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XVI. By this battle the war with the Veneti and the whole of the sea coast was finished; for both all the youth, and all, too, of more advanced age, in whom there was any discretion or rank, had assembled in that battle; and they had collected in that one place whatever naval forces they had anywhere; and when these were lost, the survivors had no place to retreat to, nor means of defending their towns.
The hypothesis of Strabo may have rested on nothing else than an inference from the similarity of name an inference such as the ancients drew, often without due reason, in the case of the Cimbri, Veneti, and others. III. I. Libyphoenicians III. VI. Gades Becomes Roman
With the exception of the Cenomani, who acted with the Veneti and declared for the Romans, all the Italian Celts concurred in the war, and they were joined by the Celts of the upper valley of the Rhone, or rather by a number of adventurers belonging to them, under the leaders Concolitanus and Aneroestus.
At length, in a naval fight, our fleet, being fully assembled, gained a victory so signal that, by that one battle, the war with the Veneti and the whole sea-coast was finished. Cæsar thought that severe punishment should be inflicted, in order that for the future the rights of ambassadors should be respected by barbarians; he therefore put to death all their senate, and sold the rest for slaves.
Many were stormed, yet much of the warfare was vain and much labour was lost, because the Veneti, having numerous ships specially adapted for such a purpose, their keels being flatter than those of our ships, could easily navigate the shallows and estuaries, and thus their flight hither and thither could not be prevented.
The celebrated Latin comic poet Statius Caecilius, who died in 586, was a manumitted Insubrian; and Polybius, who visited these districts towards the close of the sixth century, affirms, not perhaps without some exaggeration, that in that quarter only a few villages among the Alps remained Celtic. The Veneti, on the other hand, appear to have retained their nationality longer.
Caesar was constitutionally lenient, and admired rather than resented a valiant fight for freedom. But the Veneti had been treacherous. They had laid hands on the sacred persons of Roman ambassadors, and he considered it expedient on this one occasion to use severity. The council who had contrived the insurrection were put to death.
His treacherous conduct towards the Usipetes and Tenchteri, which he relates with perfect sang froid, is such as to shock us beyond description; his brutal vengeance upon the Atuatici and Veneti, all whose leading men he murdered, and sold the rest, to the number of 53,000, by auction; his cruel detention of the noble Vercingetorix, who, after acting like an honourable foe in the field, voluntarily gave himself up to appease the conqueror's wrath; these are blots in Caesar's scutcheon, which, if they do not place him below the recognised standard of action of the time, prevent him from being placed in any way above it.
By this dreadful fate, as well as by their intelligence and their patriotism, the Veneti have more than any other Celtic clan acquired a title to the sympathy of posterity.
Julius Cæsar, whose clemency has been so greatly extolled, 'executed the whole senate of the Veneti; permitted a massacre of the Usipetes and Tencteri; sold as slaves 40,000 natives of Genabum; and cut off the right hands of all the brave men whose only crime was that they held to the last against him their town of Uxellodunum. No slaughter in history is more terrible than that which took place at Jerusalem under the general who was called 'the delight of the human race, and when the last spasm of resistance had ceased, Titus sent Jewish captives, both male and female, by thousands to the provincial amphitheatres to be devoured by wild beasts or slaughtered as gladiators.
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