Ch. 77

Title

At ei1, qui Alesiae obsidebantur praeterita2 die3, qua auxilia suorum4 exspectaverant, consumpto omni frumento, inscii5 quid in Aeduis gereretur, concilio coacto 2 de6 exitu suarum fortunarum consultabant. Ac variis dictis sententiis, quarum7 pars deditionem, pars, dum vires suppeterent, eruptionem8 censebat, non praetereunda9 oratio Critognati10 videtur propter eius singularem et nefariam crudelitatem.

Chapter 76 - English 

 note - in the name of brevity, read this remainder of this chapter with the speech of Critognatus in English

“Of their opinion,” he said, “who call a most disgraceful slavery by the name of surrender I purpose to say nothing; I hold that they should not be treated as citizens nor invited to the council. Let my business be with those who approve a sortie; and in their design, by your general agreement, there seems to remain a memory of ancient courage. This is faint-heartedness of yours, not courage, to be unable to endure want for a short space. It is easier to find men to fling themselves recklessly on death than men to endure pain patiently. And yet I might now have approved this view (so much weight with me has the authority of those who hold it) if I saw therein the loss of nothing but our life; but in making our decision we should have regard to the whole of Gaul, which we have aroused to our assistance. What, think ye, will be the spirit of our friends and kindred, when eighty thousand men⁠ have been slain in one spot, if they are forced to fight out the issue almost over their very bodies? Refuse to rob of your support the men who for your deliverance have disregarded their own peril; forbear by folly, recklessness, or weak-mindedness of yours to lay prostrate, and subject to everlasting slavery, the whole of Gaul. Or do you doubt their faithfulness, their resolution, because they are not arrived to the day? What then? Do ye think that the Romans are daily engaged in those outer trenches for mere amusement? If it may not be that your resolve should be strengthened by messages from your friends, since every approach is blocked, yet take the Romans here to your witnesses that their coming draws nigh; and it is in fear thereof that they are busy in their works day and night. What, then, is my counsel? To do what our forefathers did in the war, in no wise equal to this, with the Cimbri and the Teutones. They shut themselves into the towns, and under stress of a like scarcity sustained life on the bodies of those whose age showed them useless for war, and delivered not themselves to the enemy. And if we had not a precedent for this, I should still have judged it a most glorious thing for the sake of liberty to set such a one and to hand it down to posterity. For wherein was that war like this? The Cimbri devastated Gaul, they brought great disaster upon us, yet they departed at length from our borders and sought other countries, leaving us our rights, laws, lands, liberty. But the Romans — what else do they seek or desire than to follow where envy leads, to settle in the lands and states of men whose noble report and martial strength they have learnt, and to bind upon them a perpetual slavery? ‘Tis in no other fashion they have waged wars. And if ye know not what is afoot among distant nations, look now on Gaul close at hand, which has been reduced to a province, with utter change of rights and laws, and crushed beneath the axes in everlasting slavery.”

  1. Ei: masculine, nominative, plural, they, the ones ↩

  2. praeterita die: can be taken both as an ablative of time or an ablative absolute ↩

  3. die qua: the day on which. Qua is ablative of time ↩

  4. suorum: of their own [people/allies] ↩

  5. inscii: this adjective describes the ei at the start of the sentence. It also starts an indirect question, inscii quid in Aeduis gereretur. Not knowing what was being done among the Aedui ↩

  6. de exitu suarum fortunarum: about the outcome of their fortunes ↩

  7. quarum pars deditionem: supply the censebat from later on, since you have a subject and a direct object, but no verb ↩

  8. eruptionem: an eruptio is a “charge, or a sally” where one sides sends out forces to try to break the enemy’s lines ↩

  9. praetereunda oratio Critognati videtur: remember that video in the passive can be seem. Oratio is your subject, as there is a category of 3rd declension nouns in the -o, -onis pattern (ratio, multitudino, oratio, sermo, etc). ↩

  10. Critognati: Critognatus is a high-ranking member of the Arverni tribe ↩

All material is taken, with gratitude, from The Latin Library as well as my own work, available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license CC BY-SA 4.0