In the year 57 B.C. Gaius Julius Cæsar, Roman politician, statesman, and legislator, and already, though he had only girt on the sword at forty-three years of age, a famous soldier, was campaigning in northern Gaul. The year before, a mere carpet warrior, as his enemies would have men believe, he had come up the Rhone with six legions of sturdy swarthy Italian yeomen, and summarily put an end to the great Helvetic migration, a migration perhaps little less dangerous than that of the Cimbri and ‘Teutones,’ which his kinsman Marius had annihilated at Aquæ Sextiæ and Vercellæ. Then, grimly resolute, with reluctant officers, with the scented young nobles who had followed him for a little plunder and mild excitement foreboding disaster, with even the stout legionaries--all save the men of the immortal Xth--hanging back and half afraid, he had turned on the Germans who were overrunning Gaul, and hurled them in rout and ruin across the Rhine. And--significant fact!--he wintered not in the sunny Roman Province--that Provence which still proclaims to the world from a hundred sites that Imperial Rome swayed her sceptre there for twenty generations--not in the Italian Gallia along the Po, but there, where he was, in the very homeland of the Celts, which five hundred years before had sent forth the hordes that had wasted Italy and burned Rome. The Gauls, disunited, faction-ridden, fickle, and suspicious of each other, but proud, brave, and patriotic, began to take alarm. Whether Cæsar had intended from the first to subjugate Gaul, or whether his horizon became enlarged as his successes multiplied, are questions that cannot be discussed here. But he certainly seems to have shown his hand in 58 B.C. ‘Celtic’ and ‘Aquitanian’ Gaul remained passive, but in the north, where the ‘Belgæ’ had had little to do with Roman envoys and traders, much less with Roman generals and legions, a confederacy was quickly formed to oppose Cæsar. It was headed nominally by Galba, King of the Suessiones, whose predecessor, Divitiacus, had ruled an ephemeral dominion extending over a large region of northern Gaul and parts of Britain. So writes Cæsar in the second book, ‘De Bello Gallico’; and thus, in a single terse sentence of his perfect, unadorned Latin, Britannia is swept by a roving searchlight of historical allusion.