Now as to the exact meaning of the word apertum in the passage to which Lewin refers, the commentators are not agreed. While he insists that the beach on which he believes Caesar to have landed was ‘open’, because ‘the heights to the north were at least a mile distant’, Dr. Guest[3122] denies that they were ‘open’, because ‘there is a range of heights at no great distance’. According to Long,[3123] ‘“open” means that from the beach he could see into the country.’ Now any one who has read the Commentaries attentively will see that all these explanations are wrong. For in his narrative of the second expedition[3124] Caesar tells us that he ‘felt little anxiety for the ships, as he was leaving them at anchor on a nice open shore’[3125] (eo minus veritus navibus, quod in litore molli atque aperto deligatas ad ancoras relinquebat). If the explanations which I have quoted were correct, the word apertum in this passage would be irrelevant. Whether the ‘heights’ were ‘at no great distance’, or ‘from the beach Caesar could see into the country’, the security of the ships would not have been affected in the slightest degree. The word apertum does not describe the country near the shore: it describes the shore itself; and, as C. Schneider[3126] says, apertum litus means a shore free from such obstacles or dangers as rocks, boulders, and the like.[3127] But, even assuming that Lewin was right in his interpretation of the word apertum, this much is certain:—the existence of the heights to which he refers is alone sufficient to prove that Caesar did not land either at Lympne or at Hythe or at any point between those two places. This is a matter on which I confidently appeal to any military expert who has studied the records of ancient warfare. Caesar might no doubt have landed at Hythe without any extraordinary difficulty; but if he had been so foolish as to land there, he would have found that his difficulties were only beginning. Never, even when fighting against an uncivilized enemy, did he attempt to force his way up a hill if it was possible to avoid doing so.[3128] If he had landed either at Lympne or at Hythe, he could not have turned the line of heights which extends behind those two places: he could not have penetrated into the interior of the country unless he had passed them; and he could not have passed them except at a cost of life which the least experienced of his officers would have been too prudent to incur. Furthermore, however ‘open’ the country may have been on the western side of ‘the [imaginary] creek of Lympne’, he could not have landed there if, as Lewin admits,[3129] the country was under water at high tide.

The argument which Lewin bases upon the word mollis has no value; for he does not fully understand the meaning of the word. Mollis, in the passage which we are considering, simply means that the shore was one where the anchorage was good, and where the ships, if they were driven aground, would suffer comparatively little:[3130] it probably also implies that the shore was gently sloping.[3131] Moreover, even if the word mollis implied that the shore on which Caesar landed was composed of shingle, Lewin would not be justified in concluding that Caesar landed at Hythe or Lympne unless he could prove that no other shingle beach in Kent satisfied the requirements of Caesar’s narrative.

The statements of Lucan, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch, and Dion Cassius, upon which Lewin lays so much stress, are not really evidence at all; and if he had been a classical scholar, he would never have quoted them. Nor, indeed, was his scholarship sufficient to enable him to understand what they meant. The passage quoted from Lucan occurs in a rhetorical speech which he puts into the mouth of Pompey:— Rheni gelidis quod fugit ab undis Oceanumque vocans incerti stagna profundi Territa quaesitis ostendit terga Britannis. Stagna of course simply denotes the English Channel, about which Lucan’s ideas were vague; and the point of the line is the suggestion that Caesar, in order to magnify the difficulties of his expedition, mendaciously described ‘the pools of a shifting sea’ as an ocean.[3132] As to Valerius Maximus, the idea of going to his collection of anecdotes for the details of Caesar’s military operations is really funny;[3133] but if he is to be counted an authority, he does not support Lewin’s theory, but overthrows it.[3134] Lewin[3135] insists that ‘the vada described by Valerius Maximus as caused by the flux and reflux of the tide are evidently the vada referred to by Caesar (iv, 26)’. Now ‘the vada referred to by Caesar’ were the shallow places of the shore on which he landed; and ‘the vada described by Valerius Maximus’ were, according to Lewin’s final view, in Hythe harbour. Yet Lewin emphatically denies that Caesar landed in Hythe harbour! Furthermore, Lewin assures us that the ‘islands’ of which Valerius Maximus speaks were composed of earth, and have been ‘carted away’. But Valerius Maximus says nothing about islands: the only island which he mentions is Britain. As to the marshes, Heller[3136] points out that Lewin is wrong in concluding from the narratives of Plutarch and Dion that the coast on which Caesar landed was marshy. Dion’s word τενάγη is simply his translation of Caesar’s vada, and means not ‘marshes’ but ‘shallows’.[3137] Plutarch, as the words εἰς τόπον ἑλώδη καὶ μεστὸν ὑδάτων (‘into a marshy place full of water’), which are explained by the following words ῥεύματα τελματώδη (‘marshy [or muddy] streams’), clearly show, was not speaking of a combat on the seashore, but of one which took place inland; and when Lewin identifies Plutarch’s ῥεύματα τελματώδη with Dion’s τενάγη, he simply exposes his own ignorance of Greek. Moreover, Plutarch is so deficient in accuracy and precision that his description of an incident of this kind is useless for the purpose of topographical identification.

