Ch. 78

The Gauls Make Arrangements

Sententiis dictis constituunt1 ut ei qui valetudine2 aut aetate inutiles sunt bello oppido excedant, atque omnia prius3 experiantur, quam3 ad Critognati sententiam descendant: 2 illo4 tamen potius5 utendum consilio, si res6 cogat atque auxilia7 morentur, quam5 aut deditionis aut pacis subeundam condicionem. 3 Mandubii8, qui eos9 oppido receperant, cum liberis atque uxoribus exire coguntur. Hi, cum ad munitiones Romanorum accessissent, flentes omnibus precibus orabant10, ut se11 in servitutem receptos cibo iuvarent. 4 At Caesar dispositis in vallo custodibus recipi12 prohibebat.

  1. constituunt ut …. excedant: this ut starts off a substantive noun clause, meaning that the whole ut clause is your object of constituunt, meaning it is what they decided. Translate ut just as “that” ↩

  2. valetudine aut aetate: both are ablatives of cause ↩

  3. prius…quam: priusquam = “before”. Take this in the second half of these two phrases ↩ ↩2

  4. illo tamen potius utendum consilio: potius – “it is better”, take illo with consilio, ablative objects after utendum → utor, one of the PUFFV verbs, verbs that take an ablative object, not an accusative direct object ↩

  5. potius….quam: it is better….than ↩ ↩2

  6. res: res, rei (f) – thing, affair, matter, circumstance ↩

  7. auxilia morentur: if the reinforcements (the Gauls arriving from the rest of Gaul) delay ↩

  8. Mandubii: the Mandubii are a Gallic tribe whose main city was Alesia ↩

  9. Eos: refers to the Gauls in Alesia ↩

  10. Orabant ut: this ut starts off an substantive noun clause, begging that…. ↩

  11. Ut se … iuvarent: that they (the Romans) help them (the Mandubii), having been taken into slavery, with food ↩

  12. recipi prohibebat: take it as indirect statement, he was prohibiting that [they] be accepted ↩

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