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[1] Almost all the Gauls are of tall stature, fair and ruddy, terrible for the fierceness of their eyes, fond of quarrelling, and of overbearing insolence. In fact, a whole band of foreigners will be unable to cope with one of them in a fight, if he call in his wife, stronger than he by far and with flashing eyes; least of all when she swells her neck and gnashes her teeth, and poising her huge white arms, proceeds to rain punches mingled with kicks, like shots discharged by the twisted cords of a catapult.
[2] The voices of most of them are formidable and threatening, alike when they are good-natured or angry. But all of them with equal care keep clean and neat, and in those districts, particularly in Aquitania, no man or woman can be seen, be she never so poor, in soiled and ragged clothing, as elsewhere.
[3] All ages are most fit for military service, and the old man marches out on a campaign with a courage equal to that of the man in the prime of life; since his limbs are toughened by cold and constant toil, and he will make light of many formidable dangers. Nor does anyone of them, for dread of the service of Mars, cut off his thumb, as in Italy
1
: there they call such men
murci, or cowards.
[4] It is a race greedy for wine, devising numerous drinks similar to wine, and some among them of the baser sort, with wits dulled by continual drunkenness (which Cato’s saying pronounced a voluntary kind of madness) rush about in aimless revels, so that those words seem true which Cicero spoke when defending Fonteius
2
:
The Gauls henceforth will drink wine mixed with water, which they once thought poison.
[5] These regions, and especially those bordering on Italy, came gradually and with slight effort under the dominion of Rome; they were first essayed by Fulvius,
3
then undermined in petty battles by Sextius,
4
and finally subdued by Fabius Maximus,
5
on whom the full completion of this business (when he had vanquished the formidable tribe of the Allobroges)
6
conferred that surname.
7
[6] Now the whole of Gaul (except where, as the authority of Sallust
8
informs us, it was impassable with marshes), after losses on both sides during ten years of war the dictator Caesar subdued and joined to us in an everlasting covenant of alliance. I have digressed too far, but I shall at last return to my subject.
Res Gestae. Ammianus Marcellinus. John C. Rolfe (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1935-1940.
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