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34As the fight continued equal, Caesar, at a loss what he should do, sent for fire from the camp. Previously he had wished to avoid using it, in order to gain possession of the money; but now that he saw it was impossible for him to win in any other way, he had recourse to this, as the only thing that would assist him. 2And now another kind of battle was entered upon. The assailants would approach their victims from many directions at once, shoot blazing missiles at them, hurl with their hands torches fastened to javelins and with the aid of engines would throw from a distance pots full of charcoal and pitch. 3The defenders tried to ward these missiles off one by one, and when some of them got past them and caught the timbers and at once started a great fire, as must be the case in a ship, they used first the drinking water which they carried on board and extinguished some of the conflagrations, and when that was gone they dipped up the sea-water. 4And if they used great quantities of it at once, they would somehow stop the fire by main force; but they were unable to do this everywhere, for the buckets they had were not numerous nor of large size, and in their confusion they brought them up half full, so that, far from helping the situation at all, they only increased the flames, since salt water poured on a fire in small quantities makes it burn vigorously. 5So when they found themselves getting the worst of it in this respect also, they heaped on the blaze their thick mantles and the corpses, and for a time these checked the fire and it seemed to abate; but later, especially when the wind raged furiously, the flames flared up more than ever, fed by this very fuel. 6So long as only a part of a ship was on fire, men would stand by that part and leap into it, hewing away or scattering the timbers; and these detached timbers were hurled by some into the sea and by others against their opponents, in the hope that they, too, might possibly be injured by these missiles. 7Others would go to the still sound portion of the ship and now more than ever would make use of their grappling-irons and their long spears with the purpose of binding some hostile ship to theirs and crossing over to it, if possible, or, if not, of setting it on fire likewise.
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