labienus came to him telling how the Belgae were plotting against the Roman people and exchanging hostages with each other. They were plotting because they feared that when Gaul was subdued our army would be turned on them next, and because they were being encouraged by some of the Gauls. Some hadn’t liked seeing Germans linger in Gaul, taking it even worse to see the Roman army winter there and grow accustomed to the place. Others were just frivolous and excitable, eager for new regimes, which would be harder to attain under our rule.

2. Concerned by these reports, Caesar enrolled two new legions in nearer Gaul and sent Quintus Pedius the legate² to take them to central Gaul at the beginning of summer. As soon as fodder was available, he came to the army himself. He assigned the Senones and the other Gauls near the Belgae to find out what was going on with them and inform him. They all consistently reported that troops were being gathered and an army brought together in one place. With that Caesar had no doubt about setting out in that direction. When he had an assured supply of grain he broke camp and came to the borders of the Belgae in about two weeks.

3. When he arrived unexpectedly, faster than anyone thought, the Remi, closest in Gaul to the Belgae, sent two leading men, Iccius and Andecombogius, as representatives to say they gave themselves and their followers loyally into Roman hands. They had not allied themselves with the Belgae or conspired against the Roman people and they were ready to give hostages and do what we commanded, taking us into their towns and helping with grain and other supplies. All the other Belgae were up in arms, and the Germans living this side of the Rhine had joined them. The furor was so great that the Remi could not even keep the Suessiones, who have the same laws as they, the same customs, and the same regime in war and peace, from joining the Belgae.

4. He asked them which nations were in arms, how large they were and what they could do in war. This he learned: many Belgae came from Germany, crossing the Rhine long ago to settle because the land was fertile. They drove out the Gauls who lived there and were the only ones, when all Gaul was in uproar in our fathers’ times, to keep the Teutones and Cimbri from entering their land. Memory of this gave them great prestige and high spirits in battle. The Remi said they had thoroughly ascertained their numbers because as near relatives they knew how many troops each nation had promised for this war in a general council of the Belgae. The Bellovaci were particularly well thought of for their strength and standing and numbers of men: they could bring together 100,000 armed men and promised 60,000 of them, insisting on having command of the whole campaign. The Suessiones, their neighbors, had the largest, most fertile territory. In recent memory, their king had been Diviciacus,³ the most powerful man in Gaul, who held sway over a great part of this country and Britain as well. Galba was now king. His justice and judgment earned him leadership of the whole war by common consent. With twelve towns, he promised 50,000 armed men. The Nervii, thought to be the fiercest among them and farthest distant, promised the same. The Atrebates were reckoned at 15,000, the Ambiani 10,000, the Morini 25,000, the Menapii 9,000, the Caletes 10,000, the Veliocasses and Viromandui the same, the Aduatuci 19,000, and the Condrusi, Eburones, Caerosi, and Paemani, who are all just called Germans, were reckoned at 40,000.⁴

5. Caesar encouraged the Remi and spoke to them generously, summoning their senate to come to him and bring their leaders’ children as hostages. All this they did, right on the assigned day. He encouraged Diviciacus the Haeduan, showing him how much it mattered to the republic and their common safety for enemy forces to be kept apart so he wouldn’t have to fight with so many at one time. This was possible if the Haedui would lead their forces into the land of the Bellovaci and start to plunder their fields. He sent him away with these orders. When he learned from the scouts he had sent and from the Remi that all the Belgic forces brought together were coming toward him and were now not far off, he hurried to take his troops across the Aisne river in the farther parts of Remi territory. He made camp there. This action protected one side of the camp with the riverbank and made the rear secure from enemy attack, allowing safe transport of supplies from the Remi and other nations. There was a bridge at the river. He set guard there and left the legate Titurius Sabinus on the other side with six cohorts.⁵ He ordered camp fortified with a wall twelve feet high and a ditch eighteen feet wide.

