previous next

After this he went through the whole camp, begging his troops, with tears, to have pity on him, and Pompey their general; and that they would not deliver them both up to the cruel vengeance of their enemies. Every one upon this flocks to the head-quarters. There Petreius proposes to the army to bind themselves by a new oath, not to abandon nor betray their commanders, nor to act separately, but all in concert, for the common good. He himself took this oath first, and then exacted it of Afranius, afterwards of the military tribunes and centurions, and lastly of all the companies, man by man, At the same time an order was issued that all who had any of Caesar's soldiers in their tents should signify it, that they might be put to death in the sight of the whole army. But the majority detesting this bloody order, carefully hid those who were under their protection, and procured them means to escape in the night. However, the terror they had been thrown into by their generals, the severity shown in punishing, and the new oath they had been obliged to take, defeated, for the present, all hopes of a surrender, changed the soldiers' minds, and reduced the war to its former state.

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 Latin (Renatus du Pontet, 1901)
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 (15 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: