Show 60 - The Celtic Holocaust 05:59:51

It's hardcore history. If I asked you to get a piece of paper and something to write with and to make a numerical list of all the things that you would be willing to die for, how long is your list? And what's on it? And this is kind of an exercise and you run into these things elsewhere, I'm sure. It's sort of a clarify your life and priorities exercise. Another one I've heard is go write your own obituary now.

And you can see how that might help you get a sense of, oh, gee, this is what I'd like to be someday. And here's how far I am from that now and sort of help you figure out how you're doing. The what would you be willing to die for question is a priority question. Helps you sort of figure out what are the most important things to me. And if you think about lists like that, I mean, I think we probably all have pretty similar things, at least at the top of the list, wouldn't we? I mean, wouldn't loved ones be on that list right near the top?

I would be willing to die for my wife and children or parents. I have to believe that's pretty common in any era in history. And then likely something on that list near the top would be possessions of one kind or another. Land comes to mind right off the top of my head. This farm's been in my family for three generations. I would give my life for it. The number of conflicts that were land ownership based since time immemorial is uncountable, isn't it? Pretty common.

Other kinds of possession you might think of as like money. How long down on your list though does it go before you get to things that are a little harder to get your hands on tangibly? I mean where's something like freedom on your list? And it's funny because if you go and look all throughout human history there are slogans like New Hampshire's state motto which is live free or die.

And you go and you look at like revolutionary France and all these other movements throughout history and some form of give me liberty or give me death, live free or die is on the list. I mean, people willing to give their own lives based on the idea that an unfree life isn't worth living. So willing to die for a concept, but a concept that means everything when you talk about your day-to-day life. And we should point out that freedom has always meant different things to different people and has meant different things in different eras.

The two big definitions you run into is the obvious one. Freedom is my right to personal control and autonomy and sovereignty. The other one, though, is a political sort of freedom that says as long as no outside people or power or state or entity is controlling my people, then we're free. We may live in a dictatorship, but it's our dictatorship, that kind of thing. So freedom involves freedom from outside control. Now, let me change the...

parameters of our little question though here for a minute what if instead of giving your own life and what you would be willing to die for the new list is what would you be willing to lose everything for

And by everything, I certainly mean your life. That's a given. But the lives of all your loved ones, one way or another, either through outright death or having them sold into a life of slavery, your little kids sold into a life of slavery, and all your possessions taken, and all your stuff stolen, and your community devastated, and your culture mortally wounded. That's pretty much everything, isn't it? What's worth that?

Some of the greatest human tragedies, both on a personal and on a society-wide level throughout history, have happened when some of the things on the list that you'd be willing to die for become the cost of preserving other things on your list that you'd be willing to die for. And you see this all the time. In the 20th century, look at how many people, in order to protect their society's freedom...

sent their own children off to die in a war. So this is part of the human condition. But unless you've lived through near genocidal conditions, most of us haven't had to deal with the kind of threat that people throughout history have had to deal with to everything. That general who coined New Hampshire's state motto, live free or die, was a revolutionary war general, for example. He wrote that phrase decades after the war.

and in total freedom and safety now i have no doubt he would have been willing to give his life in the service of what was a brand new country during the revolutionary war but he could also take some comfort in the idea that he wasn't going to have to give much more than that i mean the british were not going to come into the country and after they hanged him execute his teenage sons

and rape his wife and his children and send them off to slavery, burn down his house, destroy his town, and stamp out his church. They weren't going to do that. That's a different kind of risk, isn't it? That's genocide. And people still deal with that, even as I'm speaking right now, somewhere in the world.

Now, obviously, genocides come in many different shades and colors and variations and circumstances. I mean, take the Jews and the gypsies in the Second World War during the Holocaust. That's an example where the people who were being victimized had absolutely no choice and no options. No one said to them, either do this or we're going to kill you all. A choice was never offered. Sometimes, though, it is.

Choice A is you do this. Choice B is we commit a genocide or a near genocide or an absolute crime against humanity by modern day standards against you. I mean, for most of human history, that's the choice that cities have when enemy armies show up outside their walls. Surrender before the siege weapons start being used.

And you can maybe go free, maybe carry some of your personal possessions with you. Maybe not. But the deal is, is that as soon as the siege starts, in most of these cases, they could do whatever they wanted to you. Sometimes they might still let you go. Sometimes they might have a negotiation three weeks from now and say, OK, do you want to stop it now? We'll make a deal.

But oftentimes the deal was implicit. I mean, historian Hans Van Wies says that this is the standard understanding throughout most of pre-gunpowder history and even into gunpowder era history that if you don't surrender when called upon and the city goes under siege, that you could have an absolute genocide, at least on a citywide level afterwards. And everyone will understand that that's just how it goes.

They weren't doing that to civilizational equals much by the 18th century, which of course the British would have considered the colonists who five minutes ago had been subjects of the same king as the British. But when you were dealing, for example, with savages or barbarians, those are obviously slur terms, all bets were off.

In the history of the laws of war, there's a term for that, a Latin term, bellum romanum, which basically means war the way the Romans did it. Total war. The legal definition I got from one place said that bellum romanum is all-out war without restraint. As the Romans practiced it against groups they considered to be barbarians. And let's understand, if the British crown in 1775 were dealing with Native Americans...

might have been a very different situation all of a sudden you can treat them the way rome treated barbarians oftentimes with what we would call today genocide but oftentimes with choices unlike the jews and the gypsies in the second world war's holocaust oftentimes the choice was surrender and accept subjugation without rebellion and live or do any of those other things

and see everyone either killed or sold into slavery what passes for a city in your culture destroyed and maybe your culture itself taken apart piece by piece there's something very strange maybe about me but i see a certain romance

a doomed sort of romance the same sort of thing you see with the native americans sometimes where you watch this story that is a calamity and yet at times the behavior of the human beings in it make a tear roll down your cheek and touch something deep in your soul those who are willing to say yes we know that you'll kill all of us or destroy our civilization if we don't subjugate ourselves to you but we're going to take the chance here and try to live free or die

Now, I'm not the only one that sees the obvious entertainment value or the compelling nature of the extreme situation. A choice like that puts human beings into because it's a Hollywood cliche, isn't it? A storytelling trope, they would say, maybe in academic circles. A recurring theme. I mean, it would be very easy to tell this story and turn it into Braveheart. We will try very hard not to do that.

but it's an old theme and it's easy to become sort of inured to it over time sort of numb the other problem is that these situations that we're talking about the reality of them is actually so intense and so extreme that any portrayal or discussion of them can't help but somehow minimize or trivialize or hype in a different way for entertainment value what the people were actually going through i always try to think to myself

Imagine if that list that we mentioned a minute ago, that genocide list, imagine if only one of those things was going to happen to me in my cushy life here where I am in no danger of, say, having my culture wiped out. I can't even imagine what that would mean. Make blue jeans illegal. No more iPhones and they start destroying the Christian religion. I mean, I'm not quite sure in the modern sense in the United States where I live how that even you can't even get your mind around it.

Maybe in some weird, emotionally voyeuristic way, that's what makes it kind of intriguing. As I've always said, you watch people deal with something you can't imagine dealing with yourself. The story that I would like to use to highlight that has a very familiar ring, because we've seen this movie, historically speaking, before, over and over again. Broadly speaking, it's the story of a European power...

using its technological and civilizational advantages to dominate, take over, and colonize the land of a tribal people, a less sophisticated, politically speaking, tribal people, and to destroy broad elements of their culture as part of doing so. Obviously, over the last 500 or so years, we've seen this movie play out in the Americas with European colonization and conquest.

We saw it play out in Africa too, same thing. The difference here is that the people, the tribal people, on the receiving end of European conquest and colonization are themselves European. And this didn't happen a couple hundred years ago. This happened more than 2,000 years ago. And the reason that I wanted to talk about this story as opposed to any of the others with similar themes is because this is one of the times where you look at the odds, right?

And you say there's a halfway decent chance here of the people on the receiving end of the European colonization to fight back and win. The Native Americans, for example, never had a chance, never a chance ever. If for no other reason, and there's a lot of other ones, just the disease alone. If you're about to have a hemispheric civilizational conflict, you know, between the new world and the old world,

You don't want to lose maybe, I mean, I saw an estimate that said 98%. I think that's got to be high, but let's just say 85% of the entire population of the hemisphere to disease right off the bat. There are a bunch of experts who've, you know, tried to explain what the situation must have been like in these tribes in the center of the Americas, you know, that were still untouched by European contact, but the diseases managed to find them and were just like shell-shocked

traumatized remnants by the time Europeans got to the interior of the Americans because these tribes had basically been wiped out by disease. It's like a magic that, imagine the bubonic plague in Europe, but worse from the Middle Ages. I've seen numbers that say that in the, in say 1800, they were estimating what the

tribal population of North America was. Now, not the North America that constituted the United States in that area back then, because that was just a sliver compared to today. But the native population throughout, you know, from the Pacific to the Atlantic in what's now the United States. Some estimates are as low as 600,000 people. That's a pretty unfair fight right there, isn't it?

