The role of the Tribunes in the republican legion

[Sean Manning]

While I haven't checked the Latin, I think Caesar is using the historical present in that passage. Latin authors often describe past events in the present tense to make it seem as if the events are happening right before the reader. But they don't always convert every verb in a sentence from the perfect to the historical present, just the most dramatic ones. It looks strange in translation because we don't use the same device in English.