Read Ebook: History of Julius Cæsar Vol. 2 of 2 by Napoleon III Emperor Of The French

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1099 lines and 201258 words, and 22 pages

THE WARS IN GAUL, AFTER THE "COMMENTARIES."

POLITICAL CAUSES OF THE GALLIC WAR. PAGE

STATE OF GAUL IN THE TIME OF CAESAR.

CAMPAIGN AGAINST ARIOVISTUS.

WAR AGAINST THE BELGAE

MARCH AGAINST THE TREVIRI--SECOND DESCENT IN BRITAIN.

REVOLT OF GAUL--CAPTURE OF VELLAUNODUNUM, GENABUM, AND NOVIODUNUM--SIEGES OF AVARICUM AND GERGOVIA--CAMPAIGN OF LABIENUS AGAINST THE PARISII--SIEGE OF ALESIA.

RECAPITULATION OF THE WAR IN GAUL, AND RELATION OF EVENTS AT ROME FROM 696 TO 705.

EVENTS OF THE YEAR 696.

EVENTS OF THE YEAR 697.

EVENTS IN ROME DURING THE YEAR 698.

EVENTS OF THE YEAR 699.

EVENTS OF THE YEAR 700.

EVENTS OF THE YEAR 701.

EVENTS OF THE YEAR 702.

EVENTS OF THE YEAR 703.

EVENTS OF THE YEAR 704.

EVENTS OF THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE YEAR 705.

CONCORDANCE OF DATES OF THE ANCIENT ROMAN CALENDAR WITH THE JULIAN STYLE, FOR THE YEARS OF ROME 691-709. 595

CONCORDANCE OF ROMAN AND MODERN HOURS, FOR THE YEAR OF ROME 699 AND FOR THE LATITUDE OF PARIS. 638

LIST OF ANCIENT COINS FOUND IN THE EXCAVATIONS AT ALISE. PAGE

NOTE ON THE ANCIENT COINS COLLECTED IN THE EXCAVATIONS AT ALISE. 640

COINS STRUCK IN THE MINT AT ROME. 642

COINS STRUCK IN SOUTHERN ITALY. 644

COINS STRUCK OUT OF ITALY. 644

GAULISH COINS . 645

NOTICE ON CAESAR'S LIEUTENANTS.

PAGE 1. GENERAL MAP OF GAUL 15

JULIUS CAESAR.

THE WARS IN GAUL, AFTER THE "COMMENTARIES."

POLITICAL CAUSES OF THE GALLIC WAR.

These facts, obscure as they may be in history, prove the spirit of adventure and the warlike genius of the Gaulish race, which thus, in fact, inspired a general terror. During nearly two centuries, from 364 to 531, Rome struggled against the Cisalpine Gauls, and more than once the defeat of her armies placed her existence in danger. It was, as it were, foot by foot that the Romans effected the conquest of Northern Italy, strengthening it as they proceeded by the establishment of colonies.

Let us here give a recapitulation of the principal wars against the Gauls, Cisalpine and Transalpine, ich have already been spoken of in the first volume of the present work. In 531 the Romans took the offensive, crossed the Po, and subjugated a great part of the Cisalpine. But hardly had the north of Italy been placed under the supremacy of the Republic, when Hannibal's invasion caused anew an insurrection of the inhabitants of those countries, who helped to increase the numbers of his army; and even when that great captain was obliged to quit Italy, they continued to defend their independence during thirty-four years. The struggle, renewed in 554, ended only in 588, for we will not take into account the partial insurrections which followed. During this time, Rome had not only to combat the Cisalpines, assisted by the Gauls from beyond the Alps, but also to make war upon the men of their race in Asia and in Illyria. In this last-mentioned province the colony of Aquileia was founded , and several wild tribes of Liguria, who held the defiles of the Alps, were subjugated .

The movement which had long thrust the peoples of the north towards the south had slackened during several centuries, but in the seventh century of the foundation of Rome it seems to have re-commenced with greater intensity than ever. The Cimbri and the Teutones, after ravaging Noricum and Illyria, and defeating the army of Papirius Carbo sent to protect Italy , had marched across Rhaetia, and penetrated by the valley of the Rhine to the country of the Helvetii. They drew with them a part of that people, spread into Gaul, and for several years carried there terror and desolation. The Belgae alone offered a vigorous resistance. Rome, to protect her province, sent against them, or against the tribes of the Helvetii, their allies, five generals, who were successively vanquished: the Consul M. Junius Silanus, in 645; M. Aurelius Scaurus, in 646; L. Cassius Longinus, in 647; lastly, in the year 649, the proconsul Q. Servilius Caepio and Cn. Manlius Maximus. The two last each lost his army. The very existence of Rome was threatened.