Not just that, as we all know. That's not 600,000 people all smooshed into one state right next to the 13 colonies when the United States becomes a state, right? It's not like the U.S. has to deal with 600,000 natives next door. They're spread out in small groups, you know, the width and breadth of the territory, able to be picked off, divided and conquered one by one over time, which is what happened. I mean, it still blows my mind to realize that

How small the number of Native American warriors there are fighting against the encroachment of manifest destiny at any time and how well they did based on how small they were. I mean, do you know if you get 1500 North American Native American warriors in one place at one time, that's a sizable force.

The highest estimates I've ever seen for the largest Native American force of warriors ever assembled is between 4,000 and 5,000 people. The Little Bighorn, a lot of people think that's the biggest battle. The largest numbers I've ever seen are just under 5,000. 5,000? When the Spanish conquistadors found the Aztec Empire, the Aztecs could raise tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of warriors.

Now, obviously, they're a different state organizational system, which plays into this story. But at the same time, it's also first contact, basically, and the disease had not had time to take hold. And then fast forward a couple hundred years, and all of a sudden you go from hundreds of thousands of warriors, maybe, to 1,500 being a sizable force. And look how long it took the U.S. to deal with that.

And to be fair, it wasn't like the United States had 100,000 people against 1,500 natives. The forces of the European powers fighting in the New World were very small also. 1,500 U.S. forces fighting these Native American tribes, half of which might be local militia. That was not uncommon either. Even in the big wars like the American Revolution, the numbers are smaller than you would think. I mean, again, 25,000 would be a ton in the American Revolution.

So you wonder how the U.S. or before them the British and French explorers would have fared if they were exploring the interior, say, of North America and they came upon some people that had not been impacted by the disease. I mean, what if the Aztec Empire, instead of being in the middle of Mexico, was on the opposite side of the Mississippi to be run into by the Europeans at some point?

Or better yet, let's make it an interesting combat. Let's put ancient Gaul on the western side of the Mississippi. You know what Gaul is, right? Gaul is what the Romans called an area about the size of Texas in the ancient world that comprised, well, most of northwestern Europe, modern-day France, a lot of Belgium, western strip of Germany, some of Switzerland, and during one part of this period, northern Italy even.

estimates of the ancient population range from three to seven million people and the kind of armies that they could put in the field well let's just say i'd imagine they're pretty close to the kind of numbers that the aztecs probably could put in the field an army of 40 or 50 000 gallic peoples five or ten thousand of which might be mounted was not unusual imagine imagine those armies a

that are used to brushing aside 1,500 natives, maybe on a really bad day, 2,500 natives having to deal with 40 or 50,000 of them instead. Now, I have no doubt, given the technological advantages and more importantly, the state organizational advantages of a place like the early United States or before then the British and the French, I have no doubt they would conquer this latter-day version of Gaul at some point.

But I wonder if they could conquer it as quickly as Caesar did in the real thing 2,000 years before. And if they couldn't, what does that say? Well, rather than attribute it to any failings or shortcomings of the European or American forces in North America, maybe it says how incredibly awesome Julius Caesar was. But awesome doesn't mean good. And

Up until relatively recently, what he did in Gaul was celebrated. And in fact, going back 100 or 200 years in the era where the great powers, especially the great powers of Europe, are celebrating the idea of doing exactly what Julius Caesar and the Romans were doing to the tribal peoples north of them in their own era, they tended to see Caesar as the good guy. The story I want to talk about today is

is narrated by Julius Caesar. It's a little like hearing the Star Wars saga, as told by Darth Vader. And it is designed to have the audience cheer when the plucky little republics are crushed. And a hundred years ago, a lot of people did. The beginning to my recent translation of Caesar's war commentaries from his command in Gaul

The Carolyn Hammond translation feels the need at the beginning of the work to explain why yet another translation of Caesar's account of his, well, I had one professor in school in the 80s who called it a Celtic Holocaust, why a new translation was needed. And Hammond points out because the views of the audience are different than they used to be. She writes, quote,

A new translation of the Gallic War does call for some explanation, not least because a number of versions are already available. Yet each generation needs its own translation of any classic text. The

the culture and mores of the translator's own time are bound to leave their mark besides the subject matter of the Gallic war is potentially distasteful even immoral for the modern reader the drive to increase territorial holdings high civilian as well as military casualties and the predominance of economic motives for organized aggression all these belong to an accepted norm of international activity in the ancient world

and hence need careful introduction and explanation as well as up-to-date translation. End quote. Of course, what she's basically saying is that once upon a time, this was written for an audience who was expected to cheer what was going on. Nowadays, we look at things sort of differently and can't help but notice that in the process of achieving these glorious and almost impossible military victories, the

julius caesar is killing reportedly a million of the inhabitants of gaul and enslaving another million as celtic expert archaeologist barry cunliffe says if you take the low numbers of the entire population of gaul that means caesar killed a third of the population and enslaved another third is that genocide in the americas

The disease did most of the damage in terms of the overall death rate. In Gaul, in the 50s BCE, Caesar did. Even as I say that, I can hear sort of in the back of my head the screaming objections of the ancient Roman lawyers from the grave of the way that I'm framing this whole thing.

comparing roman efforts against the celtic peoples north of them to the holocaust in the second world war would be an insult to roman honor although there were some who complained about it cato i think nonetheless they would say that to suggest that doing what caesar did to the gauls is the same as what happened to the jews and the gypsies and the jehovah's witnesses and the gay folks and all the other people persecuted in the holocaust roman catholic priests

Polish folks, those are like lambs, innocent, led to the slaughter. What Caesar did, he did to a people that were like lions, dangerous lions, lions that had attacked before and might do so again. If you are forced as a state or a people or what have you to commit genocide in order to protect yourself, is that sort of a get out of jail free card thing?

in any sort of genocidal court situation. I mean, in a judgment call, would you say, well, listen, you know, they had to do it. Anybody would have done it. At the same time, of course, what Caesar was suggesting, and we'll get to that in a minute, was that they needed a preemptive war because these lions could attack at any time. So it gets murky quickly, but there's no denying that these Celtic peoples all over Europe were dangerous, right?

They are Vikings a thousand years before there are Vikings. And I don't mean in the pirate-like sense. I mean in the European barbarian stereotype sense. And the Vikings are like version 3.4 or something because the Celts are the alpha version of the northern European barbarian type. They exhibit all the typical traits. They get crazy in battle, supposedly, and they fight with enormous amounts of ferocity.

The geographer Strabo said that they are war mad. The ancient sources also point out that the Celts are headhunters, which is always a little bit unnerving. Ancient peoples are always more comfortable with head chopping than we are in the modern world. But in the more settled societies, when it was done, it was sort of...

there was no they didn't enjoy it they didn't revel in it they didn't take pride in it it wasn't something you showed off to visitors but in the celtic world according to the ancient sources that were not celtic this was something that was done posidonia says he's visiting celtic homes and they want to bring out the heads of slain enemies you know that they've kept in a chest you know soaked in cedar oil so everything stays nice and pristine and you can still recognize the features

And they have found, by the way, the archaeology has shown that there are these, for example, pillars that they find with little cubby holes with skulls still in some of them, by the way, and little hangers to to affix the skull to the back of these things. I mean, this may be a religious thing, but to the settled people cutting the heads off people, keeping them and adorning your temples and whatnot with heads, that's just freaky.

And was even then, by the way. Posidonia says he would get used to it after a while, but never quite got comfortable with people treating human heads the way some people treat, you know, the antlers of that deer they shot last fall. Put it up on the wall, mount it with a name tag underneath it, talk to it sometimes. Always give that great story about how you killed this dude.

I should also point out that besides the religious significance of the heads, Caesar says that the Gauls believed in the theory of reincarnation, sort of maybe you could call it. It was similar to what a major philosophical group in Greece always believed. But the Gauls kind of believe that when you die in this world, you're just born into the other one. And then when you die in the other one, you're just born back into this one. I think I understood that correctly.

caesar says that this is part of the reason why they're so fearless in battle because instead of being worried about having your existence snuffed out and you're just you know in oblivion you're just going to be born in the next world just to avoid confusion by the way because it can be very confusing the terms gaul and celt are used by the ancient sources in a way where it's impossible not to get everything confused archaeologist john collis has a whole rundown of the various ways you can interpret this the most common way is the way we're going to do it

We're going to assume that when we say Celt, we mean Celtic people across the width and breadth of areas that have Celtic language and culture. If we say Gauls, we specifically mean the Celts in, you know, ancient Gaul, modern day France, et cetera, et cetera.

They are like all these Northwestern European barbarian types. White, they are strong, they are tall, especially to all the peoples writing in the Mediterranean. They always look tall. They might have only been like six feet if we could go back in a time machine. But if that's five or six inches taller than your average Mediterranean type, it's still like fighting giants in battle, isn't it?