6. The Remi town of Bibrax⁶ was seven miles from this camp. Marching straight in, the Belgae launched a major siege there. Bibrax barely survived the day. Gauls and Belgae use the same siege technique: surrounding the fortifications with men, they began by hurling stones from all sides, stripping the ramparts of defenders. They made a tortoise,⁷ approaching the gates and undermining the walls. They did this easily, for with so many throwing stones and spears, no one could stay on the wall. When night ended the assault, Iccius from the Remi, high-ranking and influential there and one of the legates making peace with Caesar, sent him a message that unless help were sent them they could hold out no longer.

7. At midnight Caesar sent Numidian and Cretan archers and Balearic slingers (using Iccius’ messengers as guides) to support the townsfolk. When they arrived, the Remi took hope for defense and grew eager to fight, while the enemy similarly lost hope of taking the town. Lingering near the town a while, they plundered the fields of the Remi and burned all the villages and farmhouses they could reach. They headed then with all force for Caesar’s camp and made their camp less than two miles away. This camp, marked out by smoke and fires, stretched across more than seven miles in breadth.

8. Caesar chose at first, seeing how many and how strong the enemy were, to refrain from battle. He risked daily cavalry skirmishes to see what the enemy’s strength could do and how bold our men were. He found that ours were none the weaker and that the place before the camp was suited for setting up a battle line. The hill they camped on rose slightly above the plain, as broad as his battle line would be, with steep declines on both sides and a gently sloping front from the crest to reach the plain again. On each side of the hill he stretched a trench crossways about 400 feet long and at the end of the trenches put small forts and catapults, thus to keep the enemy, when lines were drawn, from doing what it could do with great numbers, that is, surround Caesar from the sides as they fought. Then he left the two newly-drafted legions in camp to bring out for support if needed and set the other six in battle line before camp. The enemy similarly led their troops from camp and drew them up.

9. A little swampy ground lay between the armies. The enemy waited to see if ours would cross, while ours were in arms and ready to attack them if they started to cross in full kit. Cavalry skirmishes meanwhile broke out between the lines. When neither made a start at crossing, Caesar took our troops back to camp, while the cavalry fight favored our side. The enemy headed straight from there for the Aisne, which we said lay behind our camp. They found fords and tried to bring part of their force across, thinking they might be able to win the fort the legate Sabinus protected and destroy the bridge. If they couldn’t, they would ravage the fields of the Remi, which were immensely useful for our fighting, and keep our men from resupply.

10. Alerted by Sabinus, Caesar sent all his cavalry and light-armed Numidians, slingers, and archers across the bridge and went to join them. There was a hard fight there. As they crossed the river in full kit, our men attacked them and killed many. We drove back with a shower of spears the ones who bravely tried to make their way through the corpses and the first ones to get across we surrounded with cavalry and slaughtered. The enemy saw they had been wrong about taking the town and crossing the river and that our forces wouldn’t advance to fight on uneven ground. Grain supplies were beginning to fail them so they called a council and decided they would all return home. To whatever land the Romans next took their forces, they would gather there in defense from everywhere, preferring to fight on their own land than elsewhere and to use their own grain supplies. Among other reasons, they were led to this conclusion by knowing that Diviciacus and the Haedui were approaching the land of the Bellovaci. These last could not be persuaded to stay any longer and thus be unable to offer support to their own people.

11. With that plan, at the second watch, with great noise and hubbub, they left their camp pell-mell, under no command, everyone crowding to the front in a hurry to get home—it made the departure look like a rout. Caesar’s scouts reported this immediately, but he feared ambush, not yet understanding why they were leaving, so he kept army and cavalry in camp. At dawn, reassured by the scouts, he sent his whole cavalry on to delay the enemy’s rear guard. He put the legates Pedius and Aurunculeius Cotta in charge; he ordered the legate Labienus to follow with three legions. These attacked the rear guard, following them for many miles and hacking down a great number of the enemy in flight. When that rear line was caught and took a stand and resisted the attack of our soldiers bravely, the advance guard, seemingly out of danger, uncoerced and uncommanded, heard the shouting, abandoned any semblance of discipline, and found safety, all of them, in flight. So without any danger our forces killed as many of them as the day was long, abandoning pursuit at sunset and returning to camp as ordered.

