33.
Toward evening Caesar ordered the gates to be shut, and
the soldiers to go out of the town, lest the towns-people should receive any
injury from them by night. They [the Aduatuci], by a design before
entered into, as we afterwards understood, because they believed that, as a
surrender had been made, our men would dismiss their guards, or at least would
keep watch less carefully, partly with those arms which they had retained and
concealed, partly with shields made of bark or interwoven wickers, which they
had hastily covered over with skins, (as the shortness of time required) in the
third watch, suddenly made a sally from the town with all their forces [in that
direction] in which the ascent to our fortifications seemed the least difficult.
The signal having been immediately given by fires, as Caesar had previously commended, a rush was made thither [i. e. by
the Roman soldiers] from the nearest fort; and the
battle was fought by the enemy as vigorously as it ought to be fought by brave
men, in the last hope of safety, in a disadvantageous place, and against those
who were throwing their weapons from a rampart and from towers; since all hope
of safety depended on their courage alone. About 4,000 of the men having been
slain, the rest were forced back into the town. The day after, Caesar, after breaking open the gates, which there was no one then
to defend, and sending in our soldiers, sold the whole spoil of that town. The
number of 53,000 persons was reported to him by those who had bought them.
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.