And that's what made fighting these Celtic peoples, you know, scary too. It's not just their enormous numbers, according to the ancient authors. But listen, if you're in a 21st century army, and I tell you, listen, we're going to go to battle, we're going to fight another 21st century army, and oh, by the way, everyone in that army is six inches taller than all of us. You might think to yourself, dang, that doesn't sound so good. I don't like the sound of that. At the same time, you know, you realize...

seven foot tall people or whatever they are go down from bullets and shellfire and bombs just like shorter people do so it's not that big of a deal but in the ancient world when you say you're going to fight an army of people that is on average five inches taller and proportionately stronger to all the rest of us when you're doing that in a hand-to-hand sense it can make a huge difference

The Celtic people were scary, and they had scared Rome before. And all the modern historians point out that this was somehow a scar that ran through the Roman psyche, so that even after the Celts really weren't that dangerous to the Romans anymore, they still felt the memory of lion attacks a long time ago and never quite got over them. You know, if you look at Roman history, there are a couple of famous dates.

One of them is 410 AD, right? The famous fall of Rome to the Germanic barbarians. A lot of people like to make that the exclamation point of the end of the Western Roman Empire. Always debatable, of course.

But the reason it's such a big deal is basically Rome had been on a huge winning streak. The Joe DiMaggio hitting streak of, you know, ancient runs in the sense that Rome hadn't been sacked by a foreign conqueror in almost a thousand years, right? That's a pretty big deal in the ancient world. The last time, though, that they were sacked, it was these Celtic people that did it. And the Romans never forgot it. And there's a famous phrase that sort of

sums up the whole period and i've always wondered if the ancient author writing when the roman empire was around kicking everybody's butt didn't have a sly reason for putting it in there pointing out that you know if the celts could say that back then well we can live by those same rules the line was vivictus or why victus and the translation usually used is woe to the vanquished because that's what happened to the romans famously

as a day forever after remembered as an inauspicious day in Rome, July 18th. The first Celtic army that the Romans had ever encountered, supposedly, in their history, bore down on the city itself and were coming at speed to a Rome completely unprepared to meet them. There are a bunch of different ancient historians who have written an account of what happened here,

And Livy is, of course, the most famous, most romantic, and goes into the most detail about this interesting battle where, you know, I love ancient battles, and you try to recreate what happened. And it's kind of impossible. I mean, people do their best, but the physics of the whole thing are just not understood. And ideas and concepts go in and out of fashion as to what really happened. But there are elements of humanity on an individual level

Things like fear and intimidation and very hard to quantify sides of human beings that are part of when you take those things collectively, right? What does fear do when you magnify it, you know, into a whole group of people as opposed to one individual?

This is the parts of human history that make history hard to turn into any kind of hard science. Because how do you quantify things like that? How do you say that one side in a battle was more scared than another side in a battle and that that's what made the difference? Or that one side was tougher and that's what made the difference? Because clearly the ancient writers, and let's be honest, historians writing even 50, 100 years ago had no problem saying this. But when you need evidence to prove it,

there are certain parts of humanity infused into history that you just can't quantify i mean the most logical way if you want to follow the sources anyway especially livy to view this battle that's about to happen when the romans and the celtic armies first clash supposedly is to say that the romans were terrified

And that 2,300 plus years later, it actually seeps through. You know, can you imagine that you could walk up to one of them that day and say, listen, as afraid as you are, it'll be recorded and people thousands of years from now will know how scared you are of this alien people coming down from the north. Alien's a key word, too. So you add the fact that these are

obviously big people but the entire look and feel of them has an alien quality that just is scary and understand barbarians are always scary

to settled societies, not just scary, sometimes a little sexy. You can see styles that catch on, like in Rome, they'll start wearing those tight German pants that the barbarians wear. I mean, there's, there's a certain element to them that's a little Clint Eastwood at times. Um, but you know, I like to think that there's a barbarian scale, one to 10, one being most barbaric, 10 being one step away from being a Roman with a mustache, you know? Um, and,

And so it depends on where you are. The really cool barbarians walking around Rome in leather jackets, you know, they're more like a nine or a ten on the scale. If they get drunk, they could hurt somebody, but otherwise they're pretty well behaved. You take a one or a two and put them in there and they're going to be like a bull on a china shop.

And that in 390 or 387 BCE is what the Romans are facing on the opposite side of the battlefield. And by the time they get there, according to Livy, the battlefield's already swarming with these people. So you don't even have time to get your lines all straight and everything all figured out. Okay, let's brace ourselves. You are essentially having an encounter battle with a Celtic army heading down toward Rome. And it's about 11 miles away from the city.

In all fairness, this is not the Roman Empire or even the Romans of the Julius Caesar era that we normally think of, those terrible badasses that are absolutely frightful. This is a militia army. And at this battle, it's also about half of it is just the citizens, a citizen sort of raising. So you have your militia farmers who do all your fighting for you anyway. And then you have townsfolk and other people.

But it's an emergency, and it happened so quickly there was no time, and so they raised this army hastily. Rome at this time is merely a city in Italy, probably the predominant city, but they just had a long conflict with an archenemy, a Truscan city that they had just recently defeated, and it was only like 10 miles from the city of Rome, so you could see the small scale they're operating on in this era, but this early Roman army of militia and sort of a citizen army

contingent as well meets this army of huge tall extremely scary barbarians and we are told it takes little time before they are fleeing in abject terror livy seems to say pretty openly that he thinks the commander of the romans at this battle was incompetent he makes the celtic commander out to be pretty darn good

no one knows how many people died at this battle that will be called the battle of the alia or the battle of the alia river and no one knows how many people fought there either and there are all kinds of different estimates the low ones are probably right though because in this time period i know it's hard to imagine this but rome is a true city state

probably only controls maybe 30 miles around the city, somewhere in that area. I mean, so this is a really small scale, very early version of Rome. They probably didn't have too many soldiers to defend them. The problem is, is regardless of how many of those soldiers there were, they weren't there anymore after that battle, which means Rome is totally undefended and a panic sets in in the city, we're told.

People stream out of it and the religious artifacts are evacuated and these terrible choices we are told are made. You know, this reminds you of the list of what you would be prepared to die for. We are told by residents in the city where the fighting men are going to be separated from the useless mouths, including women and young people and old people, you know, to be the ones who defend the center citadel of the city. I mean, it's this story of impending doom, right?

My favorite piece of Livy, maybe in its entirety, though, is what happens when the Gauls, the Celtic people, the army, the first army that the Romans supposedly had encountered of these alien northerners, shows up outside the gates of Rome and they're open. The city seems both deserted and simply left unlocked and unguarded.

And Livy paints a picture of a scene that's like something out of the Twilight Zone. You have these maybe superstitious natives. Like I said, they're often portrayed very similarly to how you would see, you know, the Native Americans or African tribesmen as somehow extremely superstitious and both savage and skittish and unpredictable and childlike. I mean, it's these interesting stereotypes.

but here's the story that livy paints and it involves the great old men of rome from another time the ancient ones who are still around with long beards as he says after the fashion of their day

They're neither useless mouths nor able to fight in the citadel. So they decide, Livy says, that they're going to set an example by simply sacrificing their lives in the hopes that that somehow maybe helps things with the gods or whatnot. He says these generals from the past who celebrated triumphs a long time ago and these senators and august people who are now the elders in society put on their most elaborate and decorated robes of higher office clothes

went to their homes in the posh section of rome and sat in their chairs of high office their ivory chairs and waited like silent statues for death to find them here's how livy describes the celts coming into the city of rome and it's like a ghost town with the gates open and they don't know what to do and they freak out a little bit and then an incident happens that's wild

that touches off the forest fire of Gallic impetuosity. This, by the way, from the Aubrey de Selincourt translation. Here's what Livy writes, quote,

A night having passed without action, the Gauls found their lust for fighting much abated. At no time had they met with any serious resistance, and there was no need now to take the city by assault. When therefore they entered on the following day, it was coolly and calmly enough. The Colleen Gate was open, and they made their way to the Forum, looking with curiosity at the temples and at the Citadel, the only place to give an impression of a city at war.

They left a reasonably strong guard in case of attack from the fortified heights, and then dispersed in search of plunder, finding the streets empty. Crowds of them broke into the first houses they came to. Others went farther afield, presuming, supposedly, that buildings more remote from the forum would offer richer prizes.

"'But there the very silence and solitude made them uneasy, "'separated as they were from their companions, "'and suggested the possibility of a trap. "'So they soon returned, keeping close together, "'to the neighborhood of the Forum. "'Here they found the humbler houses locked and barred, "'but the mansions of the nobility open. "'The former they were ready to break into, "'but it was a long time before they could bring themselves to enter the latter. "'Something akin to awe held them back at what met their gaze.'

those figures seated in the open courtyards the robes and decorations august beyond reckoning the majesty expressed in those grave calm eyes like the majesty of gods

They might have been statues in some holy place, and for a while the Gallic warriors stood entranced. Then, on an impulse, one of them touched the beard of a certain Marcus Papirius. It was long, as was the fashion of those days, and the Romans struck him on the head with his ivory staff. That was the beginning. The barbarian flamed into anger and killed him."

And the others were butchered where they sat. From that moment, no mercy was shown. Houses were ransacked and the empty shells set on fire, end quote. Whether or not that happened, that's a pretty cool and interesting scene. And a romantic and super Roman patriot like Livy probably saw it that way too. Nonetheless, who knows what sources he was working from.