12. Next day, Caesar, before the enemy could recover from fear and flight, led his army to the Suessiones’ land, close to the Remi, and by a long march quickly reached the town of Noviodunum.⁸ Trying to take the town on the march, because he heard it was undefended, he was unable to prevail even against a handful of defenders because the ditch was broad and the wall high. Preparing camp, he started bringing up sheds and other siege engines. Meanwhile all the fleeing Suessiones came that night into town. Quickly moving up the sheds, he erected ramps and placed towers on them—a mass of siege works swiftly raised such as Gauls had never seen or heard of before. Startled, they sent negotiators for surrender to Caesar and, supported by the Remi, obtained their safety.

13. Caesar accepted leaders of the nation and two sons of king Galba himself as hostages and all weapons were given up from the town. He accepted the Suessiones’ surrender and led the army to the Bellovaci, who had all gathered in the town of Bratuspantium.⁹ When Caesar was four or five miles away, the elders of the town all came forth, holding out hands to Caesar and proclaiming themselves willing to trust in his power, promising they would not go in arms against the Roman people. When he reached the town and pitched camp there, boys and women similarly reached out their hands to Caesar from the walls, seeking peace from the Romans in their fashion.

14. Diviciacus spoke for them (after the Belgae retreated, he sent the Haedui forces home and returned to Caesar): the Bellovaci, always true friends of the Haedui, had been driven to abandon the Haedui and make war on the Roman people by their leaders, who claimed the Haedui were enslaved by Caesar and were suffering every indignity and insult. The leaders of that scheme, seeing what ruin they had brought to their nation, had fled to Britain. Not only the Bellovaci but also the Haedui on their behalf were asking he employ his mercy and kindness. Doing so would extend the influence of the Haedui among all the Belgae, whose help and support they used whenever war came to them.

15. Caesar agreed to trust and receive them out of respect for Diviciacus and the Haedui. Because they were great among the Belgae for their influence and their numbers, he insisted on taking 600 hostages. When these were handed over and all the weapons of the town were collected, he went from there to the land of the Ambiani, who surrendered all they had without delay.

The Nervii bordered their land. When Caesar asked about them and their ways, he found that merchants had no approach to them and they allowed import of no wine or other luxury goods, because they thought these things weakened spirits and diminished courage. They were fierce and very brave, criticizing and accusing the other Belgae for surrendering to the Roman people and throwing away their ancestral courage. They insisted they would send no ambassadors and accept no terms of peace.

16. After three days’ journey through their land, he learned from captives the Sambre river was no more than ten miles from his camp. Camped across the river, waiting for the Romans, were all the Nervii, along with the Atrebates and Viromandui, their neighbors whom they had persuaded to take the same chance on war. They were waiting for the forces of the Aduatuci en route. They had put women and others of ages unsuitable for battle in a place where marshes made approach difficult for an army.

17. Knowing this, he sent out scouts and centurions to choose a good place for camp. Many Belgae and Gauls surrendered, obeyed Caesar, and traveled with him. Some of them, he later learned from prisoners, seeing how our army traveled those days, came to the Nervii at night and told them how large baggage trains came between individual legions. When the first legion reached camp and the others were still a great distance away, there would be no problem attacking them with their baggage. When they were beaten and their baggage plundered, the others would not dare stand against them. It helped the informers’ plan that the Nervii of old, with no cavalry power—even now, they pay no attention to it, but whatever they accomplish they do with foot soldiers—, in order to fend off cavalry from neighbors coming their way for plunder, cut into and bent down young trees so that with their branches growing horizontally and bushes and brambles planted between them, these hedges offered the protection of a wall, making it hard not just to pass but even to see through them. Since this would slow the progress of our line, the Nervii thought the plan worth trying.

18. The place our men had chosen for camp was like this. A hill sloping down evenly reached the Sambre (which we mentioned above). Across the river with a similar slope a hill rose opposite them, open below for about two hundred paces, wooded on top, making it hard to see through. The enemy kept themselves hidden in these woods, but a few cavalry units were to be seen in the open space along the river. The river was about three feet deep.

