LXVI.
Forte equus abruptis vinculis (abruptis vinculis: abl. abs., lit. ‘its tether having been broken’) vagus et clamore territus quosdam occurrentium obturbavit. tanta inde consternatio inrupisse Germanos credentium ut cuncti ruerent ad portas, (tanta inde consternatio inrupisse Germanos credentium ut cuncti ruerent ad portas: consecutive sentence with the correlatives tanta …ut heading the main and dependent clause: ‘so great [was] the commotion of those who believed the Germans had broken into the camp, that all rushed to the gates.’ The consequence is always expressed by the subjunctive: the imperfect denotes a consequence in the past contemporaneous with the historical tense of the main clause (here an implied erat).) quarum decumana maxime petebatur, aversa hosti ([porta] decumana … aversa hosti: ‘the decuman gate, turned away from the enemy’; only instance of aversus with dat. (except for one doubtful case in Livy and the odd one in the poets); usually with abl. with or without preposition. Of the four gates in a Roman camp, in the center of each side of the square, the decuman gate occupied the side facing away from the enemy and was opposite the praetorian gate (porta praetoria) towards the enemy or, in the absence of an enemy, the east. The other two were the porta principalis dextra and porta principalis sinistra, one at each end of the via principalis, the main street crossing the camp and dividing the first third of its space, comprising the principia (see note for dimensis principiis in ch. 61), from the rows of tents housing the legions.) et fugientibus tutior. Caecina comperto vanam esse formidinem, (comperto vanam esse formidinem: ‘having been ascertained that the panic was groundless’: comperto is abl. abs. consisting of the neuter of a perfect participle alone followed by an infinitive clause or ut + subjunctive. Other participles so used without a “subject”are audito, cognito, nuntiato, auspicato, etc. They are frequent in Livy and Tacitus (Ernout).) cum tamen neque auctoritate neque precibus, ne manu quidem obsistere aut retinere militem quiret, (cum … [non] quiret: temporal cum followed by subjunctive is known as ‘narrative cum’: it gives the circumstances immediately preceding or even accompanying the action of the main verb, here clusit viam.) proiectus (proiectus: the passive proiectus has in this case middle sense: ‘having thrown himself’.) in limine portae miseratione demum, quia per corpus legati eundum erat, (quia per corpus legati eundum erat: unlike causal cum, quia is regularly followed by indicative; eundum erat is impersonal use of the passive periphrastic conjugation to express duty or necessity with both transitive and intransitive verbs.) clausit viam: simul tribuni et centuriones falsum pavorem esse docuerunt.