Note 221 — Chapter IV · CAMPAIGN AGAINST ARIOVISTUS. (Year of Rome 696.) (Book I. of the “Commentaries.”)

Planities erat magna, et in ea tumulus terrenus satis grandis.... (De Bello Gallico, I. 43)—This phrase would be sufficient itself to prove that the encounter of the two armies took place in the plains of Upper Alsace. We may ask how, in spite of a text so explicit, different writers should have placed the field of battle in the mountains of the Jura, where there is nowhere to be found a plain of any extent. It is only at Mulhausen, to the north of the Doller, that the vast plain of the valley of the Rhine opens.

Cæsar employs three times the word tumulus to designate the eminence on which his interview with Ariovistus took place, and he never calls it collis. Is it not evident from this that we must consider this tumulus as a rounded knoll, insulated in the plain? Now it is to be considered that the plain which extends to the north of the Doller, between the Vosges and the Rhine, contains a rather large number of small rounded eminences, to which the word collis would not apply, and which the word knoll or tumulus perfectly describes. The most remarkable of these are situated, one near Feldkirch, the other between Wittenheim and Ensisheim. We may suppose that the interview took place on one of these knolls, marked 231 on Plate 6.

General de Gœler has adopted as the place of the interview an eminence which rises on the left bank of the Little Doller, to the north of the village of Aspach-le-Bas. Cæsar would have called this eminence collis, for it is rather extensive, and, by its elongated form, but not rounded, does not at all represent to the eye what is commonly called a knoll or tumulus; moreover, contrary to the text, this elevation is not, properly speaking, in the plain. It is only separated from the hills situated to the south by a brook, and the plain begins only from its northern slope.