Cæsar besieged Masilia, the gates of which had been shut against him;
leaving his lieutenants-general, Caius Trebonius and Decimus Brutus, to
carry on the siege, he set out for Spain, where Lucius Afranius and
Caius Petreius, Pompeius’s lieutenants-general, with seven legions,
surrendered to him at Ilerda: he dismissed them all in safety. He also
reduced to submission Varro, another lieutenant-general of Pompeius,
with the army under his command. He granted the privileges of Roman
citizens to the Gaditanians. The Massilians were defeated in two
engagements at sea; after having sustained a long siege, they yielded to
Cæsar. Caius Antonius, a lieutenant-general of Cæsar, having made an
unsuccessful attack upon Pompeius’s forces in Illyria, was taken
prisoner. In the course of this war, the inhabitants of Opitergium, a
district beyond the Po, in alliance with Cæsar, seeing their bridge
blocked up by the enemy’s ships, rather than fall into their hands,
killed one another. Caius Curio, one of Cæsar’s lieutenants-general in
Africa, after a successful engagement with Varus, a general of the
Pompeian party, was cut off, together with his army, by Juba, king of
Mauritania. Caius Cæsar passed over into Greece.