From: gknysh
Message: 65110
Date: 2009-09-24
>(TP) This is what Lucan has Caesar say on his arrival in Rome after having crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE.****GK: Lucan may simply have projected the situation of 59/60 CE (when Sarmatians were indeed located just across Pannonia on the Danube) back to 49 BCE. Poetic license which Harmatta interpreted as historical proof.*****
> ''tene, deum sedes, non ullo Marte coacti
> deseruere uiri? pro qua pugnabitur urbe?
> di melius, quod non Latias Eous in oras
> nunc furor incubuit nec iuncto Sarmata uelox
> Pannonio Dacisque Getes admixtus: habenti
> tam pauidum tibi, Roma, ducem fortuna pepercit,
> quod bellum ciuile fuit.'
> Pharsalia, Book III
> http://www.thelatin library.com/ lucan/lucan3. shtml
> which Riley
> http://tinyurl. com/ls8exo
> translates as
> " And have there been men, forced by no warfare, to
> desert thee, the abode of the Gods ! For what city will they fight?
> The Gods have proved more favouring in that it is
> no Eastern fury that now presses upon the Latian shores,
> nor yet the swift Sarmatian in common with the Pannonian,
> and the Getans mingled with the Dacians. Fortune, Borne,
> has spared thee, having a chief so cowardly [Pompey], in that the
> warfare was a civil one."
>
> GK: Does nothing for your thesis. Merely "supports" Harmatta's view that the Sarmatians were across from Pannonia (he thinks), although frankly, it doesn't even do that.
>