XII. CÉSAR CONCLUI A CONQUISTA DA GÁLIA
“At a crisis of such intense interest it was, we may imagine, from no patriotic motives, nor from a stern sense of duty to his country, that Caesar again withdrew the focus of action and intrigue to the obscure banishment of a distant province.”
“The subjugated and allied states he treated with studious forbearance, such as they seldom experienced from other commanders: he endowed their faithful cities with privileges, and encouraged their commerce, which already flourished in the south under his equitable administration.”
(*) “In the later history of the Empire, we shall meet with an Africanus, an Agricola, a Classicus, a Florus, an Indus, a Sacrovir, a Sabinus, and several others, all of Gaulish extraction, and bearing the gentile name of Julius. It was, however, to Augustus, no doubt, that many families owed their introduction into the Julian house, as he also gave to some of his colonies the designation of Julia, in honour of his adoptive parent.”
“Brief and inglorious had been the flourishing period of Gaulish democracy. On the other hand, it was the chieftains principally who were impatient of the conquest. Wherever the power of this class was great, as in the recent uncivilized communities of Belgium, the flames of insurrection might be repressed, but were not extinguished.”
“The triumvirs had vied with one another in courting popular applause by pomp and munificence. Caesar determined to eclipse the theatre of Pompeius by buildings of greater splendour or utility. The spoils of the Gauls were employed to adorn and enlarge the forum, in which their victorious ancestors had encamped; and the remains of the Julian basilica, on the one side, and the contemporary edifice of Aemilius, on the other, still indicate to antiquaries the limits of that venerable enclosure.”
“The Alps were once the barrier between Italy and the barbarians; the gods had placed them there for that very purpose, for by them alone was Rome protected through the perils of her infancy. Now let them sink and welcome: from the Alps to the ocean Rome has henceforth no enemy to fear.”
Cicero
“The proconsul had previously tried the experiment of dispersing his forces through a great extent of territory, and had suffered severe losses in consequence. This winter he concentrated them more closely together; but the tribes which were not awed by their immediate presence were able to carry on their intrigues the more securely, and succeeded in organizing another general revolt”
“The leaders of the Carnutes, Cotuatus and Conetodunus, are described by Caesar as men of violent and desperate character” “Still more important was the defection of the Arverni, who were excited to arms against the will of their government by Vercingetorix, a son of the ambitious Celtillus, whose life had been forfeited a few years before for the crime of aspiring to the sovereignty.(*)
(*) Cingetorix, Vercingetorix, and other Gaulish names, may possibly be analysed into several Celtic words, and the compound, in each case, may be an official designation, such as captain, general, generalissimo (Thierry, Gaulois, iii 86). In the same manner the name Arminius may be the German Heermann or general. But Heermann (Hermann) is a well-known surname, and the same may have been the case with these Celtic appellatives also.”
“Presently the Senones, the Parisii, the Pictones, the Cadurci, the Turones, Aulerci, Lemovices and Andi, all the tribes of the Mid Seine and the Lower Loire, with many others, joined in one loud cry of defiance to the oppressor.”
(*) “Owing to the confusion of the Roman calendar at this period, which will be explained in a subsequent chapter, the Kalends of January for the year A.U. 702 fell on the 23rd Nov. of the year preceding, according to the true reckoning.”
(*) “Genabum, or Genabus, is the modern Orléans. Gergovia of the Boii is to be distinguished from Gergovia of the Arverni: there are no means of determining its site; but the Boii were settled in a part of the Aeduan territory between the Loire and Allier, a district of the modern Bourbonnais, and their capital may have been at Moulins.”
(*) “As with many other Gaulish towns, the original name became exchanged for that of the people, i.e. Bituriges, and thence the modern Bourges and the name of the province Berri. The history of this change of name, which is found so repeatedly in Gaulish geography, is a curious subject in itself, which I may have a future opportunity of explaining more fully.”
“The site of Avaricum was admirably calculated for defence. It stood on a hill, and a narrow causeway between a river and a morass afforded the only approach to it.”
“The Gauls were routed and exterminated, their women and children mercilessly slaughtered, and the great central city of Gaul fell into the hands of the conquerors without affording a single captive for their triumph.”
(*) “The site of Gergovia of the Arverni is supposed to be a hill on the bank of the Allier, 2 miles from the modern Clermont in Auvergne. The Romans seem to have neglected Gergovia, and to have founded the neighbouring city, to which they gave the name Augustonemetum. The Roman city became known afterwards as Civitas Arvernorum, in the middle ages Arverna, and then, from the situation of its castle, clarus mons, Clermont. See d’Anville, Notice de la Gaule, in voc.”
