This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
When this disaster was known, M. Rufus the questor, whom Curio had left to guard the camp, entreated his men not to lose courage. They begged and requested him to reconduct them into Sicily; which he promised, and ordered the masters of the transports to have their ships in readiness at night along the shore. But fear had so universally seized the minds of the soldiers, that some cried out Juba was arrived with his troops; some that Varus approached with the legions, the dust of whose march they pretended to discern; and others, that the enemy's fleet would be upon them in an instant; though there was not the least ground for these reports The consternation thus becoming general, each man thought only of his own sailed immediately, and their flight drew after it that of the transports; so that only a very few small frigates obeyed the summons, and came to the general rendezvous. The disorder was so great upon the shore, every one striving who should first embark, that many boats sunk under the crowd, and others were afraid to come near the land.
C. Julius Caesar. The Commentaries of Caesar. William Duncan. St. Louis. Edwards and Bushnell. 1856.
The chapter breaks in this translation have been changed to align with those in the 1901 Latin edition of the De Bello Civili, ed. Renatus du Pontet.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a medium level of accuracy.
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.