Germans] had at first crossed the Rhine: but after that these wild and
savage men had become enamoured of the lands and the refinement and the
abundance of the Gauls, more were brought over, that there were now as
many as 120,000 of them in Gaul: that with these the Aedui and their
dependants had repeatedly struggled in arms, that they had been routed
and had sustained a great calamity--had lost all their nobility, all
their senate, all their cavalry. And that broken by such engagements and
calamities, although they had formerly been very powerful in Gaul, both
from their own valour and from the Roman people's hospitality and
friendship, they were now compelled to give the chief nobles of their
state as hostages to the Sequani, and to bind their state by an oath,
that they would neither demand hostages in return, nor supplicate aid
from the Roman people, nor refuse to be for ever under their sway and
empire. That he was the only one out of all the state of the Aedui who
could not be prevailed upon to take the oath or to give his children as
hostages. On that account he had fled from his state and had gone to the
senate at Rome to beseech aid, as he alone was bound neither by oath nor
hostages. But a worse thing had befallen the victorious Sequani than the
vanquished Aedui, for Ariovistus, the king of the Germans, had settled
in their territories, and had seized upon a third of their land, which
was the best in the whole of Gaul, and was now ordering them to depart
from another third part, because a few months previously 24,000 men of
the Harudes had come to him, for whom room and settlements must be
provided. The consequence would be, that in a few years they would all
be driven from the territories of Gaul, and all the Germans would cross
the Rhine; for neither must the land of Gaul be compared with the land
of the Germans, nor must the habit of living of the latter be put on a
level with that of the former. Moreover, [as for] Ariovistus, no sooner
did he defeat the forces of the Gauls in a battle, which took place at
Magetobria, than [he began] to lord it haughtily and cruelly, to demand