Cæsar’s Commentaries and Hirtius’ supplements are written with such
conciseness and terseness, that to abridge them still more would leave
nothing but a reduced miniature outline; and therefore I refer you to
the work itself. The oftener one reads them, the more one recognises the
hand of a great master. There remains, however, much to be done for him:
a critical edition is much wanted. With regard to the Gallic war much
good is to be expected; not only from the manuscripts already collated,
of which there are many, but also from those not yet collated, the
number of which is still greater. The Italian ones, especially those at
Florence and in the Vatican, are some of them very old, and have for the
most part not yet been made use of; the English ones, the majority of
which have been collated, are of very inferior value. The manuscripts of
the books _De Bello Gallico_ are not to be traced to one single family,
as is the case with those _De Bello Civili_: in these little is to be
gathered from the collations; the same gaps are found in all of them,
and they are likewise ἀκέφαλοι, the first words being patched in, in the
later times of the middle ages, to hide the defect a little. Davis and
Oudendorp were very well aware of this. As for the other books, I put
them up some time ago as the subject for a prize essay, but without
success: I will tell you my opinion about them. The appended book on the
Alexandrine war, and the last on the Gallic war, in their style and
manner evidently betray the same author, that is, A. Hirtius, a most
accomplished man, to whom we may certainly give the credit of something
so sterling. To think of Pansa is quite preposterous. It is one of the
most excellent works which we have in the range of Latin literature; the
language is most highly classical, being the Latin then spoken by the
first men of the day. Very different is the book _De Bello Africano_,
which I unhesitatingly ascribe to C. Oppius. It is indeed clever,
written by a very good officer, and thoroughly trustworthy; but the
style is much less elegant. Oppius was the companion of Cæsar in all his
wars, and one of his dearest friends. Once, while on a journey, they
both put up for the night at the same cottage, when, Oppius being ill,
Cæsar gave up to him the only disposable room in the house, and he
himself slept in the passage. Such traits are quite unstudied, showing
us Cæsar as he really was. Who wrote the book _De Bello Hispaniensi_,
heaven knows; certainly a man who did not belong to good society, its
language being the genuine vulgar idiom of the common Roman soldier: it
is an extract from the diaries which a dull fellow kept during the war,
and it is a curious and odd performance of its kind.
When Cæsar came to Gaul, the country was in great commotion. Languedoc,
Provence, and only since a short time, Dauphiné also and Savoy, were
subject to the Roman sway; the Allobroges called for Cæsar’s protection
against the inroads of the Helvetians. This is one of the strangest
events in the whole of antiquity. A man of high rank prevails upon the
whole of the nation to break up, and to conquer new abodes in the then
distracted land of Gaul, promising to lead them into fine countries
where they might live like gentlemen, whilst the conquered people were
to till the fields. He might perhaps have felt some dread at the spread
of the Sueves in the Alps, as they would have been obliged to defend
themselves against them at a disadvantage, or have to place themselves
under the protection of Rome. Such a thought as this conceived by an
individual is not a thing quite so unheard of; but that he could have
made the whole nation destroy its towns and villages, and that after his
death, they still followed up his plan, is certainly surprising. Yet
they did it, and marched with the Tigurini into Southern Gaul. How Cæsar
now negotiated with the Helvetians; how he blocked up their road to the
Roman province, and having beaten them in two battles, obliged them,
after a terrible slaughter in which the Romans revenged themselves on
the Tigurini for the Cimbric devastations, to capitulate to him; is not
only generally known, but also told very circumstantially in the first
book of the Commentaries. The power of the Helvetians having been
broken, the remnant returned to their home: it was an awful end of a
fantastic scheme. What may be said to explain and excuse it, is the then
situation of Gaul, which, quite different from the present compact
country of France, was parcelled out among a great number of distinct
tribes. One must distinguish the Aquitanians, who were Iberians, in
Guienne; the mingled Iberians and Celts, in Languedoc; the mixture of
Celts and Ligurians on the Rhone; the Ligurians on the coast of
Provence; and further in the interior of France, the Celts or Gauls. Yet
all the people between the Garonne in the south, and the Seine and the
Marne in the north, were not Celts: there certainly were Cymri or
Belgians already in Basse Bretagne. Their alleged emigration from
Britain in the fifth century is fabulous. These Cymri were strangers to
the true Gael or Celts. It is not surprising that they kept their ground
in Brittany; for originally they had their abodes all along the north of
the Seine and the Marne, but were afterwards severed from each other by
the Celts, who pushed on from the south to the north.
