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  The ruddy river Rubicon glides through the bottom of the valleys and serves as a fixed landmark to divide the land of Gaul from the farms of Italy. Issuing from a modest spring, it runs with scanty stream in the heat of burning summer; but now it was swollen by winter; and its waters were increased by the third rising of a rainy moon with moisture laden horn, and by Alpine snows which damp blasts of wind had melted. First the cavalry took station slantwise across the stream, to meet its flow; thus the current was broken, and the rest of the army forded the water with ease. When Caesar had crossed the stream and reached the Italian bank on the further side, he halted on the forbidden territory: “Here,” he cried, “here I leave peace behind me and legality which has been scorned already; henceforth I follow Fortune. Hereafter let me hear no more of agreements. In them I have put my trust long enough; now I must seek the arbitrament of war.” Thus spoke the leader and quickly urged his army on through the darkness of night. Faster he goes than the bullet whirled from the Balearic sling, or the arrow which the Parthian shoots over his shoulder. Ariminum was the nearest town, and he brought terror there, when the stars were fleeing from the sunlight and the morning star alone was left. So the day dawned that was to witness the first turmoil of the war; but clouds veiled the mournful light, either because the gods so willed or because the stormy South wind had driven them up. When the soldiers halted in the captured forum and were bidden to lay down their standards, the blare of trumpets and shrill note of clarions together with the boom of horns sounded the alarm of civil war. The inhabitants were roused from sleep. Starting from their beds, the men snatched down the arms that hung beside the household gods — such arms as the long peace supplied: they lay hold on shields that are falling to pieces with framework exposed, javelins with their points bent, and swords roughened by the bite of black rust. But when they recognised the glitter of the Roman eagles and standards and saw Caesar mounted in the midst of his army, they stood motionless with fear, terror seized their chilly limbs, and these unuttered complaints they turn over in their silent breasts: “Alas for our town, built with Gaul beside it and doomed by its unlucky site to misfortune! Over all the earth there is profound peace and unbroken quiet; but we are the booty and first bivouac of these madmen. Fate would have been kinder if she had placed us under the Eastern sky or the frozen North, and made us guard the tents of nomads rather than the gates of Italy. We were the first to witness the movement of the Senones, the onrush of the Cimbrian, the sword of Hannibal, and the wild career of the Teutones : whenever Fortune attacks Rome, the warriors take their way through us.” This was each man’s muffled groan; none dared to utter his fear aloud, nor was any voice lent to their grief; such is the silence of the country when winter strikes the birds dumb, and such the silence of mid-ocean in still weather. When light had banished the cold shades of night, lo! destiny kindled the flame of war, applying to Caesar’s hesitating heart the spur that pricked him to battle, and bursting all the barriers that reverence opposed. Fate was determined to justify Caesar’s rebellion, and she found excuse for drawing the sword. For the Senate, trampling on the laws, had menaced and driven out the wrangling tribunes from the distracted city, and boasted of the doom of the Gracchi; and now the fugitives made for Caesar’s camp, already far advanced and close to Rome. With them came Curio of the reckless heart and venal tongue; yet once he had been the spokesman of the people and a bold champion of freedom, who dared to bring down the armed chiefs to the level of the crowd. When Curio saw Caesar turning over shifting counsels in his heart, he spoke thus: “Caesar, while my voice could serve your side and when I was permitted to hold the Rostrum and bring over doubting citizens to your interest, I prolonged your command in defiance of the Senate. But now law has been silenced by the constraint of war, and we have been driven from our country. We suffer exile willingly, because, your victory will make us citizens again. While your foes are in confusion and before they have gathered strength, make haste; delay is ever fatal to those who are prepared. The toil and danger are no greater than before, but the prize you seek is higher. Twice five years Gaul kept you fighting; but how small a part of the earth is Gaul! Win but two or three battles, and it will be for you that Rome has subdued the world. As it is, no long triumphal procession awaits your return, nor does the Capitol demand your consecrated laurels; gnawing envy denies you all things, and you will scarce go unpunished for your conquest of foreign nations. Your daughter’s husband has resolved to thrust you down from sovereignty. Half the world you may not have, but you can have the whole world for yourself.” Eager for war as Caesar was already, these words of Curio increased his rage and fired his ardour none the less; so the race-horse at Olympia is encouraged by the shouting, although he is already pressing against the gates of the closed barrier and seeking to loosen the bolts with his forehead. At once Caesar summoned his armed companies to the standards; his mien quieted the bustle and confusion of the assembling troops, his right hand commanded silence, and thus he spoke: “Men who have fought and faced with me the peril of battle a thousand times, for ten years past you have been