Marius, by the victories gained at Aix over the Teutones , and at the Campi Raudii, not far from the Adige, over the Cimbri , destroyed the barbarians and saved Italy.

The ancients often confounded the Gauls with the Cimbri and Teutones; sprung from a common origin, these peoples formed, as it were, the rear-guard of the great army of invasion which, at an unknown epoch, had brought the Celts into Gaul from the shores of the Black Sea. Sallust ascribes to the Gauls the defeats of Q. Caepio and Cn. Manlius, and Cicero designates under the same name the barbarians who were destroyed by Marius. The fact is that all the peoples of the north were always ready to unite in the same effort when it was proposed to throw themselves upon the south of Europe.

From 653 to 684, the Romans, occupied with intestine wars, dreamt not of increasing their power beyond the Alps; and, when internal peace was restored, their generals, such as Sylla, Metellus Creticus, Lucullus, and Pompey, preferred the easy and lucrative conquests of the East. The vanquished peoples were abandoned by the Senate to the exactions of governors, which explains the readiness with which the deputies of the Allobroges entered, in 691, into Catiline's conspiracy; fear led them to denounce the plot, but they experienced no gratitude for their revelations.

The Allobroges rose, seized the town of Vienne, which was devoted to the Romans, and surprised, in 693, Manlius Lentinus, lieutenant of C. Pomptinus, governor of the Narbonnese. Nevertheless, some time after, the latter finally defeated and subdued them. "Until the time of Caesar," says Cicero, "our generals were satisfied with repelling the Gauls, thinking more of putting a stop to their aggressions than of carrying the war among them. Marius himself did not penetrate to their towns and homes, but confined himself to opposing a barrier to these torrents of peoples which were inundating Italy. C. Pomptinus, who suppressed the war raised by the Allobroges, rested after his victory. Caesar alone resolved to subject Gaul to our dominion."

War against the peoples beyond the Alps was thus, for Rome, the consequence of a long antagonism, which must necessarily end in a desperate struggle, and the ruin of one of the two adversaries. This explains, at the same time, both Caesar's ardour and the enthusiasm excited by his successes. Wars undertaken in accord with the traditional sentiment of a country have alone the privilege of moving deeply the fibre of the people, and the importance of a victory is measured by the greatness of the disaster which would have followed a defeat. Since the fall of Carthage, the conquests in Spain, in Africa, in Syria, in Asia, and in Greece, enlarged the Republic, but did not consolidate it, and a check in those different parts of the world would have diminished the power of Rome without compromising it. With the peoples of the North, on the contrary, her existence was at stake, and upon her reverses equally as upon her successes depended the triumph of barbarism or civilisation. If Caesar had been vanquished by the Helvetii or the Germans, who can say what would have become of Rome, assailed by the numberless hordes of the North rushing eagerly upon Italy?

And thus no war excited the public feeling so intensely as that of Gaul. Though Pompey had carried the Roman eagles to the shores of the Caspian Sea, and, by the tributes he had imposed on the vanquished, doubled the revenues of the State, his triumphs had only obtained ten days of thanksgivings. The Senate decreed fifteen, and even twenty, for Caesar's victories, and, in honour of them, the people offered sacrifices during sixty days.

When, therefore, Suetonius ascribes the inspiration of the campaigns of this great man to the mere desire of enriching himself with plunder, he is false to history and to good sense, and assigns the most vulgar motive to a noble design. When other historians ascribe to Caesar the sole intention of seeking in Gaul a means of rising to the supreme power by civil war, they show, as we have remarked elsewhere, a distorted view; they judge events by their final result, instead of calmly estimating the causes which have produced them.