In the remaining parts of free Gaul, the Arvernians were of old the
ruling people; all the rest were dependent upon them, even as the
nations of the Peloponnesus were on Sparta. And just as afterwards in
Greece, Athens put up for the hegemony; so likewise the Æduans rose by
the side of the Arvernians, being encouraged by the Romans, who were
true to their policy of dividing: they sided with the Romans in the war
which, in the year 631, the Allobroges and the Arvernians waged so
disastrously against Rome. It was then that the Æduans got the name of
brothers and friends of the Roman people, and they grew powerful at the
expense of the Arvernians. They were now great for some time; but at
length the Sequani rose in Franche Comté, and on this occasion a German
tribe, the Sueves, burst into Gaul: the Arvernians never raised their
heads again. Gaul was an exhausted wretched country. Owing to the many
emigrations which there had been, its population may have dwindled;
although, on the whole, emigrations, if they be not too extensive, will
not weaken a country, even if they have drained it of two-thirds of its
inhabitants, as the loss will be made up in about seventy to eighty
years. What may have then induced the German tribes to cross the Rhine,
is buried from us in the night of oblivion. Very likely, even before the
Gallic conquest, they had once their dwellings as far as the Alps: in
the Valais, according to Livy, ere yet the Gauls had settled there,
there were Germans who must have been overpowered by the Celts: as
conquerors, the Germans never came thither. Ariovistus, who was in the
country of the Sequani, took for his Sueves part of the arable land,
some of which they tilled themselves, and the rest they made the
conquered inhabitants farm for them: this policy was afterwards always
followed by the Germans. Against him, the Æduans and the Sequani called
upon the aid of the Romans, and it was the very difficulty of the
enterprise which emboldened Cæsar to engage in it. Situated as he was,
he ought not to have done it; for the year before his consulship,
Ariovistus had actually been acknowledged by the Roman people as a
sovereign king. Cæsar marched against him notwithstanding, and won a
decisive victory near Besançon: most of the Sueves were destroyed, and
the remnant again crossed the Rhine, whither Cæsar at that time was too
wise to follow them. There was now, not only the whole country of the
Gauls beyond the Alps under his rule, but also Cisalpine Gaul, down to
the frontier of the Romagna; Illyricum, as far as Macedon; and on the
side of the Barbarians, quite boundless tracts. Here he had seven
legions, and all the auxiliaries he could get from the allies. We of
course hear no more of real _socii_, but merely of _auxilia_, which were
quite a different thing: the _socii_ were armed in the Roman manner, and
were true legions; whilst the _auxilia_ were formed into cohorts, and
for the most part retained their national weapons.
There must now have been something which led the Belgians to dread that
Cæsar would attack them: from his Commentaries, it appears as if the
Gallic peoples had always been mistrustful and ill-disposed, without any
reason at all. All the Belgians between the Seine, the Marne, and the
Rhine, with the exception of the Remi—who were the most distinguished
among them—were arrayed in arms against the Romans. I suppose that the
Remi intrigued with these last, that they might thus get the other
Belgian tribes under their clientship. The weakness of the Gallic and
Belgian nations lay in their not having a free population: they had only
priests (Druids), knights, and serfs. These last on many occasions could
not forget that they were fighting only for their masters, and not for
their country, although they often indeed behaved bravely;—sometimes
they even fought with the courage of lions, but there was no
steadfastness in it. Of a people like the Nervians, one might almost
surmise that they had no serfs. This Belgian war Cæsar decided in two
battles, on the Aisne and on the Sombre; whereupon he invaded Brabant,
then the country of the Nervians. They stood their ground most nobly,
but yet they were almost entirely exterminated.
The Æduans and the Arvernians now silently acknowledged the supremacy of
the Romans; and most of the peoples of Gaul, as far as the Ocean, were
completely subdued. Cæsar was already spreading his troops in extensive
winter-quarters among the Belgians, from whom he expected to meet with a
stouter resistance. Thus he got into collision with the Germans, the
Usipetes and the Tenchteri, having crossed the Rhine, and made war
against the Belgians on the Meuse. Ever ready to take advantage of such
an opportunity, he fell upon them; and here he committed the worst act
of his life. Having entered into negotiations with these tribes, he got
their chiefs to come to him, threw them into prison, and then attacked
the host which he had thus deprived of its leaders—a base deed which he
tries in vain to justify. This business was brought before the senate.
Cato was for having Cæsar given up to the Germans as one who had broken
the law of nations, a motion which of course came to nothing.
He also turned himself against the Veneti in Brittany, a seafaring
people at the mouth of the Loire: on this river, he built a fleet with
which he overpowered them. The whole of this campaign was conducted by
him with remarkable skill; yet here also, as in the whole of the Gallic
war, he behaved with great cruelty. Soon afterwards, he went on his
first expedition to Britain, where the tin mines of Cornwall had already
been known for ages. Tin is even now chiefly brought from England and
the East Indies (from the peninsula of Malacca and the island of Banca);
a little only is found in the Hartz and the Erzgebirge. The Phœnicians
did not fetch it from India. An immense quantity of tin was used in
ancient times, as it was by an alloy with it that copper was made
fusible. Brass was only of late invention, considerably later than
bronze, for the founding of which, however, tin is required. Bronze is
very old indeed, being met with in the temple of Solomon, and even in
the tabernacle of Moses already. The trade in tin was carried on through
a twofold channel; either by Cadiz, which was by sea the whole way, or
else by land, through Narbonne and Nantes. About the rest of Britain
nobody cared. The country at that time was thought at Rome to be quite
inaccessible, and Cæsar became smitten with the fancy of conquering
these untrodden lands. Booty there was little to be gained in that
undertaking, as he did not go near the tin districts, and Kent and
Sussex, which he invaded, were very poor: the Romans are said to have
found there neither gold nor silver, whereas in Gaul there was a good
deal of money in circulation. He nearly lost his ships, which, being
badly built, could hardly make their way in these foreign seas: the ebb
and flow of the tides, especially the strong tides of the Channel, was
what the Romans knew nothing about. After having defeated the half-naked
and badly-armed barbarians, he made their seeming submission a pretext
for going away again. A second expedition was as unsuccessful: yet he
penetrated beyond the Thames, above London, very likely to the
neighbourhood of Windsor, got some hostages, and returned. Scarcely,
however, had he left the island, when that show of obedience ceased.