As the story goes on, basically, the Gauls sack Rome, set fire to a bunch of it, and start this siege because they can't take the fortified citadel in the middle.

The ancient sources differ on what happens next. But the famous story is that a siege develops. Both sides want to call the siege off. They come to an agreement, 1,000 pounds of gold, right? If the Romans will pay 1,000 pounds of gold, the Gauls will leave. And then as they're weighing the gold out, one of the Romans famously complains that the weights have been doctored with and the Gauls are falsifying the weights to their advantage.

And the king of this tribe walks up to the scale, takes his big heavy sword, throws it on the Gaul side of the scale, and says, woe to the vanquished. Meaning, what are you going to do if the weights are loaded in our favor? You lost. Pay up. Now, I was reading a fantastic book on early Rome called War and Society in Early Rome by Jeremy Armstrong.

And he floats an idea that a lot of others have floated to, the idea that basically it's this conquering and sacking of the city of Rome, you know, a thousand years almost before the next time that they will do it, that will create the Rome we all know. What's that line from the Batman series where the Joker says to him, you made me?

It's the same thing we said with this woe to the vanquished line that Livy throws in, right? It's almost like the Romans hundreds of years later saying, hey, you set the rules. So we're playing by them. Woe to the vanquished. This isn't genocide what we're doing in Celtic land when Julius Caesar conquers all these tribes. This is playing by the rules that you set up when you first conquered us. You made me.

And Armstrong points out that the actual sacking of Rome may not have been too terrible because the archaeological evidence doesn't seem to support some, you know, terrible Carthaginian solution type burning to the ground or anything. But for the Romans, that probably wasn't the problem. It was probably a lot more what a lot of the writers who write about the Romans quite a bit point out, that they have this

inability to accept defeat and humiliation and whereas most people probably would write something off and move along with their lives the romans fester and focus on things and remember old slights and wounds and the psychological seeds for that if not planted may have been heavily watered as a result of roman experience after losing to supposedly this first celtic army they ever fought at the battle of the alia and then seeing their city sacked by them

By the way, I should point out, because I think it's cool, that the old idea that this is a tribe of Celtic people that has shown up to sack Rome is challenged by a lot of historians. And there's people on both sides who suggest that the evidence shows that this may have been a group of hired mercenaries instead that had been hired by a ruler on the modern day island of Sicily to fight with him.

and that Rome was just on the way, and what the heck, we'll sack it, pick up a couple of extra bucks to eat on the way, you know, while we're doing it. So this idea that what we have here is a tribe may be wrong. And it's kind of important because when Caesar's conquering Gaul hundreds of years later, they'll be talking about, yeah, that tribe over there, those are the ones that, you know, sacked our country 340 years ago. Hmm, those Romans have long memories.

Unfortunately, not just for the Celts, but for everyone. And it's worth pointing out that, you know, in 390, when this battle happens, the Celtic peoples of Europe are very powerful and they're all over the place. And who they are is a great question. Once upon a time when it was easy to classify these things in ways that sounded easy to understand, but now seem totally ridiculous. They were a race.

Celts were a race like Anglo-Saxons were a race, right? I mean, all these, you divide the world into the different racial groups, and these are the yellow people, and these are the black people, and these are the white people. I mean, 100 years ago, you open up a history book, and that's how they do it. As the complexities mounted, and that whole way of looking at things went out of fashion, 50 years ago, 40 years ago, the Celts are an ethnic group, or a people.

That's how I grew up reading a guy like Michael Grant who, like everyone else, sort of insinuated most of the time that these Celtic people were probably all related by blood. Those people that sacked Rome in 390 BCE are the ancestors of the people in Ireland, you know, 500 years later or today.

Nowadays, that's a pretty tough argument to make given the way it's seen amongst most of the experts. And I don't mean to speak for them because they're, I mean, this Celtic study stuff is fascinatingly debatable. And the passion with which the experts go at it is fun to watch from the sidelines. But it means you have to be really careful. And there are a lot of people out there who are very passionate about their view of who a Celt is and who is not a Celt.

I love the way Barry Cunliffe, who we mentioned earlier, puts it because it gets me out of all kinds of trouble to say it the way he said it. He said a Celt is a person who believes him or herself to be Celtic. I thought of a T-shirt that I should market. I'm going to make it green, of course. And I'm going to say Celtic. It's not a nationality. It's a way of life.

But the point is the same. The modern view of a lot of the experts on this, and they're archaeologists, linguists, historians, I mean, they all kind of look at this and differ, is that what we're looking at here is a culture, a shared culture and similar language, maybe, like blue jeans, you know, rock and roll and beer drinking. I mean, it's something that spread sort of in prehistory to a bunch of different peoples, the foundation of which might have been in place since the last ice age, if you think about it.

And then over time, succeeding waves of people and immigrants and in marrying and all that adds layers of spice to the original. But when they do DNA test today, it's hard to not find lots of people who have been there since lots of DNA strands that have been there for a very long time, much earlier than the Celtic era in history. In fact, maybe you could look at the entire Celtic period in ancient history in Europe as a fashion trend.

era right it's the era of bell-bottoms in europe i mean this is an era where a certain culture dominated if you go 3 000 years before it's not there and after caesar it's mortally wounded but truthfully even if caesar is the one you could say mortally wounds the celtic culture the romans have been like kryptonite to this culture for a couple hundred years before caesar

I mean, if you look at a map of where Celtic culture predominates at the time that story happened, we just told you the sack of Rome in 390 BCE and where it is after Caesar does what Caesar does, it's some kind of terrible ethnic cleansing. I mean, the Celtic culture stretch all the way from Portugal on one side. Well, I was going to say to the Balkans, but truthfully, there was a tribe or a group of tribes that went all the way into modern day Turkey. They were called the Galatians.

And they're famous because a couple hundred years after they settle down and go from a 1 or a 2 on the Dan Carlin tribal scale, they're up to a 9 or a 10, and St. Paul will be writing his famous letter to the Galatians.

They have found Celtic cultural remains up as far north as like Poland, all around the Hungarian plains, southern Germany, modern Austria, all the way into northern Italy, which is a real Celtic country for a while. And then, of course, all of modern day France. And whether or not the British Isles and Ireland should fall into this, anybody's guess.

A lot of people argue, and let's remember before you send me an angry letter, a Celt is a person who believes him or herself to be Celtic, right? That's my get-out-of-jail-free card. I love the way, you know, Diodorus, though, Diodorus Siculus describes the Celts. And by the way, most of these accounts come from the same guy, supposedly, the eyewitness accounts of a person who was an expert in many different subjects, one of the great figures of the ancient world whose writings have not come down to us, a guy named Posidonius.

But we don't have his exact work. What we have is whatever he wrote down and put into the local libraries, everybody else used. So,

So we have his eyewitness accounts as told through a bunch of other different people. For example, Diodorus Siculus, who says of these Celtic peoples describing an ancient culture, something National Geographic today would certainly be cataloging all the time. See, that's who Posidonius is. He's the National Geographic explorer of his day. And through Diodorus Siculus, we hear supposedly what Posidonius saw when he visited Celts. Diodorus writes, quote,

The Gauls are tall of body, with rippling muscles and white of skin, and their hair is blonde, and not only naturally so, but they also make it their practice by artificial means to increase the distinguishing color which nature has given it, for they are always washing their hair in lime water, and they pull it back from the forehead to the top of the head and back to the nape of the neck, with the result that their appearance is like that of satyrs and pans.

since the treatment of their hair makes it so heavy and coarse that it differs in no respect from the mane of horses. Some of them shave their beard, but others let it grow a little, and the nobles shave their cheeks, but they let the mustache grow until it covers the mouth."

If you haven't looked at the wonderful art, the Pergamene art that includes this figure called the Dying Gaul, go take a look at it because it's beautiful. But it describes sort of maybe a stereotype, but maybe not the classic look of these people, the warriors anyway, as just described by Diodorus.

They looked like punk rockers, first of all, with the haircut. And you have to imagine the bleach blonde hair that he just described there, because that's what the limewater would have done to it. Bleached it like bleach blonde hair. And if you've ever had, like I have before, the bleach blonde hair, it gets all horse mane-like after a while. So this figure in the art is sitting there with like wounds in its side. And remember, it's statue stone color. So you have no colors, but you can see the blood dripping down and he's holding his wounds and the broken, I think it's a broken sword by his side,

He's also got a mustache, though. That's not very punk at the time. But the punk haircut, the mustache, and the build is interesting because, you know, it's the difference between the modern weightlifting muscles today and the life natural muscles. But he's muscular but also sort of sinewy and long. And there was actually, the ancient sources say that at least in the period we're talking about, a lot of these Celtic tribes had rules. And they would fine warriors if your belly was,

drooped over your beltline so they were required sort of to be in shape supposedly this guy is heroically nude as it's called and it's hard to figure out because the romans like portraying barbarians as heroically nude but they sometimes like portraying themselves heroically nude so it's hard to figure out what's a convention and what's real and this may have had religious overtones or other things going on nonetheless some historical evidence to back up the heroically nude concept

But there are multiple incidents that talk about Celtic warriors, especially select groups of Celtic warriors stripping off all their clothes and fighting absolutely nude except for a gold torque around the neck, which is just like a giant armlet or anklet or something, I guess you would describe it. So he's got no clothes on. He's got the punk haircut. He's got the mustache. He looks about six foot five, about 200 pounds of raw muscle and, you know, naked with the torque around his neck.

