previous next

[93] The soldiers ran together tumultuously without arms, and, as was their custom, saluted their commander who had suddenly appeared among them. When he bade them tell what they wanted they were so surprised that they did not venture to speak openly of the donative in his presence, but they adopted the more moderate course of demanding their discharge from the service, hoping that, since he needed soldiers for the unfinished wars, he would speak about the donative himself. But, contrary to the expectation of all, he replied without hesitation, " I discharge you." Then, to their still greater astonishment, and while the silence was most profound, he added, "And I will give you all that I have promised when I have my triumph with others." At this expression, as unexpected as it was kind to them, shame immediately took possession of all, and reflection, together with jealousy at the thought of their abandoning their commander in the midst of such great wars and of others joining in the triumph instead of themselves, and of their losing the gains of the war in Africa, which were expected to be great, and becoming enemies of Cæsar himself as well as of the opposite party. Moved by these fears they remained still more silent and embarrassed, hoping that Cæsar would yield and change his mind on account of his immediate necessity. But he remained silent also, until his friends urged him to say something more to them and not leave his old comrades of so many campaigns with a short and austere word. Then he began to speak, addressing them first as "citizens," not "fellow-soliders," which implied that they were already discharged from the army and were private individuals.

Creative Commons License
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.

load focus Greek (L. Mendelssohn, 1879)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (1 total)
  • Cross-references in notes to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: