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The development of martial and commercial civilisation in later times tended to restrict its typical and more primitive developments to the more conservative parts of the Celtic world. The fact that in Caesar's time its main centre in Gaul was in the territory of the Carnutes, the tribe which has given its name to Chartres, suggests that its chief votaries were mainly in that part of the country.
XLIV. Having devastated the country in such a manner, Caesar leads back his army with the loss of two cohorts to Durocortorum of the Remi, and, having summoned a council of Gaul to assemble at that place, he resolved to hold an investigation respecting the conspiracy of the Senones and Carnutes, and having pronounced a most severe sentence upon Acco, who had been the contriver of that plot, he punished him after the custom of our ancestors.
Four legions, under the orders of Mark Antony, Caius Trebonius, Publius Vatinius, and Q. Tullius, were quartered in Belgium, two among the Aedui and two among the Turones on the frontier of the Carnutes, to hold in check all the countries bordering on the ocean.
Caesar ordered the Aedui to furnish his commissariat, sent word to the Boii that he was coming to their relief, swept through the Senones, that he might leave no enemy in his rear, and then advanced on Gien, where the Roman traders had been murdered, and which the Carnutes still occupied in force. There was a bridge there over the Loire, by which they tried to escape in the night.
The Senones and Carnutes met the same fate. The Menapii, the only canton which had never submitted to the Romans, were compelled by a grand attack simultaneously directed against them from three sides to renounce their long-preserved freedom. Labienus meanwhile was preparing the same fate for the Treveri.
The Arverni were on the Upper Loire in Auvergne. The Carnunteni, whom Cæsar calls Carnutes, were partly in the middle basin of the same river. He had to cut his road through snow six feet deep. It is Ædui in Cæsar's text, or Hædui. The Ædui, one of the most powerful of the Gallic tribes, were situated between the Upper Loire and the Saone, and possessed the chief part of Burgundy.
As a reward to the men who had followed him so cheerfully in the cold January campaign, he gave each private legionary 200 sesterces and each centurion 2,000. Eighteen days' rest was all that he allowed himself, and with fresh troops, and in storm and frost, he started for the Carnutes. The rebels were to have no rest till they submitted. The Bellovaci were now out also.
For the Carnutes, who, though often harassed had never mentioned peace, submitted and gave hostages: and the other states, which lie in the remotest parts of Gaul, adjoining the ocean, and which are called Armoricae, influenced by the example of the Carnutes, as soon as Fabius arrived with his legions, without delay comply with his command.
Such expeditions were in the winter of 702-703 undertaken against the Bituriges and the Carnutes. With the Bellovaci More serious resistance was offered by the Bellovaci, who in the previous year had kept aloof from the relief of Alesia; they seem to have wished to show that their absence on that decisive day at least did not proceed from want of courage or of love for freedom.
After he had therefore shown himself with his whole army in the canton of the Haedui and had by this imposing demonstration compelled the patriot party in a ferment there to keep quiet at least for the moment, he divided his army and sent Labienus back to Agedincum, that in combination with the troops left there he might at the head of four legions suppress in the first instance the movement in the territory of the Carnutes and Senones, who on this occasion once more took the lead; while he himself with the six remaining legions turned to the south and prepared to carry the war into the Arvernian mountains, the proper territory of Vercingetorix.
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