I'm sorry, visually, it's striking and cool. And if not naked, then you get those wonderful Celtic fashions, right? Supposedly the striped clothing, the checked clothing, what we would call today the plaid clothing.

They are wonderfully colorful, interesting, cool people. Add to that the women. See, the Celtic women, once again, we get absolutely shafted by the fact that these Celts did not leave a historical written record that we could get their views on things. And historians have to scrap and try to find any little piece that might help us to understand their personality better in their own words as opposed to hearing from people who often despised them, certainly belittled them.

but i mean they thought for example in the mediterranean that celtic women were beautiful but i guess you could say maybe the way that you described them today is their attitudes were that they were also uppity and somewhat ferocious i think sometimes in the descriptions it reminds me of the old stereotype and it's an old one now of the housewife and the henpecked husband and the housewife was kind of burly and had a rolling pin in her hand and would smack the husband upside the head sometimes with it um

Among some of the people out there that are sort of the people that think of the Celts as sort of a new age kind of thing, there's a view out there that women were equal to men in these societies. And Barry Cunliffe, among others, said that that's a misperception because they're only more free than women in the Mediterranean are, for example, Greek and Roman women by comparison.

So maybe a bit uppity by Greek and Roman standards, but as Cunliffe points out, the husband still has the power of life and death over his wife. The law in most of these places allows the wife to be tortured to find out how a husband died. So not exactly equal rights, but maybe a bit uppity by Cunliffe.

mediterranean standards i will say that the ancient sources talk about these women as every bit as tall and strong and athletic as the men they talk about a society where there's more sexual freedom and these women have more freedom to be what the greeks and romans would consider to be promiscuous certainly there are famous celtic women warriors maybe the most famous ever the warrior queen buddhica from the british tribes

And remember, these stories may not be true, but they're playing to an audience and their stereotypes. So if I told you this story about a particular Celtic woman and you heard it and you said something like, yep, that sounds like what these Celtic women are like. Be careful. Don't marry a Celt. And there you go. I mean, it's a stereotype. One wonders how much of that is true, but that's the image.

And by the way, you think of a fiery Irish redhead today in the stereotypes. I mean, when I grew up, this is Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man. Just give her a bow and arrow and an axe or a maybe rolling pin and stay out of her way. She could probably kick the hell out of you. One of my favorite stories about Celtic women is the one about Chiamara or Chiamara is probably closer to the right way to pronounce it.

She was a noble woman, not a queen or anything, but a noble woman of a Galatian tribe. And when her tribe was conquered by the Romans, she became a prisoner. And here's the way Diodorus tells the story of Chiamara and her husband, Ortaigon. And, well, I mean, the end message is clear, right? First of all, the audience would listen to this and go, yep, that sounds like a Celtic woman to me. The second one is they are not to be trifled with, obviously.

Theodorus writes, this by the way, the C.H. Oldfather translation, quote, "'Kiomara, the wife of Ortaigon, was captured along with the other Galatian women when the Romans under Gnaeus Manlius conquered the Asiatic Galatians. The centurion responsible for her took advantage of his soldierly power and raped her. This man was an ignorant beast who loved both pleasure and money, but in the end his love of money won out."

With a large ransom having been agreed upon, he led her to a certain river, across from agents of her own people. The Galatians crossed over and gave him the money, but after they did so, Keomara signaled them to strike down the centurion as he was making a friendly farewell. One of her countrymen obeyed and cut off his head. She took the head, wrapped it in her cloak, and went home. When she returned to her husband, she threw the head down at his feet.

or tyagon was amazed and said my wife it is important to deal honorably yes she said but it is more important that only one man who has slept with me should remain alive end quote dang those celtic women are fierce the sack of rome by the celtic peoples is 300 more than 300 years before the time period that this story is about to take place in and a lot has changed

Many of the Celtic groups in other parts of Europe have been pacified, might be the way Caesar would put it, brought under Roman control, their ability to break out and cause destruction in nearby communities curtailed because if you look at the history of the Celts right after that battle of the Aelia where Rome is sacked, that's sort of their debut on the historical stage.

I like the way H.G. Wells put it. He says that the northern people came down into the light of history for the first time with the Celts. Peter Beresford Ellis puts it this way. He says the Celts were the first European people north of the Alps to emerge into recorded history. Okay, but that emergence comes at the head of armies, and those armies broke into various parts of Europe and caused wide-scale problems for centuries.

In 275, they went down there, smashed into Greece and caused all kinds of problems. The Romans would fight them over and over and over again in various places, winning most, losing some. There would be a big battle that crushed Celtic power in a whole region called the Battle of Telamon in 225 BCE. And that one, the famous accounts say that the problem for the Celts was that they got trapped between two Roman armies coming from different directions.

And the highlight of the battle, if you like these sorts of things, is the Celtic army supposedly, if you believe the ancient sources, turning back to back so they could face both armies attacking them at the same time, ferociously falling, basically, you know, almost wiped out.

then when hannibal and his carthaginians happen and all these great wars for survival you know the ancient version of world war ii breaks out those of course being the world famous punic wars of which there were three the celtic peoples for the most part but not exclusively that are anywhere nearby side with hannibal and look at it as a good way to get back at those romans which just makes them seem more dangerous treacherous and unreliable to the romans

after Hannibal's invasion of Italy is beaten back you get a hundred years of Roman conflict with various Celtic peoples they will play the lead role but not necessarily the only one in eliminating Galatian freedom in Asia Minor in that area in the Balkans also although the Galatians had made a lot of enemies and the Romans had plenty of help

most famously from one of the kings fighting the Galatians, where he invited the entire Galatian leadership, supposedly, anyway, this is the story, invites the Galatian leadership to dinner and then massacres them all while they're eating. That's a good way to devastate the command and control of your enemies. The Celtic peoples of northern Italy are defeated and absorbed by the Romans, and that area will become so Roman so quickly they'll start calling that toga-wearing Gaul.

The Romans will be forced, basically, that's how they would look at it, to conquer a nice chunk of the south of France from the Celtic peoples there.

because it controls access road access to spain and they have to get to spain now because after the second punic war they're left there with a lot of really ferocious tribes of several different cultures by the way some are celtic but some aren't some are supposedly a mix i mean what do you get when you cross a celt with an iberian a celtiberian or a celtiberian

Nonetheless, the Romans will get involved in a war there that one might compare to a 200-year-long Vietnam War, guerrilla fighting, atrocities, wholesale massacres, and the disillusionment of some in Rome to this ongoing commitment that they had signed up for that was just draining them. In about the year 115 BCE, which is about 15 years before Julius Caesar's birth,

some tribes appear from the north seemingly out of nowhere their origins are not understood even today by the way but their numbers are reportedly outrageously large once again we could filter out all of the exaggerations that have happened at the time and since and still come to what we must suspect is a larger than normal number since it's one of the main things that's pointed out continually

arguments persist on whether or not these people should be called germanic or celtic or a mix of the two because a lot of times where different early european cultures come together there's like a cultural estuary between them where they mix we already talked about celtabarians or celtabarians you could have celto germans celto thracians

Barry Cunliffe is one of those people that keeps trying to point out two things about talking about Celtic people. One, they're different all over the place. Celtic peoples existing in what's now, you know, the modern day area around the Adriatic are not necessarily going to be very much like the ones near modern day Portugal.

except that they're all kind of Celtic with local variations and also that time is elapsing this idea that barbarians so-called barbarians are stuck in neutral in terms of civilizational or political organizational development is wrong too they're all in different spots on the scale and all evolving and changing at different speeds some of it based on how close you are to more sophisticated civilizations in this case the

These peoples that come down about 115 BCE are always sort of portrayed as a one on the Dan Carlin tribal scale. I mean, the most barbarian of the barbarian types, and there's hundreds of thousands of them. Now, if you think about this as a national security problem for the Romans, it's interesting because even today...

If you could somehow sneak, let's just play with 200,000 as a round number, 200,000 hostile people right on the border of the United States so that when we wake up one morning, there they are, or they're there in a very short period of time, that would still be a major crisis today, if that's how many people we're talking about in this earlier era.

I don't know how they fed them, but you could certainly see how you would have a situation on your hands where the first thing you thought of is, where did these people come from? The second thing you thought of is, what are we going to do about them? And the third thing you thought of is, how do we prevent this from happening again if we don't know what's to the north of us, right? We conquered everything next to us, thought we had a buffer zone, and then these people from the north that we didn't even know about come in and smash right through our buffer zone and threaten Rome itself.

Between the years 115 and about 100 BCE, these Teutons and Cimbri and related tribes, as they're called, destroyed Roman army after Roman army. I think the final grand total is something like four Roman armies. They scare the heck out of everybody.

