Caesar and the Roman Empire by W. Warde Fowler

Author:W. Warde Fowler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jovian Press

THE GALLIC REBELLIONS. 54-52 B.C.

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THE RETREAT FROM BRITAIN IN September, 54 B.C., marks a turning point in Caesar’s life. His happiest and brightest years were surely the first four that he spent in Gaul, when he was far removed from the hurly-burly of party strife in Rome, free to indulge his own love of glory and of adventure, and free to use exactly as he pleased the services of an admirable and devoted army. Hardly a check had occurred to mar the brilliancy of his career; his star seemed ever in the ascendant, his good fortune unfailing. He worked and travelled indefatigably winter and summer in all his three provinces; he was in the full vigour of the ripest manhood, and his bodily health seems to have answered all the calls made on it, and to have profited by the constant change of scene, and by the unbroken activity of a healthy mind. And lastly, a splendid hope lay before him; that when his new conquests were completed and organised, he might return home to a second consulship, and finish the work he had begun in his first. He would once more attempt to consolidate all parties in a rational and active government, to teach men what the Roman Empire had become, and to discover for them the principles on which alone it could be intelligently and happily governed.

But just as in the early afternoon of a brilliant summer day, the face of the heaven will suddenly appear flecked with the clouds that tell of the storm to come, so at this point in Caesar’s life, he became aware of the first warnings of serious trouble. We need not speak yet of his relations with Pompeius, of the death of Crassus in Asia, or of the loss of his only daughter Julia; even in Gaul itself the trouble was beginning, and it is this that must be dealt with in this chapter. But we may say, not without truth, that from this time forwards his life, like that of Cromwell after Naseby, was one long series of struggles against disappointment and vexation. In all these struggles he was victorious, like Cromwell; but in each case the heroic man was carried by them out of the course he would have chosen for himself, and each life was worn out in the long unwearied effort.

The northern Gauls had taken advantage of Caesar’s absence in Britain to organise something like a general rebellion; they only waited to see how his forces would be disposed in winter-quarters. Unaware of what had been going on, and urged by the necessities of a bad harvest, which made it difficult to feed a large force in one district, he unwittingly played into their hands. The several legions were settled for the winter at a considerable distance from each other; though, with one exception, they were all within a circuit of a hundred Roman miles. Three of them were in what is now Belgium: one, under Q. Cicero,

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