Anyhow, my argument remains unshaken. If the ships which were carried back to the ulterior portus neither lay to nor ‘head-reached’, it is self-evident that they could not have fetched Sangatte, and therefore that the ulterior portus was Ambleteuse: if they sailed with the wind abeam, they could not have fetched any port east of Wissant: if they were laid to, they could not have fetched Sangatte; nor could they have done so even if they ‘head-reached’ unless they possessed a capacity for working to windward with which few modern ships and no ancient ship can be credited. Indeed they could not have done so even then; for it would evidently have been impossible for them to beat across the Channel in a single tide: the flood (see p. 583) would hardly have helped them; and the ebb, prolonged and strengthened by the north-easterly gale, would have carried them far out of their course.

The foregoing remarks apply of course to other passages in which I have mentioned the cavalry transports. By no means could they have returned either from near Hythe or Lympne to Ambleteuse or from near Pevensey to the mouth of the Authie.

Page 680. ‘Therefore, unless ... Bekesbourne.’ Mr. George Barrow of the Geological Survey, whom I have consulted, thinks that there is no reason to suppose that the relative level of water and banks in the Little Stour above Littlebourne was appreciably different in 54 B.C. from what it is now.

Page 698. ‘The claim ... better grounds.’ Mr. F. H. Baring (Eng. Hist. Rev., October, 1907, pp. 726-8) argues that Caesar crossed the Thames by ‘an undoubted ford just above tidewater at Hampton’, which was mentioned by Lord Lumley in 1685. He argues that, owing to the tides, Brentford would only have been available for ‘five or six hours out of twelve’; that ‘this important fact would surely have been mentioned’; and that the stakes which have been found at Brentford are fifteen inches round and therefore too large. I am not sure that he is referring to the stakes described by Mr. Montagu Sharpe, whom he does not mention; but surely the stakes would not have answered their purpose worse for being strong. I do not believe that Caesar would have mentioned the presence of tides at Brentford if they had not affected his passage; but, as we have seen (p. 696), Mr. Spurrell has argued that the tides did not reach Brentford. If there was a ford at Hampton before the days of locks and weirs, there was another, if the evidence of the name Halliford is trustworthy, at or near Coway Stakes. Are we entitled to assume that either existed in the time of Caesar? The reader will have understood that I do not pin my faith to Mr. Sharpe’s theory: I only think that it is less feebly supported than any other.

Page 712, note 2. W. Sternkopf (Hermes, xl, 1905, p. 37) rejects Boot’s emendation, proximis, and conjectures that Cicero wrote proxime, meaning that the letter in question was the most recent of several which had arrived together.

INDEX

[Only such references to authors are included as seemed likely to be useful.]

Oxford: Printed at the Clarendon Press by Horace Hart, M.A.