37.
While these affairs were going on at Gergovia , Convictolanis, the Aeduan, to
whom we have observed the magistracy was adjudged by Caesar, being bribed by the Arverni, holds a conference
with certain young men, the chief of whom were Litavicus and his
brothers, who were born of a most noble family. He shares the bribe with them,
and exhorts them to "remember that they were free and born for empire; that the
state of the Aedui was the only one which retarded the most certain
victory of the Gauls; that the rest were held in
check by its authority; and, if it was brought over, the Romans would not have room to stand on in Gaul; that he had
received some kindness from Caesar, only so far,
however, as gaining a most just cause by his decision; but that he assigned more
weight to the general freedom; for, why should the Aedui go to
Caesar to decide concerning their rights and laws,
rather than the Romans come to the
Aedui?" The young men being easily won over by the speech of the
magistrate and the bribe, when they declared that they would even be leaders in
the plot, a plan for accomplishing it was considered, because they were
confident their state could not be induced to undertake the war on slight
grounds. It was resolved that Litavicus should have the command of
the ten thousand, which were being sent to Caesar for
the war, and should have charge of them on their march, and that his brothers
should go before him to Caesar. They arrange the other
measures, and the manner in which they should have them done.
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.