One argument which doubtless influenced Cæsar against attempting a third expedition was derived from the peculiarly stormy and baffling character of the sea at the Straits of Dover. Each of his expeditions had been endangered and all but ruined by these unaccountable tides, these suddenly rising gales. He had to learn by bitter experience how different was that strange chopping sea from the peaceful waters of the Mediterranean. Had he been able to survey the channel more thoroughly, he would probably have found it worth while to make his passage at a broader part of it, like that which now separates Newhaven from Dieppe; perhaps even to anticipate the Saxon chieftains of the fifth century, to occupy the Isle of Wight, or to seek for his fleet the shelter of Southampton Water. After all, however, a sufficient reason for not renewing the attempt to conquer Britain was to be found in the precarious state of Roman dominion in Gaul. Cæsar evidently thought that his work in that country was practically finished in B.C. 55, when he first set his face towards Britain. Far otherwise: the hardest part of that work was yet to come. Five months after Cæsar’s return from his second expedition he heard the terrible tidings of the utter destruction of fifteen Roman cohorts by the Eburones. Then followed the revolt of Vercingetorix, bravest and most successful of Gaulish champions; the unsuccessful siege of Gergovia; the siege, successful but terribly hard to accomplish, of Alesia. Certainly we may say that the two years and a half which followed his return from Britain were among the most anxious, and seemed sometimes the most desperate stages in all that wonderful career which ended when, ten years after he had sailed away from Britain, he fell pierced by more than twenty dagger wounds—
E’en at the base of Pompey’s statua,
Which all the while ran blood.
NOTE
ON CÆSAR’S POINTS OF ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE IN HIS EXPEDITIONS TO BRITAIN.
I. As to the point of embarkation from Gaul, the controversy lies principally between Boulogne and Wissant, Sir George Airy’s suggestion that Cæsar sailed from the estuary of the Somme being not easy to reconcile with his own statement that he went to the country of the Morini, “because thence was the shortest transit to Britain”.
Boulogne, which was called by the Romans first Gesoriacum and then Bononia, was undoubtedly the regular harbour for passengers to Britain under the empire, and there would be little doubt that Cæsar started thence if he had not told us that the second expedition (presumably also the first) sailed from Portus Itius. It is not clear why Cæsar should have called Gesoriacum by any other name.
The advocates of Wissant identify the Itian promontory with Cape Gris Nez, well known to all passengers from Dover to Calais, and think that its name would be naturally shared with the neighbouring village of Wissant, which was probably at one time nearer to the sea than it is now. On the whole, though the arguments on both sides are pretty evenly balanced, those in favour of Wissant seem slightly to preponderate.
II. Sailing, then, from some port in Picardy (either Boulogne or Wissant), Cæsar reached a part of the British coast which from his description looks like the chalk cliffs west of Dover. So far there is not much difference between the commentators, but what happened in the afternoon when, after his long halt, he found the wind and tide both in his favour, gave the signal to weigh anchor, and “having advanced (progressus) about eight miles from that place, brought his ships to a stand at a level and open beach”? Certainly the natural rendering of these words would seem to be that he went seven English miles up channel, and so if he had really anchored off Dover he would reach Deal, and that port would be, as it has been generally supposed to be, the scene of the world-historical landing of the first Roman soldiers in Britain. It must be admitted, however, that there are great difficulties in this hypothesis. The most careful and minute inquiries that have been made seem to show that on that day (the fourth before the full moon) and at that hour (3 P.M.), the tide, if it ebbed and flowed as it does now, would be setting down, not up, the channel: and accordingly many authors have come to the conclusion that Cæsar sailed westward for those seven miles and landed either at Hythe or Lymne (well known afterwards to the Romans as Portus Lemanis), or possibly at some such place as Appledore, now inland but then at the head of a very sheltered bay.
The discussion is much complicated by the undoubted fact of the great changes which have taken place in that part of the coastline, and Dr. Guest is perhaps entitled to argue that these changes may have so altered the set of the tides as to allow him to postulate an eastward flowing tide when Cæsar weighed anchor in the afternoon. It must, however, remain for the present a disputed question: Cæsar’s word, “progressus,” on the one side, the present course of the tides on the other. On the whole it seems to me that the balance of probability is slightly in favour of Deal.
Among the authors who have written on this question may be mentioned Airy, Lewin, Appach, in favour of some port west of Dover; Long, Merivale, Guest, in favour of Deal. Guest’s arguments are perhaps the most satisfactory, but justice should be done to the extremely painstaking little treatise of Appach (Caius Julius Cæsar’s British Expeditions, etc., 1868), who, however, surely attempts the impossible in his elaborate back-calculations of the winds and tides of two thousand years ago.