Kitap 3
9
On the departure of the Liburnian galleys from Illyricum, M. Octavius comes to Salonae with the ships under his command. There he diverts Issa from its friendship with Caesar, stirring up the Dalmatians and the rest of the Barbarians. Failing to influence the Roman citizen body at Salonae, either by promises or by threatenings of peril, he set himself to besiege the town. Now, the town was strongly protected by the nature of its site and by a hill. But the Roman citizens, rapidly constructing wooden towers, protected themselves with them, and, being weak in resistance owing to their small numbers, worn out by constant wounds, betook themselves to the last resource of despair and armed all their grown-up slaves, and cut off the hair of all their women to make catapult ropes. Octavius, having ascertained their sentiments, surrounded the town with five camps and began to press the inhabitants at once by blockade and by siege operations. Prepared to endure everything, they suffered most in the matter of the corn supply. To remedy this they sent envoys to Caesar and begged his aid. The rest of their troubles they endured by themselves as well as they could. And after a long interval, when the protracted siege had made the Octavius rather careless, taking advantage of the opportunity afforded by the hour of noon when the enemy had withdrawn, they placed their boys and women on the walls that no particular of their daily routine might be missed by the besiegers, and forming themselves into a band, together with those whom they had just recently liberated, they burst into the nearest camp of Octavius. This being taken by storm, with a similar onset they attacked the second, then the third and fourth, and the remaining one in its turn, and drove the men out of all the camps, and having slain a great number, forced the rest and Octavius himself to fly to the ships. Such was the end of the siege. And now winter was approaching, and Octavius, despairing of the siege of the town after receiving such heavy losses, retired to Dyrrachium to Pompeius.
