ough only with two weak
legions, together numbering about 7000, and 400 horsemen;
nevertheless the announcement that Caesar was advancing sufficed
to induce the insurgents to raise the siege. It was time;
not one tenth of the men in Cicero's camp remained unwounded.
Caesar, against whom the insurgent army had turned, deceived the enemy,
in the way which he had already on several occasions successfully
applied, as to his strength; under the most unfavourable
circumstances they ventured an assault upon the Roman camp
and in doing so suffered a defeat. It is singular, but characteristic
of the Celtic nation, that in consequence of this one lost battle,
or perhaps rather in consequence of Caesar's appearance in person
on the scene of conflict, the insurrection, which had commenced
so victoriously and extended so widely, suddenly and pitiably broke
off the war. The Nervii, Menapii, Aduatuci, Eburones, returned
to their homes. The forces of the maritime cantons, who had made
preparations for assailing the legion in Brittany, did the same.
The Treveri, through whose leader Indutiomarus the Eburones,
the clients of the powerful neighbouring canton, had been chiefly
induced to that so successful attack, had taken arms on the news
of the disaster of Aduatuca and advanced into the territory
of the Remi with the view of attacking the legion cantoned there
under the command of Labienus; they too desisted for the present
from continuing the struggle. Caesar not unwillingly postponed
farther measures against the revolted districts till the spring,
in order not to expose his troops which had suffered much to the whole
severity of the Gallic winter, and with the view of only reappearing
in the field when the fifteen cohorts destroyed should have
been replaced in an imposing manner by the levy of thirty new
cohorts which he had ordered. The insurrection meanwhile pursued
its course, although there was for the moment a suspension of arms.
Its chief seats in central Gaul were, partly the districts
of the Carnutes and the neighbouring Senones (about Sens), the latter
of whom drove the king appointed by Caesar out of their country;
partly the region of the Treveri, who invited the whole Celtic
emigrants and the Germans beyond the Rhine to take part
in the impending national war, and called out their whole force,
with a view to advance in the spring a second time into the territory
of the Remi, to capture the corps of Labienus, and to