In the two previous years Caesar had made two invasions into Britain, in the latter of which Quintus Cicero had accompanied him. Cicero in various letters alludes to this undertaking, but barely gives it the importance which we, as Britons, think should have been attached to so tremendous an enterprise. There might perhaps be some danger, he thought, in crossing the seas, and encountering the rocky shores of the island, but there was nothing to be got worth the getting. He tells Atticus that he can hardly expect any slaves skilled either in music or letters,[49] and he suggests to Trebatius that, as he will certainly find neither gold nor slaves, he had better put himself into a British chariot and come back in it as soon as possible.[50] In this year Caesar reduced the remaining tribes of Gaul, and crossed the Rhine a second time. It was his sixth year in Gaul, and men had learned to know what was his nature. Cicero had discovered his greatness, as also Pompey must have done, to his great dismay; and he had himself discovered what he was himself; but two accidents occurred in this year which were perhaps as important in Roman history as the continuance of Caesar's success. Julia, Caesar's daughter and Pompey's wife, died in childbed. She seems to have been loved by all, and had been idolized from the time of the marriage by her uxorious husband, who was more than twenty-four years her senior. She certainly had been a strong bond of union between Caesar and Pompey; so much so that we are surprised that such a feeling should have been so powerful among the Romans of the time. "Concordiae pignus," a "pledge of friendship," she is called by Paterculus, who tells us in the same sentence that the Triumvirate had no other bond to hold it together.[51] Whether the friendship might have remained valid had Julia lived we cannot say; but she died, and the two friends became enemies. From the moment of Julia's death there was no Triumvirate. The other accident was equally fatal to the bond of union which had bound the three men together. Late in the year, after his Consulship, B.C. 54, Crassus had gone to his Syrian government with the double intention of increasing his wealth and rivalling the military glories of Caesar and Pompey. In the following year he became an easy victim to Eastern deceit, and was destroyed by the Parthians, with his son and the greater part of the Roman army which had been intrusted to him.[52] We are told that Crassus at last destroyed himself. I doubt, however, whether there was enough of patriotism alive among Romans at the time to create the feeling which so great a loss and so great a shame should have occasioned. As far as we can learn, the destruction of Crassus and his legions did not occasion so much thought in Rome as the breaking up of the Triumvirate.