The sequel of this history will prove that all the responsibility of the civil war belongs not to Caesar, but to Pompey. And although the former had his eyes incessantly fixed on his enemies at Rome, none the less for that he pursued his conquests, without making them subordinate to his personal interests. If he had sought only his own elevation in his military successes, he would have followed an entirely opposite course. We should not have seen him sustain during eight years a desperate struggle, and incur the risks of enterprises such as those of Great Britain and Germany. After his first campaigns, he need only have returned to Rome to profit by the advantages he had acquired; for, as Cicero says, "he had already done enough for his glory, if he had not done enough for the Republic;" and the same orator adds: "Why would Caesar himself remain in his province, if it were not to deliver to the Roman people complete a work which was already nearly finished? Is he retained by the agreeableness of the country, by the beauty of the towns, by the politeness and amenity of the individuals and peoples, by the lust of victory, by the desire of extending the limits of our empire? Is there anything more uncultivated than those countries, ruder than those towns, more ferocious than those peoples, and more admirable than the multiplicity of Caesar's victories? Can he find limits farther off than the ocean? Would his return to his country offend either the people who sent him or the Senate which has loaded him with honours? Would his absence increase the desire we have to see him? Would it not rather contribute, through lapse of time, to make people forget him, and to cause the laurels to fade which he had gathered in the midst of the greatest perils? If, then, there any who love not Caesar, it is not their policy to obtain his recall from his province, because that would be to recall him to glory, to triumph, to the congratulations and supreme honours of the Senate, to the favour of the equestrian order, to the affection of the people."

Thus, after the end of 698, he might have led his army back into Italy, claimed triumph, and obtained power, without having to seize upon it, as Sylla, Marius, Cinna, and even Crassus and Pompey, had done.

If we would act upon the advice of these writers, we must digress as little as possible from the "Commentaries," but without restricting ourselves to a literal translation. We have, then, adopted the narrative of Caesar, though sometimes changing the order of the matter: we have abridged passages where there was a prodigality of details, and developed those which required elucidation. In order to indicate in a more precise manner the localities which witnessed so many battles, we have employed the modern names, especially in cases where ancient geography did not furnish corresponding names.

The investigation of the battle-fields and siege operations has led to the discovery of visible and certain traces of the Roman entrenchments. The reader, by comparing the plans of the excavations with the text, will be convinced of the rigorous accuracy of Caesar in describing the countries he passed over, and the works he caused to be executed.

STATE OF GAUL IN THE TIME OF CAESAR.

An uninterrupted chain of heights divided Gaul, as it divides modern France, from north to south, into two parts. This line commences at the Monts Corbi?res, at the foot of the Eastern Pyrenees, is continued by the Southern C?vennes and by the mountains of the Vivarais, Lyonnais, and Beaujolais , and declines continually with the mountains of the Charolais and the C?te-d'Or, until it reaches the plateau of Langres; after quitting this plateau, it leaves to the east the Monts Faucilles, which unite it to the Vosges, and, inclining towards the north-west, it follows, across the mountains of the Meuse, the western crests of the Argonne and the Ardennes, and terminates, in decreasing undulations, towards Cape Griz-Nez, in the Pas-de-Calais.

This long and tortuous ridge, more or less interrupted, which may be called the backbone of the country, is the great line of the watershed. It separates two slopes. On the eastern slope flow the Rhine and the Rhone, in opposite directions, the first towards the Northern Sea, the second towards the Mediterranean; on the western slope rise the Seine, the Loire, and the Garonne, which go to throw themselves into the ocean. These rivers flow at the bottom of vast basins, the bounds of which, as is well known, are indicated by the lines of elevations connecting the sources of all the tributaries of the principal stream.

The basin of the Rhone, in which is comprised that of the Sa?ne, is sharply bounded on the north by the southern extremity of the Vosges and the Monts Faucilles; on the west, by the plateau of Langres, the C?te-d'Or, and the C?vennes; on the east, by the Jura, the Jorat, and the Alps. The Rhone crosses the Valais and the Lake of Geneva, follows an irregular course as far as Lyons, and runs thence from north to south to the Mediterranean. Among the most important of its secondary basins, we may reckon those of the Aude, the H?rault, and the Var.

The three great basins of the western slope are comprised between the line of watershed of Gaul and the ocean. They are separated from each other by two chains branching from this line, and running from the south-east to the north-west. The basin of the Seine, which includes that of the Somme, is separated from the basin of the Loire by a line of heights which branches from the C?te-d'Or under the name of the mountains of the Morvan, and is continued by the very low hills of Le Perche to the extremity of Normandy. A series of heights, extending from north to south, from the hills of Le Perche to Nantes, enclose the basin of the Loire to the west, and leave outside the secondary basins of Brittany.

The basin of the Loire is separated from that of the Garonne by a long chain starting from Mont Loz?re, comprising the mountains of Auvergne, those of the Limousin, the hills of Poitou, and the plateau of Gatine, and ending in flat country towards the coasts of La Vend?e.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet