Ancient history

First expedition to Brittany

Preparations for the expedition to Brittany

Under the consulship of Lucius Domitius and Appius Claudius, Caesar, leaving winter quarters to go to Italy, as he was accustomed to do every year, orders the lieutenants he left at the head of the legions to build, during the winter, as many ships as possible, and to repair the old ones. It determines its size and shape. So that we can load them more quickly and put them ashore, he makes them lower than those we use on our seas; he had in fact observed that the frequent movements of the ebb and flow made the waves of the ocean less high; he ordered them, because of the baggage and the number of horses they had to carry, a little larger than those used on other seas. He wants them all to be done with sails and oars, which their low height should make very easy. All that is necessary for the armament of these vessels, he brings it from Spain. He himself, after having held the assembly of Citerior Gaul, left for Illyria, on the news that the Pirustes were desolating, by their incursions, the frontier of that province. As soon as he arrives, he orders the cities to raise troops, and assigns them a meeting point. At this news, the Pirustes send him deputies, who explain to him that nothing of what had happened was the result of a national deliberation, and say they are ready to offer him, for these wrongs, all the satisfactions. Accepting their excuses, Caesar demands hostages, and that they be brought on a fixed day; failing which he declares to them that he will bring war to their country. The hostages are delivered on the appointed day; he appoints arbitrators to estimate the damage and settle the reparation.

This business over, and the assembly closed, Caesar returns to Citerior Gaul and leaves from there for the army. When he arrived there, he visited all the quarters, and found that the singular activity of the soldiers had succeeded, in spite of the extreme scarcity of all things, in building about six hundred ships of the form described above, and twenty- eight galleys, all ready to be put to sea in a few days. After giving praise to the soldiers and to those who had directed the work, he informed them of his intentions and ordered them all to go to the port Itius, from where he knew that the trip to Brittany is very convenient, the distance from this island to the mainland being only thirty thousand paces. He leaves them the number of soldiers he deems sufficient; for him, he marches, with four legions without baggage and eight hundred cavalry, among the Treveri, who did not come to the assemblies, did not obey his orders, and who were suspected of soliciting the Germans to cross the Rhine. /P>

Expedition to the Treveri

This nation is by far the most powerful of all Gaul in terms of its cavalry, and possesses numerous foot troops; it lives, as we have said above, on the banks of the Rhine. Two men disputed the sovereignty there, Indutiomaros and Cingétorix. The latter, barely informed of the arrival of Caesar and the legions, went to him, assured him that he and all his people would remain in duty, faithful to the friendship of the Roman people, and instructed him to everything that happened among the Treveri. Indutiomaros on the contrary raises cavalry and infantry; all those whose age makes them incapable of bearing arms, he has them hidden in the forest of the Ardennes, an immense forest which crosses the territory of the Treveri, and extends from the river of the Rhine to the country of the Remes; he then prepares for war.

But when he had seen several of the principals of the state, carried away by their liaisons with Cingetorix or frightened by the arrival of our army, go to Caesar, and treat with him of their particular interests, being unable to do anything for those of their country, Indutiomaros, fearing to be abandoned by all, sends deputies to Caesar:he assures him that, if he has not left his people and has not come to find him, it was to retain more easily the country in duty, and prevent it from going, in the absence of all the nobility, to imprudent resolutions. Moreover, he had complete power over the nation; he would go, if Caesar permitted it, to the camp of the Romans, and surrender to his faith his own interests and those of his country.

Although Caesar well understood the motives of this language and this change of design, as he did not wish to be forced to pass the summer with the Treveri, while everything was ready for the war in Britain, he ordered Indutiomaros to come with two hundred hostages. When he had brought them, and among them his son and all his near relatives, who had been specially appointed, Caesar consoled him and exhorted him to remain in duty; however, having assembled the principals of the Treveri, he rallied them personally to Cingetorix, both on account of his merit and because it seemed to him of great interest to increase among the Treveri the credit of a man who had towards him with such remarkable zeal. Indutiomaros saw with pain the attack that was thus made on his influence, and, already our enemy, he therefore became irreconcilable.