“The Gauls abandoned themselves to the full intoxication of a success beyond their most sanguine hopes. Even the Roman writers enumerated this among the few instances in which their illustrious hero was worsted.”
“Caesar, always found at the point where the danger was greatest, was this day engaged with the cavalry, as in his great battle with the Nervians he had done the duty of a legionary. At one moment he was so nearly captured that his sword was wrested from him, and remained in the hands of his enemies. The Arvernians caused it to be suspended in one of their temples, and of all military trophies this assuredly was the noblest.”
“But the fatal mistake of assembling the whole Gaulish army in one spot, and there tying it, as it were, to the stake, offered an opportunity for a daring and decisive exploit.”
“At this moment Caesar risked every thing; all the plans of conquest which he had established and matured in Gaul/ all the schemes of ulterior aggrandizement over which he had so long brooded; his life, his reputation, all were hazarded at this eventful crisis.”
“it became necessary to repel the approach of famine by extraordinary measures. The Gaulish chieftains were animated with the most desperate resolution; it was deliberately proposed to sanction the killing and eating of human beings.”
“The result of the original blockade was now inevitable. It could only remain a question with the Gauls, whether they should die with arms in their hands, or yield themselves to the vengeance of the exasperated enemy.”
“The ancient superstition of many nations declared that the self-devotion of the chief is accepted by the Gods as an atonement for the people; and Vercingetorix, who had been the principal instigator as well as the most conspicuous leader of the revolt, now claimed the honour of being its last victim.”
“The answer was stern and ominous. It demanded the surrender of their chiefs, the delivery of their arms, the submission of the whole multitude to the discretion of the Roman general. Vercingetorix, with all the gallant gaiety of his nation, clad himself in his most splendid armour, and mounted his noblest charger.”
“wherever the influence of any single chief was preeminent, or where, as among the Carnutes, the authority of the Druids was all-powerful, the smouldering flames found fuel among a restless and harassed population, and news armies continued to spring up in inexhaustible abundance.”
“At etiam qui triumphant eoque diutius vivos hostium duces servant, ut his per triumphum ductis pulcherrimum spectaculum fructumque victoriae populus Romanus percipere possit; tamen quum de foro in Capitolium currum flectere incipiunt, illos duci in carcerem jubent; idemque dies et victoribus imperii et victis vitae finem facit.”
Cícero
(*) “In the 8th book of the Commentaries on the Gallic war we have no longer Caesar himself as our guide. Suetonius attributes it to one of his officers, Aulus Hirtius (Jul. 56). The style is formed on the model of Caesar’s, but is inferior to it both in elegance and clearness. But, like the preceding books, it is the work of an eyewitness, and seems to be equally trustworthy. In this place the author gives as a reason for the desultory warfare into which the Gauls relapsed after the loss of Vercingetorix, their despair of overthrowing the enemy in a general engagement, and their hope of wearing out his troops by attacking them in detail. It is more probable that the loss of the only leader who had ever succeeded in uniting them in a common enterprize was irreparable.”
“Caesar quum suam lenitatem cognitam omnibus sciret, neque vereretur, ne quid crudelitate naturae videretur asperius fecisse”
Au. Hirtius
“Let the reader conceive the languid and bloodless figure of Gaul, just escaped from a burning fever and inflammation of her vital parts; let him remark how thin and pale she is, how helpless and nerveless she lies; how she fears even to move a limb lest she should bring on a worse relapse; for the Roman army rushed upon her as a plague stronger than the strongest patient, which rages the more, the more resistance it encounters. The thirst that consumed her was her impatience at the demand for pledges of her perpetual servitude; liberty was the sweet cold draught for which she burned; she raved for the waters which were stolen from her.”
Orosius
XIII. OS FRACASSOS DE POMPEU / OS NOBRES CONTRA CÉSAR / CÉSAR NA GÁLIA / AS LEGIÕES CESÁREAS / CÚRIO / TRIBUNOS CONTRA O SENADO
“A letter of Caesar or Pompeius expressing his regard for the culprit, his assurance of his innocence and wishes for his success, might be read in open court with no little effect upon the interested parties in whose hands the decision lay.”
“The year of Pompeius’ consulship was distinguished by the multitude of cases in which the conduct of men of all shades of political opinion was submitted to judicial scrutiny. He passed a law to compel the prosecution of all the charges of bribery with which the various candidates for office since the year 699 had been menaced. A curious provision was adopted to stimulate the flagging zeal of the accusers. The culprit who was suffering himself under conviction for a similar crime might obtain remission of his own penalty by conducting to a successful issue a charge against another.”
“The riddance which had been made both of Milo and Clodius, together with many of their noisiest adherents, freed the forum from the tumultuary bands by which public business had been so long impeded.” “Such was the early promise of the military tyranny which the consul and senate had virtually introduced into the city.”