victorious. Is this your reward for blood shed on the fields of the North, for wounds and death, and for winters passed beside the Alps? The huge hubbub of war with which Rome is shaken could be no greater, if Carthaginian Hannibal had crossed the Alps. Cohorts are raised to their full strength with recruits; every forest is felled to make ships; the word has gone forth that Caesar be chased by land and sea. What would my foes do if my standards lay prostrate in defeat and the tribes of Gaul were rushing in triumph to attack my rear? As it is, when Fate deals kindly with me and the gods summon me to the highest place, my foes challenge me. Let their leader, enervated by long peace, come forth to war with his hasty levies and un warlike partisans — Marcellus, that man of words, and Cato, that empty name. Shall Pompey forsooth be glutted by his vile and venal minions with despotic power renewed so often without a break? Shall Pompey hold the chariot reins before reaching the lawful age? Shall Pompey cling for ever to the posts he has once usurped? Why should I next complain that he took into his own hands the harvests of the whole world and forced famine to do his bidding? Who knows not how the barrack invaded the frightened law-court, when soldiers with the grim glitter of their swords stood round the uneasy and astonished jurors? how the warrior dared to break into the sanctuary of justice, and Pompey’s standards besieged Milo in the dock? Now once again, to escape the burden of an obscure old age, Pompey is scheming unlawful warfare. Civil war is familiar to him: he was taught wickedness by Sulla and is like to outdo his teacher. As the fierce tiger, who has drunk deep of the blood of slain cattle when following his dam from lair to lair in the Hyrcanian jungle, never after loses his ferocity, so Magnus, once wont to lick the sword of Sulla, is thirsty still. When blood has once been swallowed, it never permits the throat it has tainted to lose its cruelty. Will power so long continued ever find an end, or crime a limit? He is never content; but let him learn one lesson at least from his master, Sulla — to step down at this stage from his unlawful power. First came the roving Cilicians, and then the lingering warfare with the King of Pontus — warfare hardly completed by the infamy of poison; shall I, Caesar, be assigned to Pompey as his crowning task, because, when bidden lay down my victorious eagles, I was disobedient? But, if I am robbed of the reward for my labours, let my soldiers at least, without their leader, receive the recompense of their long service; and let them triumph, be their leader who he may. What harbour of peace will they find for their feeble old age, what dwelling-place for their retirement? What lands will my veterans receive to till, what walls to shelter their war-worn frames? Shall Magnus give the pirates preference as colonists? Lift up, lift up the standards that have long been victorious! We must employ the strength we have created. He who denies his due to the strong man armed grants him everything. Nor will the favour of Heaven fail us; for neither booty nor empire is the object of my warfare: we are but dislodging a tyrant from a State prepared to bow the knee.”

/>   Thus he spoke; but the men wavered and muttered doubtfully under their breath with no certain sound. Fierce as they were with bloodshed and proud of heart, they were unnerved by love of their country and their country’s gods, till brought to heel by horrid love of slaughter and fear of their leader. Then Laelius, who held the rank of chief centurion and bore the decoration of a well-earned badge — the oak-leaves which are the reward for saving a Roman’s life — cried out thus: “Mightiest captain of the Roman nation, if I have leave to speak and if it be right to confess the truth, our complaint is, that you have borne too much and restrained your strength too long. Was it confidence in us that you lacked? While the warm blood gives motion to these breathing frames, and while our muscles have strength to hurl the pilum, will you submit to the disgrace of wearing the toga and to the tyranny of the Senate? Is it so wretched a fate to be victorious in a civil war? Lead us straightway through the tribes of Scythia, or the inhospitable shore of the Syrtes, or the burning sands of thirsty Libya — that we might leave a conquered world at our backs, these hands tamed with the oar the swelling waves of Ocean and the foaming eddies of the northern Rhine — I must have as much power as will to follow where you lead. If I hear your trumpet sound the charge against any man, he is no countryman of mine. By your standards, victorious in ten campaigns, and by your triumphs I swear, whoever be the foe whom you triumph over — if you bid me bury my sword in my brother’s breast or my father’s throat or the body of my teeming wife, I — will perform it all, even if my hand be reluctant. If you bid me plunder the gods and fire their temples, the furnace of the military mint shall melt down the statues of the deities; if you bid me pitch the camp by the waters of Etruscan Tiber, I shall make bold to invade the fields of Italy and there mark out the lines; whatever walls you wish to level, these arms shall ply the ram and scatter the stones asunder, even if the city you doom to utter destruction be Rome.” To this speech all the cohorts together signified their assent, raising their hands on high and promising their aid in any war to which Caesar summoned them. Their shout rose to heaven: as loud as, when the Thracian North wind bears down upon the cliffs of pine-clad Ossa, the forest roars as the trees are bent towards earth, or again as they rebound into the sky.