Dumnorix plots. His death

These things finished, Caesar goes with the legions to the port Itius. There, he learns that forty ships built by the Meldes, driven back by a storm, had not been able to hold their course, and had returned to the port from which they had left. He found the others ready to set sail and provided with everything. The cavalry of all Gaul, to the number of four thousand men, meets in this place, as well as the principal inhabitants of the cities. Caesar had resolved to leave on the Continent only the small number of influential men whose fidelity was well known to him, and to take the others as hostages with him; for he feared some movement in Gaul during his absence.

Among these chiefs was the Aedui Dumnorix, of whom we have already spoken. It was the one above all that Caesar wanted to have with him, knowing his eagerness for novelties, his ambition, his courage, his great credit among the Gauls. It must be added to these reasons that Dumnorix had already said in an assembly of the Aedui that Caesar offered him royalty in his country. This statement had greatly displeased them; and they dared not address Caesar either refusal or entreaties. He was only informed of it by his hosts. Dumnorix at first had recourse to all sorts of entreaties to remain in Gaul, saying sometimes that he feared the sea to which he was not accustomed, sometimes that he was restrained by scruples of religion. When he saw that his request was stubbornly refused, and that all hope of obtaining it was lost, he began to intrigue with the chiefs of Gaul, to take them aside and to urge them to remain on the continent; he sought to inspire fear in them; it was not without reason that Gaul was stripped of all its nobility, Caesar's design was to kill, after their passage through Brittany, those whom he dared not cut their throats in the sight of the Gauls; he gave them his faith and solicited theirs to do in concert what they thought would be useful to Gaul. Several reports informed Caesar of these plots.

At this news, Caesar, who had given so much consideration to the Aedui nation, resolved to suppress and prevent Dumnorix by all possible means. As he saw him persevering in his folly, he thought it his duty to prevent him from harming his interests and those of the republic. During the twenty-five days or so that he remained in port, being held back by a northwesterly wind which usually blows on this coast for a great part of the year, he endeavored to keep Dumnorix in check. , and nevertheless to keep abreast of all its steps. Finally the weather became favourable, and Caesar ordered the soldiers and horsemen to embark. But, taking advantage of the general concern, Dumnorix rode out of the camp with the Heduan cavalry, unbeknownst to Caesar, to return to his country. On the advice given him, Caesar, suspending the departure and adjourning all business, sent in pursuit of him a large part of the cavalry, with orders to bring him back, or, if he resisted and did not obey, to To kill him; quite certain that he had everything to fear, during his absence, from a man who, in his presence, had disregarded his orders. Dumnorix, when he was overtaken, resisted, put up sword in hand, and implored the fidelity of his people, exclaiming repeatedly that he was free and a member of a free nation. He was, as ordered, surrounded and put to death. The Aedui horsemen all returned to Caesar.

The crossing

Having, after this affair, left Labienus on the continent with three legions and two thousand cavalry to guard the port, to provide for provisions, to know all that was passing in Gaul, and to take advice of the time and circumstances, Caesar, with five legions and a number of horsemen equal to that which he left on the continent, weighed anchor at sunset, by a light south-westerly wind which, having ceased towards the middle of the night, did not allow him to continue on its way; carried far enough by the tide, he noticed, at daybreak, that he had left Brittany on the left. Then, letting himself go with the ebb, he rowed hard to reach this part of the island, where he had learned, the previous summer, that the descent is easy. One could not praise too much, in this circumstance, the zeal of the soldiers who, on unwieldy transport vessels, equaled, by the continuous work of the oars, the speed of the galleys. The whole fleet landed about noon; no enemy appeared in these parts; but Caesar afterwards learned from the captives that many troops had assembled there, and that, terrified at the sight of the great number of our ships (for including the light barques which each intended for his particular convenience, there were more of eight hundred), they had moved away from the shore and taken refuge on the heights.