“A few months must reveal the imposture, and the termination of his extraordinary office would be hailed as the dethronement of a tyrant. Great as were his abilities in the conduct of affairs, and free as he was from the passions which so frequently cloud the judgment of statesmen, untrammeled by avarice or sensuality, with few personal hatreds or partialities, nevertheless his character exerted no ascendency over others. Always artful, he had no ingenuity in concealing his artifice.”
“Caesar, on his part, in the midst of the overwhelming cares and perils of war, kept his eye intently fixed upon the progress of affairs in the city, and saw that his only hope now lay in the errors of his antagonists. His term of government was approaching its close, while his opponents were eagerly pressing to have it cut short at once.” “He could expect neither justice nor mercy from the powers whose position in the city seemed now impregnable.”
“His first counter move was to employ some of his friends among the tribunes to submit a law to the people, authorizing him to sue for the consulship without being present in the city; that is, without laying down his command previously.”
“The position which Cicero had lost as a political leader might be compensated to the state by the activity and success with which he applied himself to the business of a pleader in political causes. For some years there was, perhaps, no cause of importance in which his eloquence was not put in requisition for the accusation or the defence; and his name grew more and more illustrious, both for the brilliancy and the effectiveness of his harangues.”
“Though in his private correspondence he still expressed himself in despair for his country’s destinies, yet that he did in fact retain hopes of better days appears from the interest he continued to take in those, among the rising generation, who seemed to give the greatest promise of goodness and wisdom.”
“the abilities of Curio were brilliant, and his disposition had some natural bias towards the good; his recent quaestorship of Asia had opened his mind to larger views of interest and duty, and his sphere of action was expanded by the death of his father, a man of considerable influence among his order. Cicero exerted himself to the utmost to develop the latent seeds of good in his favourite and pupil”
“The first of March was apparently the ordinary day for assigning the provinces, the most important business connected with the internal economy of the state.”
“When the news was conveyed to him of the determination at which the senate had thus arrived to deprive him of his government on the appointed day, he laid his hand on his sword and exclaimed, This, then, shall keep it. (Appian. Plutarch, however, attributes this sally to one of his soldiers.)”
“There was no one at his ear to whisper how hollow these demonstrations were, to foretell that Italy would surrender to his rival without a blow, and that the voices now loudest in the accents of devotion to him would welcome the conqueror of Gaul with no less fervent acclamations.”
“Nor was it Caesar’s wish to bring Rome thus, as it were, into the provinces; his object was, on the contrary, to approach the Gaulish provincials to Rome, to give them an interest and a pride in the city of their conquerors.”
“Not only the Arverni, the Aedui, the Bituriges, but even the fierce and intractable Treviri, were indulged with the name of free states.”
“Caesar, indeed, had another enemy in the southern part of his province, the Pompeian faction, whom he feared more than the Gauls themselves, and it was in order to strengthen himself against these that he paid his court to the nations which he had subdued.”
(*) “The legions which Pompeius maintained in Spain bore the numbers 1 to 6. The numbers were given according to the date of conscription; but even at this early period the armies of the east and west had no reference to each other, and the legions of Syria were numbered independently of those of Spain and Gaul. Guischard.”
“Only a small portion of these soldiers could have been of genuine Roman or Italian extraction, with the full franchise of the city”
“The common dangers and glories of a few campaigns side by side had rendered the Gaulish auxiliary no less efficient than the legionary himself.”
“One entire legion, indeed, he did not scruple to compose of Gauls alone; and of all his audacious innovations, none, perhaps, jarred more upon the prejudices of his countrymen.” “The soldiers who composed this legion were distinguished by a helmet with the figure of a lark or a tuft of its plumage on the crest, from whence it derived its name Alauda. The Gauls admired the spirit and vivacity of the bird, and rejoiced in the omen. Fond of the excitement of a military life, vain of the consideration attached to the profession of arms, proud of themselves and their leaders, they found united in Caesar’s service all the charms which most attracted them.”
“Accordingly, he enjoyed popularity among his troops such as seldom fell to the lot of the Roman generals, who maintained discipline by the terror of punishment alone.”
“and the toils and privations they endured in their marches and sieges more appalled the enemy than even their well-known bravery in the field.”
“Curio’s term of office was on the point of expiring, and his personal safety also was compromised. The tribune made a last appeal to the people; he proclaimed aloud that justice was violated, that the reign of law was over, that a military domination reigned in the city; he entreated the citizens to resist this tyranny, as their fathers had done before them, by refusing military service”
“Caesar offered to surrender at once the Transalpine province, together with all the troops by which its submission was secured; he requested no more than permission to retain the Cisalpine and Illyricum, with the moderate force of two legions. He must have been aware that the passions of his enemies had been lashed into such fury that they would lend no ear to any compromise.”