Twice also did Cæsar cross the Rhine, and that in our own neighbourhood,
against the Sigambri and the Sueves; both times, however, without
obtaining any advantage. Yet that it was possible to advance so far into
those wild forests, is much to be wondered at: as the _Westerwald_ is in
fact the western part of that immense tract of forests, which reached to
the heart of Poland, and for some time formed the southern border of the
Germans against the Celts. Ambition only could have led Cæsar to seek
for conquests in those countries.
While Cæsar was in Britain, the oppression of the Romans, and the
lawlessness of the soldiers, caused the grand rising of the Eburones
under Ambiorix: this was the most propitious undertaking which this
people could have attempted. A whole legion under L. Titurius was
annihilated, and another under Q. Cicero nearly so. Had not Cæsar given
up his somewhat Quixotic expedition to Britain, Q. Cicero would even
have been utterly lost; luckily, however, he returned. On the other
hand, the Aquitanians were conquered by Crassus; and thus Cæsar, in the
beginning of the seventh year of his proconsulship, was master of the
whole of Gaul. An insurrection then broke out which had been long
brewing, that of Vercingetorix, and among those tribes which until then
had always been faithful to the Romans. This war, from its vastness,
from the rage and dogged determination of the Gauls, and also on account
of Cæsar’s great generalship in it, highly deserves indeed to be read.
Cæsar here overcame, by sheer superiority of talent, armies which far
outnumbered his own. Headed by the Æduans and Arvernians, who, before
that had always been jealous of each other,—the Æduans, however, rose
somewhat later,—the peoples from the Saone to the Ocean, and from the
Loire to the Cevennes, were in open revolt: the Arvernian Vercingetorix
showed himself worthy of the choice which his nation had made of him.
The outbreak of the war was attended with barbarity and cruelty: in
Genabum, the present Orleans, all the Romans who happened to be there,
were massacred. Cæsar was then in the north of Gaul; but he instantly
started for the south, the Belgians in his rear remaining perfectly
still. He reduced Orleans and avenged the murder of the Romans, and he
also took Bourges, after a long siege and a very brave defence: then he
penetrated into what is now Auvergne. Near Gergovia, above Clermont, the
war was for some time at a stand. Cæsar himself suffered a defeat, in
which he lost a legion, and found himself obliged to raise the siege.
The Æduans also having now risen, the seat of war was transferred to
Alesia, between Autun and Langres, in their country. This town, into
which many thousand Gauls had thrown themselves, Cæsar besieged with the
utmost skill: on the other hand, he was pressed upon by the great
Vercingetorix with a powerful army. In one of those skirmishes which
took place in many points with varying success, Cæsar was once made
prisoner by the Gauls; but good luck, or rather providence, which had
destined him to great things, enabled him to escape owing to the folly
of a Gaul. This was the account which Cæsar himself gave of this
matter.[9] But it is much more likely, that just as Napoleon, in May
1800, bribed an Austrian patrol into the hands of which he had fallen
when reconnoitring, Cæsar also got off by offering money to a Gallic
soldier. If he told the man that he would give him a million, the fellow
would be sure to let him go free, as Vercingetorix would at most have
given him a dram. When, however at last the war was protracted, and the
famine in Alesia had risen to the highest, so that the troops of the
Gauls became discontented and deserted; Vercingetorix had the nobleness
of mind to stand forth in the city, and say, “that they should yield him
up on condition that their lives were spared.” This stamps him as one of
the greatest men of antiquity. He went and gave himself up to Cæsar, who
again behaved vilely. Though Cæsar ought to have been more than a common
Roman, and to have treated him generously, sending him to a _libera
custodia_; he bound him in chains, kept him for his triumph, and then
had him put to death. This is one of those stains from which indeed
Cæsar is not free.
After this, there were still some smaller insurrections. There was a
rising of the Belgians, but the time for it was past; and moreover there
was one of the Bellovaci, in the neighbourhood of Beauvais and Chartres:
yet it was now very easy for Cæsar to conquer them. We see clearly that
it was the will of Providence to make the Roman Empire great, and to
gather all the nations then known under its sway. Had Vercingetorix, who
could not have been unacquainted with the state of affairs at Rome, kept
back the outbreak in Gaul for a couple of years, until the heartburnings
between Cæsar and Pompey had brought on the civil war, Gaul might
perhaps have recovered her freedom.