Disembarkation. First contact

Caesar, having established the army on land and chosen a suitable ground for the encampment, as soon as he had learned from prisoners where the enemy troops had retired, he left near the sea ten cohorts and three hundred horsemen for the guard. of the fleet, and, on the third watch, marched against the Bretons:he feared all the less for the ships because he left them at anchor on a flat and open shore. He had entrusted the command to Q. Atrius. Caesar had walked about twelve thousand paces during the night when he saw the troops of the enemy. They had advanced with the cavalry and the chariots on the edge of a river and, placed on a height; they began to argue with us for passage and engaged in combat. Repulsed by the cavalry, they retired into the woods, where they found a place admirably fortified by nature and art, and which seemed to have been formerly prepared for a civil war; for all the avenues were closed off by thick fellings of trees. It was against these scattered woods that they fought, defending the approach to their intrenchments. But the soldiers of the Seventh Legion, having formed the tortoise and raised a terrace to the foot of the rampart, seized this position and drove them out of the wood, almost without suffering any losses. Caesar, however, forbade him to pursue the fugitives too far, because he did not know the country and a large part of the day having passed, he wanted to employ the rest in the fortification of the camp.

Storm

The next morning, having divided the infantry and cavalry into three corps, he sent them in pursuit of the fugitives. They had come but a short way, and the last ranks were still in sight of the camp, when horsemen, sent by Q. Atrius to Caesar, came to announce to him that the previous night a violent storm had broken and thrown on the shore almost all the vessels; that neither anchors nor ropes had been able to resist; that the efforts of the sailors and pilots had been powerless, and that the collision of the vessels between them had caused them great damage.

The fleet locked in a camp. Cassivellaunos

At this news, Caesar recalls the legions and the cavalry, and cease pursuit:he himself returns to his fleet. He recognized with his own eyes a part of the misfortunes which the messengers and the letters had announced to him; about forty ships were lost; the rest, however, seemed to him to be repairable by dint of work. He therefore chose workers from the legions and brought others from the mainland. He wrote to Labienus to build as many ships as he could out of the legions he had with him; he himself, in spite of the extreme difficulty of the enterprise, decided, as a very important thing, that all the vessels should be brought to the beach and locked up with the camp in common intrenchments. He employed about ten days in this work, which the soldier did not even interrupt at night. When the ships were dry and the camp well fortified, he left there as a garrison the same troops as before, and returned in person to the same place from which he had started. He found there numerous troops of Bretons assembled from all sides; they had, of unanimous opinion, entrusted the general command and the conduct of the war to Cassivellaunos, whose states were separated from the maritime countries by a river called the Thames, distant from the sea about eighty thousand paces. In earlier times there had been continual wars with other peoples; but all came, in the dread caused them by our arrival, to confer the supreme command on him.

Brittany and its inhabitants

The interior of Brittany is inhabited by peoples that tradition represents as indigenous. The maritime part is occupied by tribes that the lure of booty and the war have brought out of Belgium; they have almost all retained the names of the countries from which they originated, when, arms in hand, they came to settle in Brittany and cultivate the soil. The population is very strong, the houses there are very numerous and almost similar to those of the Gauls; cattle are plentiful there. One uses, for money, either copper or iron rings of a determined weight. In the center of the country are tin mines; on the coasts, iron mines, but not very productive; the copper we use comes from outside. Trees of all kinds grow there, as in Gaul, with the exception of beech and fir. The Bretons consider it forbidden to eat hare, chicken or goose; they raise them, however, out of taste and pleasure. The climate is more temperate than that of Gaul, the cold is less harsh.

