![]() Politics governed by clashes within and between important families for political power. Larger states with annually elected officials and leaders in the south. We get a picture of Gaul on the eve of conquest. And everybody not dead presumably traumatised and in shock. After this there was another year or so of smaller scale campaigns before all Gaul was conquered. There, besieged by the Romans he runs out of food, expels the town's population who are then trapped between Vercingetorix's and Caesar's lines with nothing to eat, only to see the relieving army defeated. You know how it is, one day you are just marching against the Helvetii, the next thing you know ten years have passed and you seem to have inadvertently conquered all of Gaul, invaded Britain and Germany twice and written a set of memoirs putting the best light on your activities and lucky escapes from disaster.įrom early on Gallic leaders seems suspicious of the extent of Caesar's ambitions, Ariovistus' (a warlord from beyond the Rhine) defence (pp.52-3) of his own role in northern Gaul seems to mirror Caesar's activities: I'm not the aggressor, I was called in by the locals to defend them, this big army I've got with me is purely for my own protection and not to threaten anyone.Gaul, however, was not big enough for the two of them.Ĭaesar starts out with little campaigns but is drawn in his own words further away from the Roman Province in southern France into greater offensive measures which provoke bigger resistance down to the massive effort of Vercingetorix and his confederates culminating with the defeat of said champion at the town of Alesia. Understandably, Caesar's own account makes it all sound a little more reasonable than that, there is a fair attempt made to make it sound like an accidental bit of empire building. Suetonius, admittedly writing The Twelve Caesars a good hundred and fifty years after the events wrote that Caesar lost no opportunity of picking quarrels - however flimsy the pretext - with allies as well as hostile and barbarous tribes, and marching against them the danger of this policy never occurred to him. In short, join the army, it'll make a master builder of you. They dig massive siege works - a ten mile ditch and rampart round Alesia and a fourteen mile ditch and rampart round that to defend themselves against any relieving force (view spoiler). Soldiers ford the Thames and the Loire with water to their shoulders expecting to have to fight on the far bank (view spoiler). In the face of overwhelming opposition they fight on. What is striking about the Romans is their sheer bloodymindedness. Vercingetorix, who led the big campaign against Caesar that involved most of the peoples of Gaul, is reported as realising this and advised that they should carry out a scorched earth defence, abandoning all towns that couldn't be defended against the Romans as well as starting fighting in winter. It seems that an ad hoc supply network was created (p.174 and p.183) to meet Roman needs but in addition the soldiers regularly gathered in crops whenever they could and occasionally cattle. Tens of thousands of men roaming round Gaul needed food and fodder. Part of the reason for the savagery is logistics. Though of course he could have been exaggerating to impress the people back home. One of the Gaulish leaders, Vercingetorix, has the ears cut off or an eye gouged out of his own soldiers "even for a minor fault" (p157), Roman civilians are massacred on occasion while Caesar in his own account records the extermination of substantial proportions of entire peoples, sells the populations of captured towns in to slavery and in a moment of mercy has a hand of every man captured in one of his last campaigns chopped off to serve as a visual aid to clarify the folly of resisting Rome to the unenlightened. The warfare is savage, and at the end Caesar tumbles into The Civil War that ends the Roman republic. Unlike Asterix the injuries aren't restricted to black eyes and broken bones, nor is there a big feast at the end. One of the Gaulish leaders, Vercingetorix, has the ears cut off or an eye gouged out of his own soldiers "even for a minor fault" (p157), Roman civilians are massacred on occasion wh This is what I was brought to by a childhood of reading Asterix. ![]() This is what I was brought to by a childhood of reading Asterix.
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