Note 301 — Chapter VII · (Year of Rome 699.) (Book IV of the “Commentaries.”) INCURSIONS OF THE USIPETES AND THE TENCTERI—FIRST PASSAGE OF THE RHINE—FIRST DESCENT IN BRITAIN—CHASTISEMENT OF THE MORINI AND THE MENAPII.

The account of this campaign is very obscure in the “Commentaries.” Florus and Dio Cassius add to the obscurities: the first, by placing the scene of the defeat of the Usipetes and Tencteri towards the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine; the second, by writing that Cæsar came up with the Germans in the country of the Treviri. Several authors have given to the account of these two historians more credit than to that of Cæsar himself, and they give of this campaign an explanation quite different from ours. General de Gœler, among others, supposes that the whole emigration of the Germans had advanced as far as the country of the Condrusi, where Cæsar came up with them, and that he had driven them from west to east, into the angle formed by the Moselle and the Rhine. From researches which were kindly undertaken by M. de Cohausen, major in the Prussian army, and which have given the same result as those of MM. Stoffel and De Locqueyssie, we consider this explanation of the campaign as inadmissible. It would be enough, to justify this assertion, to consider that the country situated between the Meuse and the Rhine, to the south of Aix-la-Chapelle, is too much broken and too barren to have allowed the German emigration, composed of 430,000 individuals, men, women, and children, with wagons, to move and subsist in it. Moreover, it contains no trace of ancient roads; and if Cæsar had taken this direction, he must necessarily have crossed the forest of the Ardennes, a circumstance of which he would not have failed to inform us. Besides, is it not more probable that, on the news of the approach of Cæsar, instead of directing their march towards the Ubii, who were not favourable to them, the Germans, at first spread over a vast territory, would have concentrated themselves towards the most distant part of the fertile country on which they had seized—that of the Menapii?