This island is triangular in shape; one side faces Gaul. Of the two angles on this side, one is to the east, towards the country of Cantium, where almost all the Gallic vessels land; the other, lower, is at noon. The length of this side is about five hundred thousand paces. The other side of the triangle looks at Spain and the west:in this direction is Hibernia, which is half the size of Brittany, and is separated from it by a distance equal to that of Brittany to Gaul:in the intermediate space is the island of Mona. There are believed to be several others of lesser size, of which some writers have said that they were, towards the season of winter, deprived of the light of the sun for thirty continuous days. Our research has taught us nothing on this point:we only observed, by means of certain water clocks, that the nights were shorter than on the continent.

The length of this side of the island is, according to the opinion of these writers, seven hundred thousand paces. The third side is to the north and has no land opposite it, except Germany at one of its angles. Its length is estimated at eight hundred thousand paces. Thus the circuit of the whole island is twenty times one hundred thousand paces.

Of all the Breton peoples, the most civilized are, without a doubt, those who inhabit the country of Cantium, a region entirely maritime and whose customs differ little from those of the Gauls. Most of the peoples of the interior neglect agriculture; they live on milk and flesh and cover themselves with skins. All Bretons dye themselves with pastel, which gives them an azure color and makes them look horrible in combat. They wear their hair long, and shave their whole body, except the head and the upper lip. The women there are in common between ten or twelve, especially between the brothers, the fathers and the sons. When children are born, they belong to the one who first introduced the mother into the family.

Fights

The enemy horsemen with their chariots of war attacked our cavalry vigorously in its march, which was everywhere victorious and repulsed them in the woods and on the hills; but, after slaying a large number of enemies, his eagerness to pursue the remnants cost him some casualties. Shortly afterwards, as our men expected nothing and were working to entrench the camp, the Bretons, suddenly springing from their forests and descending on the guard of the camp, attacked it vigorously.

Caesar sends to support it two cohorts, who were the first of their legions; as they had left a very small space between them, the enemy, taking advantage of their astonishment at the sight of this new kind of combat, rushed boldly into the gap and escaped without loss. ( Q. Laberius Durus, military tribune, was killed in this action. Several other cohorts sent against the Barbarians repelled them.

The tactics of the Bretons

This combat, of such a new kind, fought under the eyes of the whole army and in front of the camp, made it clear that the weight of the arms of our soldiers, by preventing them from following the enemy in his retreat and by making them fear of departing from their colors made them less fit for a war of this nature. The cavalry also fought at a disadvantage, in that the Barbarians, often pretending to retreat, drew them away from the legions, and then leaping from their chariots gave them an unequal combat on foot; now, this sort of engagement was for our horsemen as dangerous in retreat as in attack. Moreover, the Bretons never fought en masse but in separate troops and at long intervals, and had reserve corps, intended to collect them, and to replace with fresh troops those who were tired.

Roman Victory

The next day the enemy took up position far from the camp, on hills; they only showed themselves in small numbers and skirmished against our cavalry more feebly than the day before. But, towards the middle of the day, Caesar having sent three legions and all the cavalry under the command of Lieutenant Trebonius to forage, they fell suddenly and on all sides on the foragers, not far from their colors and their legions.
Ours, falling vigorously on them, pushed them back; the cavalry, counting on the support of the legions they saw close to them, did not let up in their pursuit, and wreaked great carnage, without giving them time to rally or stop. , nor to descend from chariots. After this rout, the helpers who had come to them from all sides retired; and since then they no longer tried to oppose us with great forces.

Crossing the Thames

Caesar, having understood their design, proceeded towards the Thames in the territory of Cassivellaunos. This river is fordable only in one place, yet the passage is difficult. Arrived there, he saw the enemy in force, lined up on the other side. This bank was defended by a palisade of sharp stakes; other piles of the same type were driven into the bed of the river and hidden under the water.

Informed of these arrangements by prisoners and defectors, Caesar sent the cavalry forward, which he immediately followed by the legions. The soldiers rushed there with so much ardor and impetuosity, although their heads alone were above water, that the enemies, unable to withstand the shock of the legions and cavalry, abandoned the shore and fled.

