Res Gestae

Pleased with these first-fruits of victory, he passed through the land of the Treveri, and went to winter at Sens, a town which was then convenient. There, bearing on his shoulders, as the saying is, the burden of a flood of wars,[*](See p. 82, n. 5.) he was distracted by manifold cares—how the soldiers who had abandoned their usual posts might be taken back to danger-points, how he might scatter the tribes that had conspired to the hurt of the Roman cause, and how to see to it that food should not fail his army as it was about to range in different directions.

As he was anxiously weighing these problems, a host of the enemy attacked, fired with increased hope of taking the town, and full of confidence because they had learned from the statements of deserters that neither the targeteers nor the gentiles[*](See note 3, p. 56.) were at hand; for they had been distributed in the towns, so as to be more easily provisioned than before.

So, having shut the city gates and strengthened a weak section of the walls, Julian could be seen day and night with his soldiers among the bulwarks and battlements, boiling over with rage and fretting because however often he tried to sally forth, he was hampered by the scanty numbers of the troops at hand. Finally, after a month the savages withdrew crestfallen, muttering that they had been silly and foolish to have contemplated the blockade of the city.

But—a thing to be regarded as a shameful situation[*](I.e. the ill-treatment of Julian.) —while Caesar was in jeopardy, Marcellus, master of the horse, although he was stationed in neighbouring posts, postponed sending him reinforcements; whereas even if the city alone was endangered, to say nothing of the prince’s presence there, it ought to have been saved from the hardships of blockade by the intervention of a large force.

Once relieved of this fear, Caesar provided with the greatest efficiency and with unfailing solicitude that some rest should follow the long continued toil of the soldiers, a short one perhaps, but enough, at least, to restore their strength; and yet that region, a wilderness in its