There is, therefore, no evidence that there was any marshy ground at or near Caesar’s landing-place; and if there was, the fact does not prove that he landed at Hythe.[3138]

5. Lewin[3139] next proceeds to examine Caesar’s narrative of the events which followed his first disembarkation,—the hauling up of the galleys on dry land, the wreck caused by the storm which occurred on the night of the full moon, and the subsequent attack by the British charioteers. The whole account, he tells us, corresponds with the topography of Lympne and Hythe, but of no other place. The shingle field between Dymchurch Wall and Shorncliffe, being ‘sound and dry, without any mixture of ooze’, deserves Caesar’s epithet, aridum:[3140] the ‘steep place’ (declivis ac praeceps locus[3141]), down which the British chariots charged, is ‘in this part of the marsh on the north’; the spring tide, driven by ‘a strong south-east wind’, would have poured over the shingle, and waterlogged Caesar’s galleys. ‘It is a singular confirmation,’ says Lewin, ‘of our hypothesis of the debarcation at Romney Marsh that the range of high water is greater here than at any other point of the southern coast. At Dungeness, for example, the mean range is twenty-one feet three quarters, while at Deal it is only sixteen feet.’ Finally, he anticipates the objection that if Caesar had landed near Hythe, he would have moored his ships within Hythe harbour, and thereby avoided the destruction which overtook so many of them. He explains that ‘the narrow and winding gut which constituted the port’ was ‘little capable of receiving a fleet’, and that, ‘as it ... could only be entered and quitted at high water, and as its banks were lined by a hostile population, the mooring of the Roman vessels within it would be certain destruction,’ but ‘it would be highly useful for keeping up his communication with the Continent’.

That Caesar’s ships could have been hauled up on the shingle between Dymchurch Wall and Shorncliffe; that the said shingle might have been described as ‘aridum’; that a ‘steep place’ existed ‘in this part of the marsh on the north’;[3142] and that the tide, driven by ‘a strong south-easterly wind’, might have waterlogged Caesar’s ships if they had been drawn up on the beach at Hythe,—all these things may be admitted: but they avail nothing to establish Lewin’s theory unless he can prove that on the east coast of Kent there was no place which answered equally well to Caesar’s narrative; and it is amusing to find that in another passage[3143] he rightly insists that the wind which he here calls ‘south-easterly’ was ‘from the north-east’. The comparison which he makes between ‘the range of high water’ at Romney Marsh and at Deal is irrelevant; for I doubt whether he would have seriously maintained that a spring tide between Walmer and Deal, heightened by a storm, would have been insufficient to cause the damage which Caesar described.

The objection which Lewin anticipates, and waves aside, is not thereby disposed of. If the reader will examine Lewin’s map, he will see that Hythe harbour would have been amply large enough to accommodate Caesar’s fleet;[3144] and if it could only be entered at high water, the Portus Itius, according to Lewin himself,[3145] was in the same case. That Caesar would have landed close to a harbour which he afterwards found ‘highly useful’, without mentioning its existence, is, to say the least, unlikely. Moreover, Lewin omits to tell us in what respect Caesar could have found a harbour ‘highly useful’ even for ‘keeping up his communication with the Continent’, if the dispatch vessels which kept up the communication never entered the harbour; nor does he explain what would have been the use of their entering the harbour when, on his own showing, they could not have remained there without ‘certain destruction’, but after they had entered it, must have forthwith gone out again, and have been hauled up on the beach outside along with the others.

6. It remained for Lewin to point out the spot on the banks of a river about twelve miles from the Roman camp, where the Britons disputed Caesar’s advance on the day after his second landing in Britain. He maintained that Wye on the Stour, between Ashford and Canterbury, answered in every detail to Caesar’s account, and denied that any such place could be found on the theory that Caesar landed near Deal.[3146]

Airy[3147] objects that the Stour at Wye is ‘little wider than a wide ditch’, and that, as it flows ‘between sound meadows, where there is not, and never has been, any marsh or broad stream’, it never could have been wider. Lewin[3148] replies that he has himself seen the Stour at Wye when it was so full of water that ‘the mill had constantly at work four pairs of stones from 5.30 a.m. till 8 p.m., except for a short time at noon’; and I may add that it is more than ten yards wide.[3149] Caesar does not describe the stream at all: he merely calls it a flumen; and he calls the Oze and the Ozerain, the two streams which encompass Alesia[3150] (the modern Mont Auxois), and which are narrower than the Stour at Wye, by the same name. Moreover, as Lewin[3151] justly remarks, Caesar, in describing the combat which took place on the banks of the stream in question, and the subsequent attack upon the British stronghold,[3152] ‘does not make the river the important part of the defence.’ The Stour at Wye and the features of the surrounding country correspond sufficiently well with Caesar’s account; but this does not constitute a positive argument in favour of Lewin’s theory unless it can be proved that, on the theory that Caesar landed in East Kent, it is impossible to discover a stream which satisfies the requirements of his narrative.

D’Anville, the famous French geographer, added little or nothing to the case for Hythe. He maintained that the ‘higher ground’ to which the Britons withdrew on descrying the Roman flotilla in 54 B.C. must have been the line of heights which extends just behind Hythe.[3153] But the passage in which Caesar describes the retirement of the Britons, so far from implying that the ‘higher ground’ was close to the landing-place, implies the very reverse; for Caesar, immediately after telling us that the Britons had retired to higher ground, expressly states that the position on which he found them posted was about twelve miles from his camp near the sea.[3154]