19. Caesar sent cavalry ahead and followed in force, but his order of march differed from what the Belgae had told the Nervii. Approaching the enemy, Caesar, as was his way, led six legions without baggage and had the whole army’s baggage put behind; then the two newly-enrolled legions brought up the rear of the whole line, guarding the baggage. Our cavalry crossed the river with the slingers and archers, joining battle with enemy cavalry. While they would fall back with their force in the woods and break out again out of the woods to attack our men, we did not venture farther in following than the open ground allowed. The six first legions to arrive did their surveying and began to make camp. When those hiding in the woods saw the first of our baggage, which they had agreed was the sign for engaging battle, they settled their line and ranks in the woods and encouraged one another, then suddenly flew out in full force to attack our cavalry, who were easily driven back in disarray. They raced to the river so incredibly swiftly that they seemed to our men to be in the woods and at the river at the same moment. Just as swiftly they made for the opposing hill, our camp, and those who were working there.

20. Caesar had to do everything at once: set up the standard, call soldiers back from work, summon back those who had gone out farther for material for a rampart, draw up the line, encourage the soldiers, and give the signal. The attack left too little time for all this. Two things helped: the knowledge and experience of the soldiers (tested in earlier battles, they could tell themselves what needed to be done as easily as hear it from someone else), and Caesar’s command forbidding legates to leave their legions before camp was finished. With the enemy swiftly at hand, they did not wait for Caesar’s orders but took care of what seemed best themselves.

21. Caesar, giving the necessary commands, running wherever opportunity presented to encourage the soldiers, came to the tenth legion. He encouraged them with a speech just long enough to say they should recall their former courage, remain calm, and bravely resist enemy attack. When the enemy was scarcely a spear’s throw away he gave the sign to fight. Going to encourage the other wing, he found it already fighting. There was so little time and enemy spirits were so ready for fight that there was no time for fitting on insignia or even for putting on helmets and removing shield covers. Whatever part of the line and whatever standards each man coming back from work chanced upon, there he stayed, not to waste time looking for his own unit.

22. He deployed the army more as the situation and the urgency allowed than by military doctrine, with different legions resisting the enemy in different places. The thick hedges, as we said, made it hard to see. Reserves couldn’t be placed properly, nor arrangements for what was needed where. Not all the orders could be given by one person. With such diverse disadvantages, luck’s outcomes were very various.

23. Soldiers of the ninth and tenth legions, standing on the left wing, threw their spears and quickly drove the Atrebates (that’s who they faced), breathless and tired from running and done in by wounds, from higher ground into the river. Pursuing them with swords as they tried to cross weighed down, they killed most of them. Our men did not hesitate to cross the river. Advancing uphill they again joined battle and routed the enemy resistance. Elsewhere,¹⁰ the eleventh and eighth legions, routing the Viromandui they had battled, fought down to the riverbank from above. With just about the whole camp undefended on the front and left, when the twelfth and not far away the seventh stood firm on the right, all the Nervii in tight formation, led by Boduognatus the commander, hurried there. Half of them tried to surround the legions on the open side, while the other half tried to take the high ground of the camp itself.

24. Then as our cavalry and light-armed infantry returned to camp, driven back together in the first attack as I said,¹¹ they encountered the onrushing enemy and again fled in another direction. From the camp gate and hilltop, the camp followers had watched our troops crossing the river in victory, then gone out for plunder; now seeing the enemy prowling in our camp, they fled pell-mell. Then the cries of the baggage-minders went up, heading one way and another in terror. The Treveri cavalry coming from their nation to support Caesar were disturbed by all this—and their reputation for bravery is unique among the Gauls. They saw our camp full of an enemy mob, our legions under pressure and almost surrounded, and the camp followers, cavalry, slingers, and Numidians scattered and fleeing in all directions. Losing hope in our cause they made for home. They told their people the Romans were beaten and overcome, their camp and baggage in enemy hands.

