This text is part of:
Between the city of Lerida, and the hill where Petreius and Afranius were encamped was a plain of about three hundred paces, in the midst of which was a rising ground, which Caesar wanted to take possession of; because, by that means, he could cut off the enemy's communication with the town and bridge, and render the magazines they had in the town useless. In this hope, he drew out three legions, and having formed them in order of battle, commanded the first ranks of one of them to run before, and gain the place. Afranius perceiving his design, despatched the cohorts that were upon guard before the camp, a nearer way to the same eminence. The contest was sharply maintained on both sides: but Afranius's party, who first got possession of the post, obliged our men to give ground, and being reinforced by fresh supplies, put them at last to rout, and forced them to fly for shelter to the legions.
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.