Page:The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon.djvu/50

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outshone all other soldiers, so much did Caesar excel all other generals, nay, other men of all times. In the wars carried on under his command, 1,192,000 of the enemy were slain. How many were slain the civil wars he was reluctant to record. He fought fifty-two pitched battles; being the only general who exceeded Marcus Marcellinus, who fought thirty-nine. No one wrote more rapidly, no one read with greater facility; he was able to dictate four letters at one and the same time. So great was his excellence that those whom he conquered by his arms, he conquered yet more by his clemency."

Augustus, succeeding Julius Caesar, obtained the empire of the whole world: and received tribute from Britain as well as from his other dominions, as Virgil remarks:—

"Embroidered Britons lift the purple screen."^[1]

This he did in the forty-second year of his reign, when the true Light shone upon the world, and all kingdoms and islands, before over-shadowed with darkness, were taught that there is One only God, and saw the image of Him that created them. When Augustus had reigned fifty-five years and a half, he paid the debt of nature. Eutropius thus panegyrizes him: "Besides the civil wars, in which he was always victorius, Augustus subdued Armenia, Egypt, Galatia, Cantabria,

↑ Geor. iii. 25. The sense is not very clear, and I have therefore rendered the words literally, in preference to offering any gloss upon it. Dryen thus paraphrases it:
- "When the proud theatres disclose the scene
- Which interwoven Britons seem to raise,
- And show the triumphs which their shame displays."
Heyne conjectures that allusion is made to the curtain of the theatre on which were pictured, embroidered, or interwoven, the tall and gaunt forms of British captives, represented in the act of rising from the ground and lifting the curtain. However this may be, the quotation from the Georgics, which Henry of Huntingdon borrows from Nennius, fails of proving the subjection of the Britons in the time of Augustus. We find no authority for the statement, that this emperor received tribute from Britain, except a passage in the De Rebus Gestis of Jornandes, the Goth, a work of the sixth century, in which he made use of the now lost Ecclesiastical History of Cassiodorus, who was governor of Sicily in the same century—no authorities whatever against the silence of contemporary classical authors. Dion Cassius tells us, that Augustus came to Gaul with the intention of invading Britain, as the Britons refused to enter into a treaty with him, but was prevented by the revolt of some recently-subdued tribes of Gaul.

[1] Geor. iii. 25. The sense is not very clear, and I have therefore rendered the words literally, in preference to offering any gloss upon it. Dryen thus paraphrases it:
- "When the proud theatres disclose the scene
- Which interwoven Britons seem to raise,
- And show the triumphs which their shame displays."
Heyne conjectures that allusion is made to the curtain of the theatre on which were pictured, embroidered, or interwoven, the tall and gaunt forms of British captives, represented in the act of rising from the ground and lifting the curtain. However this may be, the quotation from the Georgics, which Henry of Huntingdon borrows from Nennius, fails of proving the subjection of the Britons in the time of Augustus. We find no authority for the statement, that this emperor received tribute from Britain, except a passage in the De Rebus Gestis of Jornandes, the Goth, a work of the sixth century, in which he made use of the now lost Ecclesiastical History of Cassiodorus, who was governor of Sicily in the same century—no authorities whatever against the silence of contemporary classical authors. Dion Cassius tells us, that Augustus came to Gaul with the intention of invading Britain, as the Britons refused to enter into a treaty with him, but was prevented by the revolt of some recently-subdued tribes of Gaul.

[1]