One of the rare defeats which Julius Caesar’s forces suffered during the Gallic Wars - or his entire military career - was the battle of Atuatuca (or Aduatuca) , an unidentified place somewhere in the Ardennes, in the fall of 54 BC. One legion and a half (between 5.000 and 7.500 legionaries, not counting the auxiliaries, technicians, doctors, administrative staff, slave traders etc.) under the command of lieutenants (legati) Sabinus and Cotta had been sent by Caesar to spend the winter of 54/53 among the Celto-Germanic tribe of the Eburones. Shortly after building up their winter fortifications, they were persuaded by the Eburone chief Ambiorix to leave their camp and head westward. An hour or so after their departure, Ambiorix and his men attacked them while they were marching through a valley. The legions were not able to break out of the valley, and only few legionaries survived the following battle and massacre.
Instead of giving you a boring summary of the battle in my poor English, I hint at a translation of the Caesar passage in
http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.5.5.html, (chapters 26-37) or the Latin original on
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/caesar/gall5.shtml#26 (and on many other sites, of course)
Reading the description carefully, I am convinced that the sling played an essential and decisive role in this battle (which, by the way, inflicted the heaviest losses on Roman troops in the whole Gallic War). Although only once mentioned clearly in Caesar’s report of the battle, the sling was, in my opinion, the main weapon of the Eburones once the Romans had been pinned down in the valley.
My questions to our experts of Latin are:
1. Can
telum, the Word that Caesar uses for the projectile that the Romans were volleyed with, have the common meaning of “sling projectile” or does it usually comprise other missiles (javelins, arrows, axes etc.)?
2. Does
os in chapter 35 really mean “mouth”? I think it would be more appropriate to translate
os funda vulneratur as “his face was wounded by a sling” (I found this in some other translations). If poor Cotta had really been hit by a slung stone or something like a Celto-Germanic kind of lead or ceramic
glans in the mouth, it seems unlikely that he would have been able to discuss with his colleague Sabinus afterwards. At least not in spoken language. A sling (projectile) wound in another part of his face was surely bad enough, though.
By the way and for the friends of other primitive weapons, the
tragulae mentioned in the passage might have been something similar to the weapons discussed in
http://slinging.org/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1224247036 If I read it right, then the passage in chapter 35
utrumque femur tragula traicitur says that
one “slung” tragula pierced
both thighs of Centurion Balventius.
Looking forward to your opinions and
sorry for the extended post