THE OPERATIONS OF THE BRITONS DURING THE LAST FEW DAYS OF CAESAR’S FIRST EXPEDITION
After describing how he rescued the 7th legion, which had been sent out on a foraging expedition and surprised by a British force, Caesar tells us that he led this legion and the force with which he had marched to its assistance back to camp. ‘Meanwhile,’ he continues, ‘our people were all busy, and the Britons who were still in their districts moved off’ (dum haec geruntur, nostris omnibus occupatis, qui erant in agris reliqui discesserunt[3410]). The words ‘the Britons who were still in their districts’ (qui erant in agris reliqui) evidently refer back to two passages in the thirtieth and thirty-second chapters of the Fourth Book of the Commentaries. In the former we read that after the storm which wrecked several of Caesar’s ships the British chiefs who had disbanded their levies and come into the Roman camp ‘renewed their oaths of mutual fidelity, and began to move away one by one from the camp and to fetch their tribesmen secretly from the districts’ (itaque rursus coniuratione facta, paulatim ex castris discedere et suos clam ex agris deducere coeperunt). In the thirty-second chapter Caesar says that, just before the 7th legion was attacked, ‘some of the natives still remained in the districts’ (pars hominum in agris remaneret). Evidently, then, the meaning of the passage which I quoted at the beginning of this note is that during and after the attack on the 7th legion, and while the Roman soldiers were employed in various duties, those Britons who had not yet left their respective districts in order to rally round their leaders did so. However, the meaning which is obvious to the ordinary mind does not satisfy von Göler,[3411] who insists that the MS. reading, nostris omnibus occupatis, qui erant in agris reliqui discesserunt, yields no satisfactory sense, and offers in place of it one of his conjectural emendations:—(nostris omnibus occupatis,) quae erant in agris relicta (discesserunt). After a few moments of bewilderment the reader suddenly apprehends von Göler’s meaning. He fancied that occupatis meant ‘having been taken possession of’, and was ignorant that nostris omnibus in Caesarian Latin could not mean ‘all our belongings’; so he persuaded himself that Caesar intended to convey that the Britons, ‘having appropriated all our property, which had been left in the fields, made off’! ‘The Romans,’ he explains, ‘had not only not been able to convey into camp the corn which they had cut, but, on account of the surprise, they must even have abandoned their tools for cutting and gathering the corn.’
Comment is needless.