This text is part of:
25.
Caesar, having removed out of sight first his own horse,
then those of all, that he might make the danger of a11 equal, and do away with
the hope of flight, after encouraging his men, joined battle. His soldiers
hurling their javelins from the higher ground, easily broke the enemy's phalanx.
That being dispersed, they made a charge on them with drawn swords. It was a
great hinderance to the Gauls in fighting, that, when
several of their bucklers had been by one stroke of the (Roman) javelins pierced through and pinned fast together, as the
point of the iron had bent itself, they could neither pluck it out, nor, with
their left hand entangled, fight with sufficient ease; so that many, after
having long tossed their arm about, chose rather to cast away the buckler from
their hand, and to fight with their person unprotected. At length, worn out with
wounds, they began to give way, and, as there was in the neighborhood a mountain
about a mile off, to betake themselves thither. When the mountain had been
gained, and our men were advancing up, the Boii and
Tulingi, who with about 15,000 men closed the enemy's line of
march and served as a guard to their rear, having assailed our men on the
exposed flank as they advanced [prepared] to surround them; upon seeing which,
the Helvetii who had betaken themselves to the
mountain, began to press on again and renew the battle. The Romans
having faced about, advanced to the attack in two divisions; the first and
second line, to withstand those who had been defeated and driven off the field;
the third to receive those who were just arriving.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.