ns, calling to
each other in loud voices across the water. In this way they succeeded
in so far coming to an agreement as to fix upon a time and place for a
more formal conference, to be held by commissioners chosen on each side.
This conference was thus held, but each party came to it accompanied by
a considerable body of attendants, and these, as might have been
anticipated, came into open collision while the discussion was pending;
thus the meeting consequently ended in violence and disorder, each party
accusing the other of violating the faith which both had plighted.

[Sidenote: Undecided warfare.]
[Sidenote: Bread made of roots.]

This slow and undecided mode of warfare between the two vast armies
continued for many months without any decisive results. There were
skirmishes, struggles, sieges, blockades, and many brief and partial
conflicts, but no general and decided battle. Now the advantage seemed
on one side, and now on the other. Pompey so hemmed in Caesar's troops
at one period, and so cut off his supplies, that the men were reduced to
extreme distress for food. At length they found a kind of root which
they dug from the ground, and, after drying and pulverizing it, they
made a sort of bread of the powder, which the soldiers were willing to
eat rather than either starve or give up the contest. They told Caesar,
in fact, that they would live on the bark of trees rather than abandon
his cause. Pompey's soldiers, at one time, coming near to the walls of a
town which they occupied, taunted and jeered them on account of their
wretched destitution of food. Caesar's soldiers threw loaves of this
bread at them in return, by way of symbol that they were
abundantly supplied.

[Sidenote: Caesar hems Pompey in.]
[Sidenote: Anxiety of the rivals.]

After some time the tide of fortune turned Caesar contrived, by a
succession of adroit maneuvers and movements, to escape from his toils,
and to circumvent and surround Pompey's forces so as soon to make them
suffer destitution and distress in their turn. He cut off all
communication between them and the country at large, and turned away the
brooks and streams from flowing through the ground they occupied. An
army of forty or fifty thousand men, with the immense number of horses
and beasts of burden which accompany them, require very large supplies
of water, and any destitution or even scarcity of water leads
immediately to the most dreadful consequences. Pompey's troops