  When Caesar saw that war was so eagerly welcomed by the soldiers, and that Fate was favourable, he would not by any slackness delay the course of destiny, but summoned his detachments scattered through the land of Gaul and moved his standards from every quarter for the march on Rome. The soldiers left their tents pitched by Lake Leman among the mountains, and the camp which crowned the winding bank of the Vosegus, and controlled the warlike Lingones with their painted weapons. Others left the fords of the Isara — the river which travels so far with its own waters and then falls into a more famous stream, losing its name before it reaches the sea. The fair-haired Ruthenians were freed from the garrison that long had held them; the gentle Atax, and the Varus, the boundary of Italy enlarged, rejoiced to carry no Roman keels; free was the harbour sacred under the name of Hercules, whose hollow cliff encroaches on the sea — over it neither Corus nor Zephyrus has power: Circius alone stirs up the shore and keeps it to himself and bars the safe roadstead of Monoecus; and free the strip of disputed coast, claimed in turn by land and sea, when the enormous Ocean either flows in or withdraws with ebbing waves. Does some wind from the horizon drive the sea thus on and fail it as it carries it? Or are the waves of restless Tethys attracted by the second of the heavenly bodies and stirred by the phases of the moon? Or does fire-bearing Titan, in order to quaff the waves that feed him, lift up the Ocean and draw its billows skyward? I leave the enquiry to those who study the workings of the universe: for me, let the cause, whatever it be, that produces such constant movements, remain, as the gods have wished it to remain, for ever hidden. Gone are the soldiers who held the region of the Nemes and banks of the Atyrus, where the Tarbellians hem in the sea that beats lightly against the winding shore. The departure of their foe brings joy to the Santoni and Bituriges; to the Suessones, nimble in spite of their long spears; to the Leuci and Remi who excel in hurling the javelin, and to the Sequani who excel in wheeling their bitted steeds; to the Belgae, skilled in driving the war-chariot invented by others, and to the Arvernian clan who falsely claim descent from Troy and brotherhood with Rome; to the Nervii, too prone to rebel against us and stained by breach of their treaty with slaughtered Cotta; to the Vangiones, who wear loose trousers like the Sarmatians, and to the fierce Batavians, whose courage is roused by the blare of curved bronze trumpets. There is joy where the waters of Cinga stray, where the Rhone snatches the Arar in swift current and bears it to the sea, and where a tribe perches on the mountain heights and inhabits the snow-covered rocks of the Cevennes. The Treviri too rejoiced that the troops were moved; so did the Ligurians with hair now cropped, though once they excelled all the longhaired land in the locks that fell in beauty over their necks; and those who propitiate with horrid victims ruthless Teutates, and Esus whose savage shrine makes men shudder, and Taranis, whose altar is no more benign than that of Scythian Diana. The Bards also, who by the praises of their verse transmit to distant ages the fame of heroes slain in battle, poured forth at ease their lays in abundance. And the Druids, laying down their arms, went back to the barbarous rites and weird ceremonies of their worship. (To them alone is granted knowledge — or ignorance, it may be — of gods and celestial powers; they dwell in deep forests with sequestered groves; they teach that the soul does not descend to the silent land of Erebus and the sunless realm of Dis below, but that the same breath still governs the limbs in a different scene. If their tale be true, death is but a point in the midst of continuous life. Truly the nations on whom the Pole star looks down are happily deceived; for they are free from that king of terrors, the fear of death. This gives the warrior his eagerness to rush upon the steel, his courage to face death, and his conviction that it is cowardly to be careful of a life that will come back to him again.) The soldiers also set to keep the long-haired Cayci away from the Belgae, left the savage banks of the Rhine and made for Rome; and the empire was left bare to foreign nations.