They march around seemingly going where they want to go and doing what they want to do, raiding here and there, into Roman territory, out of Roman territory, go to Spain for a couple of years, head on back to Italy. Finally, in desperation, the Romans put this guy in command who had just finished mopping up guerrilla warfare problems in what's now North Africa, a famous person in the entire Roman story named Gaius Marius. Gaius Marius.

marius by the way is the uncle by marriage of julius caesar he's a major player in the final stages of the death throes of the roman republic that begin to accelerate and pick up speed with his appearance on the scene one of the things that marius famously does before he fights these peoples that have already destroyed four roman armies is change the roman army one of the benchmarks in roman military history is something called the marian reforms

Now, to be fair, I've seen some writings out there and some thinking that the guy gets way too much credit for this, for what he did, because what he did, these people would say, was simply codify and formally institutionalize practices the Romans had been doing on an ad hoc basis, improvisationally for decades, filling needs as they came up any way they could. And now Marius was basically saying, oh, you know, those things we're doing to fill those needs, let's just make that how we do it.

nonetheless i'd say most people still give caius marius a ton of credit for taking the roman the late roman republican army and let's be honest and call it what it is turning it into the roman the first roman imperial army because it has imperial problems and trying to deal with imperial problems with a republican army has been killing it now for some time and damaging society too in spin-off ways

Marius opens up allegiance to everybody. It's no longer based on how much land you own, a farm, your wealth, anything like that. And these people don't go home. They're professionals. It's a permanent army. Now, what this does is completely change the institutional memory of the force. And this is something most people don't think about. But I mean, the thing you lose the most when you send the citizen army back home because the war is over is so much of what you learned.

and the cohesion that you gained from training together. I mean, how much math does your kid forget over the school summer, right? Now magnify that times a thousand. I mean, by keeping an army together all the time, building experience as units, drilling continually and not stopping, you are building capability and institutional memory so that five years from now, your cohort is going to be that much better.

These Roman armies are a huge leap forward in terms of effectiveness, what they could do on the field, and how much they outclassed the competition. He then took this new model army out and proceeded to butcher, over the course of a couple years, both those tribes and their subsidiary friends that they brought with them.

The butchery is supposed to be intense. After all, if you have these massive numbers of people which made these people so particularly dangerous to begin with, what happens to all of them if you don't kill them? Bellum Romanum, right? War the way the Romans did it against people they considered to be barbarian.

I read one story that said that some of the survivors of one of these battles were more than 100,000 were supposed to have been left dead on the battlefield. They ran to a nearby Celtic tribe for sanctuary and the Romans pursued him and told the Celts to turn him over. And when the Celts turned him over, they butchered him on the spot.

After one of these battles, supposedly, the peace terms for some of the people that were left over were that 300 of their married wives had to be sold to the Romans as slavery. And in a famous story, the wives reportedly strangled each other to avoid that fate. Now, at the time that Chias Marius is destroying these Germanic or Celtic or Celto-Germanic tribespeople, Caesar's being born.

That's the time frame here. So that by the time Caesar is an adult, mature man trying to argue about, you know, what you do about this problem we have with barbarians north of us, he's able, as are many other generals and politicians, to make use of this deep-seated fear that the Romans have about a potential invasion from the north, one that goes all the way back to the sack of Rome in 390. Here's the way historian Nick Fields writes.

explains what the memory of the kimberi and the two-tone invasion a generation before meant to somebody trying to exploit fears in the rome of the 50s bce he writes quote

The vivid memory of the near disaster remained, however, and served as a frightening reminder to Rome that a new northern barbarian threat could suddenly emerge at any time. Barbarian migrations were the stuff of Roman nightmares, and Caesar made good use of it by playing up the, quote, end quote, Germanic menace in his writings. More to the point, he

he writes, he also had the wit to revive fears of the Gauls that dated from the sack of Rome in 390 BCE and advertised them as a race without civilization who were not above burning alive their prisoners of war, end quote. So in effect, the near disaster against these tribes peoples that were sprung on the Romans unexpectedly was

was to deepen, widen, and reopen a scar that maybe you could say had been a piece of the Roman psychological reality since at least 390 BCE. And, you know, as early Roman writers kind of said, there's a belief that Rome sort of conquered an empire in self-defense. I think it was Livy who originally threw a version of that line out there, conquering the world in self-defense.

But as other historians have pointed out, I read one that he got a great line. He pointed out that, look, Rome is looking for secure borders and security. And the problem is, is that every time they conquer a new unstable region and pacify it, thinking that, OK, now we're safe over there, they inadvertently create a new frontier. Whatever the kingdom they just conquered, you know, whatever their neighbor was is now Rome's neighbor. And it's another unstable frontier. So they keep getting sucked

farther away from the center as they continually try to make sure that they're safe not sure i buy that there's a whole lot of wealth and money and all kinds of other things involved here that explain things at least as well as the idea that we're just trying to be safe but if i were a super roman patriot like livy maybe that's how i would defend the conquest of the world myself we're just trying to be safe anybody do it but truthfully the biggest threat to rome

in the 50s when caesar is a mature man playing his role in the decline and fall of the roman republic the biggest danger to rome is no outside force it's inside it's tearing itself apart and reaching the boiling point in a story that is well known and impacts this story only obliquely but if you believe caesar and by the way there's some confirmation from cicero and some other places that

rome's not the only place reaching the political boiling point with instability looming apparently gaul's in terrible shape that way as well in sixty three sixty two or sixty one b c e

a member of one of the more powerful, influential Gallic tribes, a tribe which, by the way, is a friend of the Roman people. That's their diplomatic designation. So they're kind of like allies. Shows up to inform the Roman Senate about something that's been going on deeply in the heartland of his territory. Because the Romans don't always know. They know what's going on in nearby Gaul, but sometimes you get to the barbarian heartland and they find out when people tell them, and that's what this guy is there to do.

His name is Devicacius, and he is, we are told, about the closest thing I'm ever going to find in a historical situation to King Arthur's Merlin. We are told that Devicacius is a druid and that he can see the future. Now, a little side note here. The druids are one of the wonderfully famous...

very compelling sides of the whole celtic culture it's connected to the religious side and they have been called all sorts of things generally thought of to be the priests of the celtic religion but so many other titles and positions are mentioned on the good side the admirable side the civilized side you'll hear them called teachers

supposedly you were not allowed to write down druidic knowledge and so it was 20 years of study for an acolyte to become a druid they're a little like philosophers too and as a matter of fact cicero i think he calls him a philosopher philosophy though is something that's often attributed to them this is celtic philosophy they are also called judges and that for example if you have a murder trial or something going on you will take it to a druid for adjudication

Most of the modern archaeologists and people like that that I've read seem to think it's a pretty good bet that the Druids are sort of the intellectual class of Gaul, if you will. They study things like astronomy, herb lore. They may be the oral traditionalists and historians of their people.

I've heard them called natural scientists before. And the magic that they're supposed to use, if indeed magic it is, is sort of nature magic, if you will. They're like Gandalf or Dumbledore, but it's all nature magic. Caesar and Cicero and the people who do mention druids seem to have quite a lot of respect for them. There is, of course, also the more lurid druids.

side of it where it's more akin to shaman and medicine men and maybe even witch doctors when you get to that stage they are supposedly the kind of people that if not conducting it are supposed to be there for legal reasons the human sacrifices that the Celts are supposed to participate in or at least once did unclear whether or not by Caesar's time they still do much of that although Caesar's the one that mentions the wicker man himself and

you've heard of that one haven't you the one where they build the giant hollow see-through wicker figure you know if they imagine something like 20 feet 30 feet tall wicker but with holes in it so you can see inside then they fill it with people caesar says they prefer criminals and convicts but they're not picky if they run out of those and then maybe throw in some other live animals and some hay and other combustibles and light the whole thing on fire

And supposedly the druids have to be around to witness that. Now, the thing you'll hear blamed on the druids or the class right below them is a certain form of divination where you stab somebody and then you look at the convulsions as they're dying. And that explains what's going on. The funny thing about the ancient world is,

is that the Romans can sit there and scoff at these barbarian superstitions and all that kind of stuff, you know, as the so-called superior culture looking down on the childlike superstitious natives. But then at the same time, make sure to point out that, listen, if you ever need a flock of birds analyzed for what the movements of the flock of birds means and how that foretells the future, the Celts are the best in the business at that. In other words, showing, you know, that one person's superstition is another person's magic and vice versa.

I remember getting a great piece of advice from one of my professors once in how to see the ancient world differently. Because we were talking about something, he said, "Well, what about the impact of magic?"

And it was long pause as my brain tried to figure out the proper answer to that. And I said, well, there's no such thing as magic. And he says, I know that. And you know that. But the people in this story didn't know that. And they believed otherwise. And because they believe these things to be real and true, it impacts reality because they act upon those beliefs.

I think he may have called it the Tinkerbell effect or something, but the idea was similar, that because you believe in this as reality, you base your moves and how you behave on that, and that that changes real history. Nonetheless, this guy, Deficitius, was there to explain to the Romans that a terrible battle had occurred in the deep, dark, barbarian country.