25. Caesar left off encouraging the tenth for the right wing, where he saw his men under pressure. The standards of the twelfth were pressed together in one place, legionaries crowded together and getting in each others’ way. The centurions of the fourth cohort had all been slaughtered, the standard-bearer killed, the standard lost, and just about all the centurions of the others cohorts killed or wounded, notably first spear Sextius Baculus, bravest of men, exhausted by so many serious wounds he could barely stand.¹² The rest lagged and some from ranks behind had deserted, leaving battle and dodging arrows, while the enemy did not stop attacking from lower ground, coming up in front and pressing on both sides. He saw things were tough and there was no help to be brought up. Snatching a shield from a soldier in the rear—he’d come without one himself—he went through to the front rank, calling the centurions by name, encouraging the other soldiers, ordering standards brought up and formations loosened so they could use swords more easily.¹³ His coming brought the soldiers hope and renewed spirits, each one longing to exert himself well in the general’s eyes, even in direst circumstances. The enemy attack was slowed a little.

26. When Caesar saw that the seventh legion nearby was equally under enemy pressure, he ordered the military tribunes to bring the legions together gradually, turn the standards around, and attack the enemy. This they did, each of them helping one another, no longer afraid of being surrounded if they turned, and began to push back more confidently and fight more bravely. Soldiers of the two legions watching the baggage at the rear, hearing of the battle, were spotted hurrying up by the enemy on the hilltop. Labienus, taking the enemy camp and looking down from above at what went on in our camp sent the tenth to help us. When they learned from the fleeing cavalry and camp followers how things stood, how dangerous it was for camp and legions and general, they made haste every way they could.

27. Their arrival brought such a reversal that even our fallen men, exhausted by wounds, re-entered battle leaning on their shields. Unarmed camp followers, sensing the enemy’s fear, confronted armed men themselves, while the cavalry, to erase the shame of flight with their bravery, pressed out ahead of legionaries all over the field. But the enemy, with their last hope for safety, displayed great courage. As front line soldiers fell, the next stood upon them where they lay and fought from their bodies; when they were thrown down and the corpses piled up, survivors hurled things at our men as if from a hillock and threw back spears they had caught.

28. After this battle, the Nervii were almost destroyed in name and race. Their elders—we said they were hidden in valleys and swamps with the children and women—on hearing of the battle, thinking the victors would stop at nothing and the vanquished would have no safety, all agreed to send representatives to Caesar and surrender to him. Recounting the calamity to their nation, they said they were reduced from 600 to three senators, from 60,000 people to scarcely 500.¹⁴ Caesar, to show himself merciful to wretched suppliants, looked after them carefully, ordered them to stay in their land and towns, and commanded their neighbors to abstain from all harm and ill-doing.

29. The Aduatuci we spoke of before were making their way with all force to assist the Nervii, but heard of this battle on the way and returned home. Abandoning all their towns and forts, they brought all they had together in one town splendidly protected by nature. With high rocks and cliffs on all sides around, on one side a gentle slope left an approach no more than 200 feet wide. That they fortified with a high double wall, on which they settled heavy rocks and sharpened sticks. They were descended from the Cimbri and Teutones. They had left the baggage they could not carry as they headed for our province and for Italy on this side of the Rhine along with a guard of six thousand men. After the downfall of the invaders these were hounded for many years by their neighbors, sometimes waging war against them, sometimes defending against attacks, but then made a peace agreement and chose this place for their home.

30. As our army arrived, they made several sorties from the town and fought our men in skirmishes. Then, when we had surrounded them with a rampart 12 feet high and about 14 miles around, they kept themselves to town.¹⁵ Seeing sheds brought up, a ramp raised, and a tower built at a distance, they first mocked and taunted from the walls, for building such an engine so far away. Whose hands or strength did such short men (for the most part Gauls despise our short stature compared to their huge bodies) think would establish such a heavy tower on the wall?