  When Caesar’s might was gathered together and his huge forces encouraged him to larger enterprise, he spread all over Italy and occupied the nearest towns. False report, swift harbinger of imminent war, was added to reasonable fears, invading men’s minds with presentiments of disaster, and loosing countless tongues to spread lying tales. The messengers report that horsemen are charging in fierce combat on the wide plains that breed Mevania’s bulls; that the foreign cavalry of fierce Caesar are riding to and fro where the Nar joins the Tiber; and that their leader, advancing all his collected eagles and standards, is marching on with many a column and crowded camps. Men’s present view of him differs from their recollection: they think of him as a monster, more savage than the foe he has conquered. Men say that the tribes which dwell between the Rhine and the Elbe, uprooted from their northern homes, are following in his rear; and that the word has gone forth that Rome, under the eyes of the Romans, shall be sacked by savage nations. Thus each by his fears adds strength to rumour, and all dread the unconfirmed dangers invented by themselves. Nor was the populace alone stricken with groundless fear. The Senate House was moved; the Fathers themselves sprang up from their seats; and the Senate fled, deputing to the consuls the dreaded declaration of war. Then, knowing not where to seek refuge or where to flee danger, each treads on the heels of the hastening population, wherever impetuous flight carries him. Forth they rush in long unbroken columns; one might think that impious firebrands had seized hold of the houses, or that the buildings were swaying and tottering in an earthquake shock. For the frenzied crowd rushed headlong through the city with no fixed purpose, and as if the one chance of relief from ruin were to get outside their native walls. So, when the stormy South wind has driven the vast sea from the Syrtes of Libya and the heavy mast with its sails has come crashing down, the skipper abandons the helm and leaps down with his c
rew into the sea, and each man makes shipwreck for himself before the planks of the hull are broken asunder. Thus Rome is abandoned, and flight is the preparation for war. No aged father had the power to keep back his son, nor weeping wife her husband; none was detained by the ancestral gods of his household, till he could frame a prayer for preservation from danger; none lingered on his threshold ere he departed, to satiate his eyes with the sight of the city he loved and might never see again. Nothing could keep back the wild rush of the people. How ready are the gods to grant supremacy to men, and how unready to maintain it! Rome that was crowded with citizens and conquered peoples, Rome that could contain the human race assembled, was left by coward hands an easy prey to invading Caesar. When the Roman soldier is closely besieged by the foeman in a distant land, he defies the perils of the night behind a slender palisade; hastily he throws up the sods, and the protection of his mound lets him sleep untroubled in his tent. But Rome is abandoned as soon as the word “war” is heard; her walls are no safeguard for a single night. Yet such panic fear must be forgiven; Pompey in flight gives cause for terror. Then, that no hope even for the future might relieve anxiety, clear proof was given of worse to come, and the menacing gods filled earth, sky, and sea with portents. The darkness of night saw stars before unknown, the sky blazing with fire, lights shooting athwart the void of heaven, and the hair of the baleful star — the comet which portends change to monarchs. The lightning flashed incessantly in a sky of delusive clearness, and the fire, flickering in the heavens, took various shapes in the thick atmosphere, now flaring far like a javelin, and now like a torch with fan-like tail. A thunderbolt, without noise or any clouds, gathered fire from the North and smote the capital of Latium. The lesser stars, which are wont to move along the sunless sky by night, now became visible at noon. The moon, when her horns were united in one and she was reflecting her brother luminary with her disk at the full, suddenly was smitten by the earth’s shadow and grew dim. The sun himself, while rearing his head in the zenith, hid his burning chariot in black darkness and veiled his sphere in gloom, forcing mankind to despair of daylight; even such a darkness crept over Mycenae, the city of Thyestes, when the sun fled back to where he rose. In Sicily fierce Mulciber opened wide the mouths of Etna; nor did he lift its flames skyward, but the fire bowed its crest and fell on the Italian shore. Black Charybdis churned up waves of blood from the bottom of the sea, and the angry bark of Scylla’s dogs sank into a whine. From Vesta’s altar the fire vanished suddenly; and the bonfire which marks the end of the Latin Festival split into two and rose, like the pyre of the Thebans, with double crest. The earth also stopped short upon its axis, and the Alps dislodged the snow of ages from their tottering summits; and the sea filled western Calpe and remotest Atlas with a flood of waters. If tales are true, the national deities shed tears, the sweating of the household gods bore witness to the city’s woe, offerings fell from their place in the temples, birds of ill omen cast a gloom upon the daylight, and wild beasts, leaving the woods by night, made bold to place their lairs in the heart of Rome. Also, the tongues of brutes became capable of human speech; and women gave birth to creatures monstrous in the size and number of their limbs, and mothers were appalled by the babes they bore; and boding prophecies spoken by the Sibyl of Cumae passed from mouth to mouth. Again, the worshippers who gash their arms, inspired by fierce Bellona chanted of heaven’s wrath, and the Galli whirled round their gory locks and shrieked disaster to the nations. Groans came forth from urns filled with the ashes of dead men. The crash of arms was heard also, and loud cries in pathless forests, and the noise of spectral armies closing in battle. From the fields nearest the outside walls the inhabitants fled in all directions; for the giant figure of a Fury stalked round the city, shaking her hissing hair and a pine-tree whose flaming crest she held downwards, Such was the Fury that maddened Agave at Thebes or launched the bolts of fierce Lycurgus; and such was Megaera, when, as the minister of Juno’s cruelty, she terrified Hercules, though he had seen Hell already. Trumpets sounded; and dark nights, when winds were still, gave forth a shouting loud as when armies meet. The ghost of Sulla was seen to rise in the centre of the Campus and prophesied disaster, while Marius burst his sepulchre and scattered the country-people in flight by rearing his head beside the cool waters of the Anio.