There must have been thousands upon thousands of these battles throughout history, don't you think? These ones that happened, you know, where great deeds were performed and amazing things occurred, but they happened in the deep darkness of prehistory somewhere between tribal people. You don't know anything about them unless somehow they come to light. Well, there's this battle that you can look up now that exists that's real called the Battle of Megatobriga. But you know about it because this guy, this druid, showed up to explain to the Romans that his people lost that battle.

It was against one of their traditional Celtic enemies. And again, we think of Native American tribes where there were just tribes that were longstanding enemies of each other, right? Longstanding. Crow and Lakota is a perfect example. Apache and Comanche. I mean, it didn't matter what you did. They would ally with an outside power to go against them rather than, you know, unite with their historic enemies. In this case,

It may have been a war that was over trade rights, like who could charge tolls on this area of a river. I mean, something really banal like that. But in this battle, the Celtic tribe fighting the Druid who showed up in Rome's people brought in outside help.

They had solicited the assistance of some Germans, we're told. Certainly some of these tribes that Caesar calls German. Although, let's be honest, the Roman ethnographers are a little bit sloppy and sometimes they just, eh, they're all Celts. They're all Celts to me. They all look the same, those barbarians.

nonetheless this is the story right they are germans and they come in and they tip the scales in favor of this other tribe leading to devikash's tribe getting decimated on the battlefield and if you believe him the nobility massacred so you lose basically your entire aristocratic class in the stroke of a sword or a bunch of swords

This Druid basically is pleading for help from his allies, the Romans, and pointing out that the entire area is destabilized because these Germans who came in to help this Celtic tribe decided that they don't want to leave. They like it in Gaul. They're going to stay. And that's causing a domino effect as they become the neighbors of all the Celtic people around them. All of a sudden,

Gaul seems extremely destabilized, and that could prove to be a very dangerous situation in Rome. It could also prove to be extremely profitable and a potential opportunity. In fact...

There's a way of looking at this story, and a lot of people do, that this is Julius Caesar's account of what's going on in Gaul, and making it seem like a destabilized national security threat is something that works out in his favor if he's trying to build a case for why he should go in and fix it all. And as far as theories about why it's broken in the first place, why are they having all this trouble?

destabilization well caesar has a theory and even though it's impossible to prove it's one of those lenses that you can look at this whole thing through that's rather interesting but it brings up other questions i'd like to point out that the only reason i'm qualified to discuss this is because i don't have a reputation as a historian to protect every now and then not being a historian works out in my favor doesn't it in this case it allows me to examine the

things that used to be valid theories once upon a time until they required things like you know supporting evidence for for valid theories once upon a time a historian could say listen caesar said this happened and without something that makes me think he's a liar i'm going to believe him if you do that here's how you can explain the instability in gall but remember this guy has a vested interest in convincing you that gall needs his help

But the way this story is told by Caesar and other earlier historians is that the reason the Celts are having some problems and that that whole area of Gaul, most of which is still outside of Roman control, is having problems is because slowly but surely, due to the infusion of, you know, Roman and Greek and Mediterranean luxuries and culture and whatever, these Celts are getting, for lack of a better word, soft. Right?

caesar by the way points to wine more than once as the leading softening agent involved here and actually says that some tribes prohibit the importation of italian wine for just that reason that it's known to take the edge off the celts were settled with the same reputation as drunkards that you often see associated with other tribal peoples native americans for example have had to live with that stereotype forever

Our friend Diodorus Siculus said this about them, this, by the way, the C.H. Oldfather translation of the work, quote,

The Gauls are crazy for wine and consume, unwatered, amazing amounts imported by merchants. Their unrestrained consumption often leads them to fall into a drunken stupor or sink into morose depression. Therefore, many Italian merchants see Gaul as the land of opportunity for quick riches. These traders bring the wine by boat on the rivers and by wagons through the plains and

In return, they make an amazing profit, for they receive a slave in return for each jar of wine they deliver. End quote. When I was growing up, there was a widespread belief among Native American groups themselves that the importation of alcohol had done damage to the traditional culture. It would not be surprising at all if that happened amongst the Gauls as well. And in the case of wine specifically, it's designed to take the edge off.

People drink it for that reason. Here's the problem. What if that edge is required to survive in a world that is basically dog-eat-dog in geopolitical terms? If only the strongest survives, what if you have your people survive

being impacted by your proximity to a luxury-filled culture nearby, who is weakening you in a way that will eventually cause you to lose everything to somebody. What if you're taking the edge off and the ferocious tribes next to you aren't? In this case, those tribes were called by the Romans the Germani.

often translated to germans today but whether or not they're related to modern day germans is just as contentious a discussion as whether or not celts are related to modern day peoples in the regions where they used to be but these germans are portrayed as like hyenas ready to pounce on any weak animal in the geopolitical herd they're portrayed as rough they're tough they're

they're nasty and they're interfering in the celtic world in a way that threatens if you believe caesar's account and of course his war commentaries are told from the point of view of darth vader and this is his excuse for getting involved in this whole thing is that these germans are destabilizing the whole region and this is what this druid comes to rome to say and he's asking for help and in a

And you want to have that Star Wars music start playing, the ominous kind, because Caesar's going to stop the warfare in the region. But he's going to do it in a way that you could easily make a case should be called the Celtic Holocaust. Now, the idea of any society getting soft is impossible to quantify. It falls into that category we discussed earlier about these human qualities that historians have to steer clear of because you can't make any sort of case. There's no data.

But a hundred years ago, the wonderful professorial military historian Hans Delbruck had no problem laying it out to you in a way that he treated as, you know, scientific. You couldn't say this today, but it sets up this, you know, fun idea I want to throw out there as the fool of history. A hundred years ago, actually back in 1908, I think it was, Delbruck wrote about this question of civilization versus barbarism in terms of the military pros and cons. He said, quote,

When modern peoples, he means the people in his era, 1908, come into conflict with barbarians, the outcome is determined from the start by the differences in weapons technology. In antiquity, this relationship was not so simple. Here we may wonder, he writes, in what manner the Roman military system was really superior to that of the barbarians.

vis-a-vis civilized people barbarians have the advantage of having at their disposal the warlike power of unbridled animal instincts of basic toughness civilization refines the human being he writes making him more sensitive and in doing so it decreases his military worth not only his bodily strength but also his physical courage

these natural shortcomings must be offset in some artificial way scharnhorst he writes was perhaps the first one to state that the main service of the standing army consisted of making civilized people through discipline capable of holding their own against the less civilized

If a given group of Romans, normally living as citizens or peasants, had been put up against a group of barbarians of the same number, the former would have undoubtedly have been defeated. In fact, they probably would have taken flight without fighting. It was only the formation of the close-knit tactical body of the cohorts that equalized this situation."

It's an old idea, right? That civilization allows you to compensate for what you lose when you give up that whole warrior society thing.

Now remember, the military trade-off for losing this barbarian edge is supposed to be, you know, the ability to control troops with officers and instill drill and organization and the logistical ability to concentrate, you know, food and supplies and keep armies in the field, all those wonderful benefits. But what if you get hit by

You know, when you've lost the barbarian edge part, but you haven't quite gained the benefits of civilization yet. What if you get hit when you're in transition at the vulnerable point between civilization

the two kinds of approaches. I mean, for example, have you ever heard what a beam sea is when your ship is beamed to the sea? It means a ship is getting hit broadside with the waves, and that's a really dangerous thing to have happen. You want to have your nose pointed or your stern pointed, but you don't want to be sideways onto big waves. But if you have to turn around in the sea, then there'll be that danger point when for a second you're side onto the waves. I wonder if one could make the case that

that some of these Celtic tribes in Gaul had been contacted by the Romans enough to be semi-civilized, which dulled their barbarian edge against their less civilized neighbors without yet providing the benefits that the more centralized, urbanized, state-like systems have. What if the Celts got caught in a beam sea?

And to be fair, this is not really my idea. My idea is a knockoff of the very one Caesar's proposing here, too. He's talking about the BMC idea in different terms. The problem is, is if you're trying to defend this from a historical viewpoint, how do you do it?

and there's no doubt at all that historians are a thousand percent right when they say that these are classic recurring themes in ancient literature that the audience expected absolutely correct but does that mean that you can automatically rule out all of them is what caesar says here so implausible and if so does caesar know it is he deliberately trying to lie to us or is he just misconstruing things because of his own biases from his own era

In any case, the BMC idea may not be quite originally mine. I'm just academically safe enough because I don't have any credentials at all to be able to suggest that maybe there's more to it than is often acknowledged these days.

caesar in his war commentaries explains several times that certain tribes used to be more feared and more tough and now weren't in other words implying that there is movement on the softness versus toughness scale

what he doesn't really tell us because maybe it's common knowledge is how advanced some of these gallic tribes were including the one that this druid defecitious came from this is the way historian adrian goalsworthy explains sort of the system in gaul which is hard to describe because it has so many different tribes and all these tribes are in different states of development in fact

the most advanced of them maybe shouldn't be called tribes at all but as goldworthy explains whether you call them states or tribes neither one of those words is a good translation for the latin that caesar uses here's the way goldsworthy puts the situation after he explains that gaul is essentially organized in tribes divided into clans but you could call some of them states quote

The basic political unit was the clan, and several of these usually made up a tribe. He gives the Latin word for both of them, by the way, and then he says that neither English word is entirely appropriate, and some scholars would prefer state to tribe, but no one has really come up with anything better. He then says, quote, The importance of the tribe seems to have increased markedly in the century before Caesar's arrival in Gaul, and some scholars would like to see them as comparatively recent inventions.

