Caesar

Nevertheless, he did not make his feeble health an excuse for soft living, but rather his military service a cure for his feeble health, since by wearisome journeys, simple diet, continuously sleeping in the open air, and enduring hardships, he fought off his trouble and kept his body strong against its attacks. Most of his sleep, at least, he got in cars or litters, making his rest conduce to action, and in the day-time he would have himself conveyed to garrisons, cities, or camps one slave who was accustomed to write from dictation as he travelled sitting by his side, and one soldier standing behind him with a sword.

And he drove so rapidly that, on his first journey from Rome to Gaul, he reached the Rhone in seven days. Horsemanship, moreover, had been easy for him from boyhood; for he was wont to put his hands behind his back and, holding them closely there, to ride his horse at full speed. And in the Gallic campaigns he practised dictating letters on horseback and keeping two scribes at once busy, or, as Oppius says, even more.

We are told, moreover, that Caesar was the first to devise intercourse with his friends by letter, since he could not wait for personal interviews on urgent matters owing to the multitude of his occupations and the great size of the city. Of his indifference in regard to his diet the following circumstance also is brought in proof. When the host who was entertaining him in Mediolanum, Valerius Leo, served up asparagus dressed with myrrh instead of olive oil, Caesar ate of it without ado, and rebuked his friends when they showed displeasure.

Surely, said he, it were enough not to eat what you don’t like; but he who finds fault with ill-breeding like this is ill-bred himself. Once, too, upon a journey, he and his followers were driven by a storm into a poor man’s hut, and when he found that it consisted of one room only, and that one barely able to accommodate a single person, he said to his friends that honours must be yielded to the strongest, but necessities to the weakest, and bade Oppius lie down there, while he himself with the rest of his company slept in the porch.

But to resume, the first of his Gallic wars was against the Helvetii and Tigurini,[*](Cf. Caesar, Bell. Gall. i. 2-29.) who had set fire to their twelve cities and four hundred villages and were advancing through that part of Gaul which was subject to the Romans, as once the Cimbri and Teutones had done. To these they were thought to be not inferior in courage and of equal numbers, being three hundred thousand in all, of whom one hundred and ninety thousand were fighting men.

The Tigurini were crushed at the river Arar, not by Caesar himself, but by Labienus, his deputy; the Helvetii, however, unexpectedly attacked Caesar himself on the march, as he was leading his forces towards a friendly city, but he succeeded in reaching a strong place of refuge. Here, after he had collected and arrayed his forces, a horse was brought to him. This horse, said he, I will use for the pursuit after my victory; but now let us go against the enemy, and accordingly led the charge on foot.

After a long and hard struggle he routed the enemy’s fighting men, but had the most trouble at their rampart of waggons, where not only did the men themselves make a stand and fight, but also their wives and children defended themselves to the death and were cut to pieces with the men. The battle was hardly over by midnight.

To the noble work of victory Caesar added a nobler still, that of settling those of the Barbarians who had escaped alive from the battle (there were more than one hundred thousand of them), and compelling them to resume the territory which they had abandoned and the cities which they had destroyed. He did this because he feared that if the territory became vacant the Germans would cross the Rhine and occupy it.

His second war, directly in defence of the Gauls, was against the Germans,[*](Cf. Caesar, B. G. i. 30-53.) although previously, in Rome, he had made their king Ariovistus an ally.[*](Acting as consul, in 59 B.C.) But they were intolerable neighbours of Caesar’s subjects, and if an opportunity presented itself it was thought that they would not remain quietly in their present homes, but would encroach upon and occupy Gaul.