31. But when they saw it move and approach the walls, disturbed by the novel, surprising sight, they sent to Caesar ambassadors for peace, who spoke thus: They could not think the Romans waged war without divine help, if they moved up such tall engines so quickly. They yielded themselves and all they had to our power. One plea they made: if his kindness and mercy, of which they had heard from others, decided the Aduatuci should survive, he should not strip them of their weapons. Almost all their neighbors were enemies and envied their prowess; they could not defend themselves from them if they handed over their weapons. Better for them, if put to it, to endure anything from the Roman people than be tortured to death by those whom they were used to dominating.

32. Caesar answered them thus: He would preserve their nation out of kindness, not because they deserved it, if they surrendered before a battering ram touched their wall, with no condition of acceptance except they yield their weapons. He would do what he did for the Nervii and order their neighbors to do no harm to Rome’s subjects. When they had reported to their side, the Aduatuci said they would do what he commanded. They cast a great mass of weapons from the wall into the trench before the town—the heap of weapons almost equaled the height of wall and the ramp—but still hid and kept about a third of them in the town, as was after seen. They opened the gates and enjoyed peace that day.

33. Toward evening Caesar ordered the gates shut and the soldiers out of the town, so townspeople would not be harmed by soldiers in the night. They had made a plan before, as we found out, believing that after surrender we would remove our guards or at least keep watch carelessly. Some had weapons they had kept and hid, others made shields of bark or woven reeds covered hastily, for lack of time, with skins. After midnight they broke out of town suddenly with all force, where the approach to our fortifications seemed less steep. As Caesar had ordered, a fire signal was given and our men rushed from the nearby forts. The enemy fought as hard as brave men with their last hope of safety, on unfavorable ground against men who hurled weapons from rampart and towers—for all hope lay in courage alone. Four thousand men were killed, the rest forced back into town. Next day the gates were broken—no one defended them now—and our soldiers entered and Caesar sold the whole town in one auction lot. The buyers reported the number enslaved at 53,000.

34. Then he heard from Crassus, whom he had sent with one legion to the Veneti, Venelli, Osismi, Coriosolitae, Esuvii, Aulerci, and Redones, maritime nations reaching the ocean, that all of them had been brought under the authority and power of the Roman people.

35. With this, all Gaul was pacified.

The impression of this war on the barbarians was so powerful that the nations across the Rhine sent embassies to Caesar promising to give hostages and do as he ordered. Caesar was making haste for Italy and Illyricum and told these embassies to return early next summer. He settled the legions for winter among the Carnutes, Andes, Turones, and the nations close to the places where he had fought, then left for Italy. For all this, on Caesar’s report, a supplication of fifteen days was decreed, which had happened to no general before.

Caesar is curiously inconsistent in referring to him, sometimes as Titurius, sometimes as Sabinus; to avoid confusion (no other person is treated this way), I always include “Sabinus” when he is mentioned.

Son of Caesar’s older sister, to be consul in 43 BCE.

Not the Haeduan Diviciacus we saw in the first commentary.

308,000 in all, against Caesar’s eight legions totaling about 40,000 (a level he mostly maintains from now on).

A legion normally comprised ten cohorts of about 500 fighters each.

Location uncertain: in the vicinity of modern Reims.

The Romans had the advantage in armament that wealth and technology bring, but their opponents were often able to emulate (or learn) their tactics very well indeed.

Soissons, one of several Gallic towns of the name Noviodunum that he will mention. C.’s Roman readers had no such helpful footnotes as this.

Bretueil.

The tenth and ninth legions were on the left, the eleventh and eighth here are in the center, and the twelfth and seventh held the right. As the left and center advanced, the right was isolated.

The extremely rare first person singular in Caesar; see also 4.27, 5.54, 6.24.

Recurs as a sturdy fellow at 3.5 and 6.38.

The whole paragraph to here is one sentence in Latin, a thrilling rush of 137 words.

In three years (5.38), they will be mustering a sizeable force.

Fourteen miles is clearly what the manuscripts say and clearly just daftly too large a circle even for Caesar to build. Two to three miles would be more like it.