us Caesar, in the year of Rome 696, (58 B C.) got himself
appointed proconsul in Gaul, his single aim was to form for himself there
an army devoted to his person, of which he might avail himself to satisfy
his ambition and make himself master of Rome. We should not be too ready
to believe in these far-reaching and precise plans, conceived and settled
so long beforehand, whether by a senate or a single man. Prevision and
exact calculation do not count for so much in the lives of governments
and of peoples. It is unexpected events, inevitable situations, the
imperious necessities of successive epochs, which most often decide the
conduct of the greatest powers and the most able politicians. It is
after the fair, when the course of facts and their consequences has
received full development, that, amidst their tranquil meditations,
annalists and historians, in their learned way, attribute everything to
systematic plans and personal calculations on the part of the chief
actors. There is much less of combination than of momentary inspiration,
derived from circumstances, in the resolutions and conduct of political
chiefs, kings, senators, or great men. From the time that discord and
corruption had turned the Roman Republic into a bloody and tyrannical
anarchy, the Roman Senate no longer meditated grand designs, and its
members were preoccupied only with the question of escaping or avenging
proscriptions. When Caesar procured for himself the government for five
years of the Gauls, the fact was, that, not desiring to be a sanguinary
dictator like Scylla, or a gala chieftain like Pompey, he went and sought
abroad, for his own glory and fortune's sake, in a war of general Roman
interest, the means and chances of success which were not furnished to
him in Rome itself by the dogged and monotonous struggle of the factions.

[Illustration: The Roman Army invading Gaul----61]

In spite of the victories of Marius, and the destruction or dispersion of
the Teutons and Cimbrians, the whole of Gaul remained seriously disturbed
and threatened. At the north-east, in Belgica, some bands of other
Teutons, who had begun to be called Germans (men of war), had passed over
the left bank of the Rhine, and were settling or wandering there without
definite purpose. In eastern and central Gaul, in the valleys of the
Jura and Auvergne, on the banks of the Saone, the Allier, and the Doubs,
the two great Gallic confederations, that of the AEduans a