Mounting
one of the hired vehicles, he drove at first along another road, and
then turning towards Ariminium, when he came to the stream which
divides Gaul within the Alps from the rest of Italy (it is called
Rubico[519] , and he began to calculate as he approached nearer to
the danger, and was agitated by the magnitude of the hazard, he
checked his speed; and halting he considered about many things with
himself in silence, his mind moving from one side to the other, and
his will then underwent many changes; and he also discussed at length
with his friends who were present, of whom Pollio Asinius[520] was
one, all the difficulties, and enumerated the evils which would ensue
to all mankind from his passage of the river, and how great a report
of it they would leave to posterity. At last, with a kind of passion,
as if he were throwing himself out of reflection into the future, and
uttering what is the usual expression with which men preface their
entry upon desperate enterprises and daring, "Let the die be cast," he
hurried to cross the river; and thence advancing at full speed, he
attacked Ariminum before daybreak and took it. It is said that on the
night before the passage of the river, he had an impure dream,[521]
for he dreamed that he was in unlawful commerce with his mother.
XXXIII. But when Ariminum was taken, as if the war had been let loose
through wide gates over all the earth and sea at once, and the laws of
the state were confounded together with the limits of the province,
one would not have supposed that men and women only, as on other
occasions, in alarm were hurrying through Italy, but that the cities
themselves, rising from their foundations, were rushing in flight one
through another; and Rome herself, as if she were deluged by torrents,
owing to the crowding of the people from the neighbouring towns and
their removal, could neither easily be pacified by magistrate nor kept
in order by words, and in the midst of the mighty swell and the
tossing of the tempest, narrowly escaped being overturned by her own
agitation.
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