XIV. CRUZANDO O RUBICÃO / CÉSAR “SITIA” POMPEU / FUGA DOS NOBRES
“From this moment the staunchest of the proconsul’s adherents in the senate were reduced to silence.”
“The law had declared itself against Caesar in the person of its chief organs, the authorities and great council of the state; and the Marian party, the strength of which certainly did not lie in the eminence of its leaders in the city, had neither the courage nor the power to defy it.”
“Even those who had obstinately maintained a neutral position, such as Cato, those who detested and feared both the rival chiefs equally, found themselves reduced to the necessity of embracing the side on which the state had declared itself.”
“The conquerors of Gaul, it was said, were wearied with war, satiated with plunder, discontented with their restless general, dismayed at the prospect of raising their hands against their beloved country.”
“But there was no more fatal mistake throughout their proceedings than their confidence in the existence of general disaffection to their leader among the officers and soldiers of the Gallic legions.”
“the frontier of Italy and Gaul was traced by the stream of the Rubicon.”
“The ancients amused themselves with picturing the guilty hesitation with which the founder of a line of despots stood, as they imagined, on the brink of the fatal river, and paused for an instant before he committed the irrevocable act, pregnant with the destinies of a long futurity. Caesar, indeed, in his Commentaries, makes no allusion to the passage of the Rubicon”
“and the news that Caesar had actually crossed the frontier came upon them like a clap of thunder.”
“Nor was it only the Caesar of the Curia and the Forum who was rapidly approaching their walls. Bold and reckless as he had shown himself in the civic contests of the gown, he had learnt cruelty by habitual shedding of blood; he had become, they were assured, in his 9 years’ intercourse with the barbarians, more ferocious than the Gauls themselves.”
“If Pompeius, on the other hand, had refrained hitherto from acts of violence, everyone was ready to acknowledge that he was deterred by no principle; it was only because the necessities of the senate had compelled it to throw its powers unreservedly into his hands.”
“It is not the province of the historian to condemn or absolve the great names of human annals. He leaves the philosophic moralist to denounce crimes or errors, upon a full survey of the character and position of the men and their times”
“He may be allowed to lament the pettiness of the statesmen of this epoch, and the narrow idea they formed of public interests in the contest between Caesar and his rival. Above all, he must regret that a man to whom we owe so much affection as Cicero should have been deceived by a selfish and hypocritical outcry”
“The consuls and senate, as we have seen, had abandoned the city on the first rumour of Caesar’s advance to Ariminum. The political effects of this rash step seem to have been little considered by them; but, in fact, in the view of the great mass of the Roman people, the abandonment of the city was equivalent to an abdication of all legitimate authority.”
“Caesar arrived before Brundisium on the 9th of March. The forces with which he formed the siege amounted to 6 complete legions, together with their auxiliary Gaulish cohorts.”
“Caesar had made himself master of Italy in 60 days. Never, perhaps, was so great a conquest effected so rapidly and in the face of antagonists apparently so formidable.”
“the magistrates of every city flung wide their gates, and hailed the Roman traitor as their hero and deliverer.”
“The subjugation of Spain had occupied 150 years of almost constant warfare. Step by step had Rome made her way into the heart of a country, in which every mountain and desert had been defended with the same inveterate love of freedom.”
“in the absence of civilization, the Iberians had no social institutions which could retain their vitality under the blight of a foreign conquest.”
“The genius and activity of Caesar seemed to have effected in 9 years in Gaul beyond the Cevennes the moral and social transformation which it had taken a century and a half to mature in the Iberian peninsula.”
“The two great nations of the west were thus rendered the allies of the republic, rather than her subjects.”
“But in the eastern half of the Roman empire the ideas of the dominant people had received no such development, and no interest was there felt in the quarrels of the city.”
“The sympathies of the Orientals centred always in man, and never in governments.”
“He left the city, says Cicero, not because he could not defend it, and Italy, not because he was driven out of it; but this was his design from the beginning, to move every land and sea, to call to arms the kings of the barbarians, to lead savage nations into Italy, not as captives but as conquerors. He is determined to reign like Sulla, as a king over his subjects; and many there are who applaud this atrocious design.”
XV. CÉSAR EM ROMA / SUBJUGANDO AS FORÇAS ESPANHOLAS DE POMPEU / A CAPITULAÇÃO DE POMPEU EM 49 A.C.
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GLOSSÁRIO INGLÊS:
lark: cotovia
morass: pântano
Seclusão Anagógica 