Hello again, Julius.
I admire and am fascinated by your (very successful) efforts to read real ancient Latin without ever opening a Latin Grammar. In language-learning forums like this, “grammar” is an over-burdened term. I prefer the metaphor “shoemaker’s last” from the twentieth-century polyglot Kató Lomb (whose very non-technical, easy-and-enjoyable-to-read book Polyglot: How I Learn Languages you and others may find interesting).
If I said I never consulted a translation to resolve an impasse, I’d be a liar. If I said I’ve never done that a thousand times, I’d be a liar. Doing so is not an impure stain on the process of learning a language!
I loved Familia Romana, and the very mention of it makes me remember with amusement that naughty older brother. My favorite scene is the young lady and man servants escaping in a storm-tossed boat when … but let me not be a spoiler, in case you haven’t gotten that far. But I had had plenty of formal training in Latin grammar before reading it, so I can’t comment on its efficacy as a self-contained, self-sufficient resource for learning basic Latin. But with all due respect, Nesrad, wouldn’t you agree that whatever works works, and that won’t be the same for everyone?
Here’s the dilemma, though. When you seek correction, it’s difficult to respond without invoking … grammar! My esteemed Textkit colleague msw (who dislikes my editorials!) is much better at this than I am; I think he’s a teacher by profession (Michael, correct me if I’m wrong), and I’m not.
If we were having coffee together at an outdoor Parisian cafe this fine summer day, I’d try reading the “quod” sentence to you several times to see if I could better convey its meaning to you by my brilliant delivery …, which probably wouldn’t work!
The original: > reperiebat etiam in quaerendo Caesar, quod proelium equestre adversum paucis ante diebus esset factum, initium eius fugae factum ab Dumnorige atque eius equitibus—nam equitatui, quem auxilio Caesari Haedui miserant, Dumnorix praeerat—; eorum fuga reliquum esse equitatum perterritum> .
Your paraphrase: > in quaerendo Caesar etiam reperiebat initium fugae proelii equestris – quod ante paucis diebus esset factum – ab Dumnorige atque eius equitibus factum esse nam…
I think what you’re still getting wrong is that you’re treating quod as a relative pronoun, whereas in this passage it’s a conjunction meaning “because”, “in that”. The difficulty may be that it is forward looking: ‘because [according to his informants] … [for that reason] the flight had been undertaken’.
A signpost here is that the quod clause is in the subjunctive, which means it is reported speech (Caesar is conveying what he learned from his informants, not his own deduction). Understood as a relative pronoun, it wouldn’t be in the subjunctive (unless the question at hand wasn’t why Dumnorix fled but how many days ago he fled). If you’re not consulting a Latin Grammar, please at least don’t refrain from checking out the quod entry in a good Latin dictionary. As for the stitch in the shoemaker’s last that says reported speech conveying the view of another uses the subjunctive, whether you can intuit that from continued reading of “the classics” or, alas, can only get it from a grammar book, I can’t say.
Unless, per Michael’s dictum, I think I understand the sentence but really don’t. But that’s never happened to me 
.
By the way, there’s no such thing as an “embarrassing” lack of academic background, at least not in my orbit.
