CHAPTER IV.——­GAUL CONQUERED BY JULIUS CAESAR.

Historians, ancient and modern, have attributed to the Roman Senate, from the time of the establishment of the Roman province in Gaul, a long-premeditated design of conquering Gaul altogether.  Others have said that when Julius Caesar, in the year of Rome 696, (58 B C.) got himself appointed proconsul in Gaul, his single aim was to form for himself there an army devoted to his person, of which he might avail himself to satisfy his ambition and make himself master of Rome.  We should not be too ready to believe in these far-reaching and precise plans, conceived and settled so long beforehand, whether by a senate or a single man.  Prevision and exact calculation do not count for so much in the lives of governments and of peoples.  It is unexpected events, inevitable situations, the imperious necessities of successive epochs, which most often decide the conduct of the greatest powers and the most able politicians.  It is after the fair, when the course of facts and their consequences has received full development, that, amidst their tranquil meditations, annalists and historians, in their learned way, attribute everything to systematic plans and personal calculations on the part of the chief actors.  There is much less of combination than of momentary inspiration, derived from circumstances, in the resolutions and conduct of political chiefs, kings, senators, or great men.  From the time that discord and corruption had turned the Roman Republic into a bloody and tyrannical anarchy, the Roman Senate no longer meditated grand designs, and its members were preoccupied only with the question of escaping or avenging proscriptions.  When Caesar procured for himself the government for five years of the Gauls, the fact was, that, not desiring to be a sanguinary dictator like Scylla, or a gala chieftain like Pompey, he went and sought abroad, for his own glory and fortune’s sake, in a war of general Roman interest, the means and chances of success which were not furnished to him in Rome itself by the dogged and monotonous struggle of the factions.

[Illustration:  The Roman Army invading Gaul——­61]

In spite of the victories of Marius, and the destruction or dispersion of the Teutons and Cimbrians, the whole of Gaul remained seriously disturbed and threatened.  At the north-east, in Belgica, some bands of other Teutons, who had begun to be called Germans (men of war), had passed over the left bank of the Rhine, and were settling or wandering there without definite purpose.  In eastern and central Gaul, in the valleys of the Jura and Auvergne, on the banks of the Saone, the Allier, and the Doubs, the two great Gallic confederations, that of the AEduans and that of the Arvernians, were disputing the preponderance, and making war one upon another, seeking the aid, respectively, of the Romans and of the Germans.  At the foot of the Alps, the little nation of Allobrogians,