Campaign against Cassivellaunos

Cassivellaunos, as we have said above, despairing of defeating us in pitched battle, sent back the greater part of his troops, kept only four thousand men mounted on chariots, and confined himself to observing our march, keeping at some distance from our route, hiding in places of difficult access and in the woods, causing the cattle and the inhabitants of the countries through which he knew we had to pass to withdraw into the forests. Then, when our horsemen ventured into distant countryside to forage and forage, he would come out of the woods with his armed wagons, by all the roads and paths that were well known to him, and put our cavalry in great peril, which the fear of these attacks prevented it from spreading far and wide. There remained no other course for Caesar to take than to no longer allow the cavalry to get too far from the legions, and to carry the devastation and the fire as far as the fatigue and march of the legionnaires could permit. .

However, deputies are sent to Caesar by the Trinovantes, one of the most powerful peoples of this country, homeland of the young Mandubracios, who had placed himself under the protection of Caesar, and had come to Gaul to take refuge near him, in order to to avoid by flight the fate of his father, who reigned over this people and whom Cassivellaunos had killed. They offer to surrender to him and obey him, begging him to protect Mandubracios against the outrages of Cassivellaunos, and to send him back to his people to become their leader and their king. Caesar demands from them forty hostages, food for the army, and sends them Mandubracios. They hastened to carry out these orders and delivered the required number of hostages with the food.

Seeing the Trinovantes protected, and sheltered from any violence on the part of the soldiers, the Cenimagnes, the Segontiacs, the Ancalites, the Bibroques, the Casses, deputed to Caesar to submit to him. He learned from them that the place where Cassivellaunos had retired was at a short distance, that it was defended by woods and marshes, and contained a considerable number of men and cattle. The Bretons give the name of stronghold to a thick wood which they have surrounded by a rampart and a ditch and which is their accustomed retreat against the incursions of the enemy. Caesar leads the legions there:he finds the place perfectly defended by nature and art. However, he tries to attack it on two points.

The enemies, after some resistance, could not bear the shock of our soldiers and fled through another part of the place. Many cattle were found there, and a large number of Barbarians were captured or killed in their flight.

He submits

While things were going on in this place, Cassivellaunos had sent messengers to the Cantium, situated, as we have said, on the shores of the sea, to the four chiefs of this country, to Cingetorix, Carvilios, Taximagulos , Ségovax, ordering them to assemble all their troops, and attack unexpectedly the camp which contained our ships.

Scarcely had they arrived there than ours made a sortie, killed a large number of them, captured one of their principal leaders, Lugotorix, and returned without loss to the camp. At the news of this defeat, Cassivellaunos, discouraged by so many setbacks, seeing his territory ravaged, and overwhelmed above all by the defection of several peoples, offered his submission to Caesar through the Atrebates Commios. Caesar, who wanted to spend the winter on the continent, because of the sudden revolts of Gaul, seeing that the summer was coming to an end, and feeling that the affair could drag on, demanded hostages and fixed the tribute that Britain would pay the Roman people every year. It expressly forbids Cassivellaunos any act of hostility against Mandubracios and the Trinovantes.

Return to Gaul

After receiving the hostages, he led the army back to shore, found the repaired ships, and had them put afloat. As he had a large number of prisoners and that several ships had perished by the storm, he resolved to send the troops back to the mainland in two transports. It is remarkable that of so many ships which made the journey several times this year and the preceding one, none of those which carried soldiers perished; but of those who returned empty from Gaul, after having deposited there the soldiers of the first transport, as well as the sixty ships built by the care of Labienus, very few landed at their destination; nearly all of them were washed ashore. Caesar, after having waited for them for some time in vain, fearing that the season would prevent him from keeping to sea, because of the approach of the equinox, was forced to pile up his soldiers. In a great calm, he weighed anchor at the beginning of the second watch, landed at daybreak, and saw all the ships arrive safely.


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