Kitap 1
14
When these events were announced at Rome such consternation seized at once on the inhabitants that when the consul Lentulus had come to open the treasury for the purpose of providing a sum of money for Pompeius in. accordance with a decree of the senate, as soon as ever he had opened the inner treasury he fled from the city; for news was falsely brought that Caesar was on the very point of arriving and that his cavalry had already come. Lentulus was followed by his colleague Marcellus and by most of the magistrates. Gn. Pompeius had left the city the day before and was on his way to the legions which he had taken from Caesar and distributed in winter quarters in Apulia. The levying of troops round the city is broken off; no one thinks there is any safety this side of Capua. It was at Capua that they first rally with renewed courage and begin to raise a levy among the colonists who had been planted there under the Julian law, while Lentulus brings the gladiators, whom Caesar kept in a training school there, into the forum and encourages them by the prospect of liberty, gives them horses, and orders them to follow him; y but afterwards, on the admonition of his followers, because such a proceeding was censured by the general judgment, he distributes them for safe keeping among his friends in the burgess-body at Capua.