More probably, the changing political and economic climate in Gaul had simply given new importance to loose ties of kinship and ritual that were very long established. Even so, he writes...

The degree of unity between the clans of one tribe varied considerably, and there were a number of cases during the Gallic Wars when individual clans acted independently. Kings appear in some tribes, and perhaps also at the clan level, but not in others, and the majority, meaning the majority of these groups, seem to have been governed by councils or senates, with day-to-day running of affairs being placed in the hands of elected magistrates. Rome's oldest ally, the Aedui, which is

which is where this druid was from, had a supreme magistrate called the Virgibret, who held office for a single year. No man could be elected twice to this post, nor could any member of his family hold the office during his lifetime, thus preventing any individual or group from monopolizing power.

The similarity of this ideal to the Roman Republic system is striking, and in many ways, the tribes of Gaul resembled the city-states of the Mediterranean world, though perhaps at an earlier stage of development. End quote. That's a really good, concise way to explain that situation. And there are books written about Caesar's book.

and more on this in a second because that's what we're going to follow and get into, that describes his rationale for arguing about why we have to have this conflict against the Gauls now and why it has to be preemptive as opposed to waiting until they all attack us. And he says it's because Caesar is making the argument that some of these tribes are becoming more like us and we have to get them before they do because they're going to then combine, you know, the

war-like irrationality that they have now in their spirit with greater capability which by the way is a reason that some historians give for why the germanic peoples you know fast forward to the fall of rome will eventually be able to defeat the roman legions that they will learn enough fighting the romans over time and develop enough of a state-like system that they could truly be dangerous

Andrew M. Rigsby in his book, Caesar in Gaul and Rome, War and Words, points out that Caesar's argument in his book is that we have to get the Gauls now before they do precisely that. He says that in Caesar's work and as part of the propaganda, the people he calls Gauls and the people he calls Germans serve different purposes. Rigsby writes, quote,

in the same way the two northern groups are dangerous for complementary reasons in the case of the germans the problem is their fluidity a people who do not recognize boundaries social or geographic cannot be trusted to stay in their own territory and to not make war on the romans

With the Gauls, the problem is not randomness, but a more specific tendency to wage war. They are prone to fighting, both individually and collectively. Their temerity makes them unable to check violent impulses, even when that would be the prudent course of action.

Whatever the source of danger, the Romans will respond preemptively. As chapter 6 discusses, he writes, this is an important source of justification for military actions. Furthermore, the semi-civilized Gauls provide a special kind of threat. Their similarity to the Romans grows over the course of the work. If they are not conquered now, the threat will only increase. Hence, the preemptive strike is required now.

The characterization of both peoples, he writes, legitimizes their conquest. The specific nature of the Gauls makes them particularly attractive candidates, end quote. And why would Caesar want to conquer them? Ah, yes. That gets us to some of the problems that motivate this story, that push it along, that add the booster rockets to the whole thing, because Caesar

I mean, let's be honest. What's the likelihood that as Rome becomes more powerful, it doesn't absorb these tribal areas to their north? That's like saying that you could expect somehow, via treaties and good faith and everything else, the 13 U.S. colonies to have just stayed over where they were on the eastern seaboard and never advance into the native territory.

That's a what if that you can hardly even plausibly play with, right? I mean, what's the likelihood? Well, what's the likelihood that the Romans don't absorb these tribes to the north and conquer that territory? Because the money that is available in land, and let's not forget this because it's huge, slaves, is so tempting and Caesar's need is so great at this time that

that it's impossible to imagine that that giant pot of gold that is Gaul wouldn't be taken by somebody. And the attitude that these Romans had, and it's part of something we discussed in another program, this insane and yet wonderfully merit-based system where you claw your way to the top like it's a mafia crime family and only the strong survive, had created by this time in Roman history a

A three-headed monster. That's what the Romans called it. We know it as the first triumvirate today. And essentially what it is is a conspiracy. One of the great conspiracies in all world history. It is Caesar and the other two most powerful men in Rome and their allies essentially...

against the rest of the Roman government. And they are so powerful and they control so many people. And one of these guys in this three-headed monster is the richest man in Rome and he's spreading money everywhere. And that makes a huge difference that by this time period, as long as these three men, Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus agree on something, it's going to happen. And all three men want something. So all three men support each man getting what they want. What Caesar wants is a chance to conquer something.

He is the least grand at this time period of those three people. He doesn't have a whole lot of military conquest to his record or his name yet. And he owes so much money that at one point we're told he's not even allowed to leave Rome. The creditors basically grab him and say, either you're paying up or you're not going anywhere. And Crassus, one of the members of the three-headed monster, the rich guy, comes in and pays off the debt so Caesar can go and do what he needs to do, which is find a way to get the money to pay off the debts.

and also to spread it around in Rome to make more friends because these politicians, and that's what Caesar is, they're deadly politicians, they're politician generals, but spreading money around Rome, throwing games and all kinds of other things is how you get your name out there. And it's a large part of the reason why Caesar is in such great debt. And there's two ways of looking at the Gallic situation at the time. One is to say, uh,

uh-oh, there's all that land and all those slaves there for the taking. The Gauls seem vulnerable and the Germans are coming in and doing it. And the attitude being, if somebody's going to get that, it's going to be us. The other way of looking at it is that this whole idea of a German threat is part of a manufactured plot, a reason that provides Caesar with an excuse to go in there and scoop up all that wealth himself.

And to do so, right, for the glory and defense of Rome. This brings us to the actual war commentaries because we're going to have to rely on these. And yet, I mean, I'm not sure you could find, if you had to be stuck with one main source, I'm not sure you could find a better one. It is one of the great works of literature of all time. And in military history, there's very few things like it.

As historian Michael Grant says about it, quote, It was the best account of warfare that had ever been written by a Roman, and it retained this supremacy for at least another four centuries. End quote.

He also wrote that because of Caesar's, I mean, Caesar was one of the great writers of all time. So much of his other qualities are overshadowed by his military reputation, but the concise sort of prose that he used in everything made his work a staple of, you know, first-year Latin courses all throughout the Western civilized educational world. I mean, everybody knew Caesar's work once upon a time. Michael Grant also said, quote,

Caesar's formidable intellect and lucid, concise Latin transforms these ostensibly modest works into masterpieces. His unique inside knowledge carries extraordinary authority. End quote. It's very rare to have essentially the war dispatches of one of the great commanders of all time. I mean, you have nothing like this from Alexander the Great, for example, or most of the other people. I mean, where's Genghis Khan's?

One of the ones that you can have fun reading today, for example, is if you go read the Second World War series as penned by Winston Churchill. You get a similar sort of feel because instead of having somebody tell you the story, they're basically telling you the story from within the story. And there's a lot of I said and then he said to me. And then, I mean, it's a completely different way to view history. And, you know, it's completely biased. I mean, Churchill even said, I know history shall treat me kindly because I shall be writing that history. Well, that's what Caesar's doing, too.

And one of the parts that will screw you up the most if you never read it before is he refers to himself 99% of the time in the third person. Caesar did this, Caesar did that. It's a little strange, but if you understand, and I've read several books just on that book, and it's fascinating the way they tear it apart and look at all the angles because Caesar's playing three-dimensional chess here with this work. He's writing it for a contemporary audience and for the future.

The little intricacies that you would have to actually not just speak Latin, but archaic Latin and have a really good idea of context. These experts will point out that just based on the way Caesar's using the Latin language, he may have been writing. There may have been a political purpose to it.

Because instead of writing maybe for the aristocracy of Rome and the power brokers in the Senate, Caesar was a populare. He was one of these people that made his political name supposedly appealing to the needs of the people as opposed to the wealthy people in Rome. And so he may have written this, maybe not even to be read.

maybe to be read aloud to the crowds in Rome in a language that was straightforward, that they would understand, and pulling themes and ways of approaching the story out, for example, praising the average Roman soldier quite a bit, as something to curry favor with the crowd.

This is a political document. It's a document of personal aggrandizement. It is a piece of propaganda. And it is also the best source of military conduct that you are going to get to the Byzantines. Maybe the best source you're going to get in the entire ancient world from a man, as Michael Grant says, whose authority is absolutely unmatched in this. I mean, who would you rather if you could only have one account of

who would you rather have it from? An unbiased observer would be nice, but when Caesar tells you about the intricacies of this war, he's telling it to you, you know, as the man who decided on things. So he's biased as hell, but he's an absolutely unbelievable source to be able to hear from in a first-person sense.

Caesar gets the command he wants from the three-headed monster. He was looking at a place called Dacia over near the Adriaticus, maybe a place to involve himself. That's a good place where I can conquer some people, make some names, you know, secure Rome's borders. But trouble brewed over in Gaul instead, and it flared up again.

in an indirect way if you believe the sources because of this new german situation a tribe that was located whose territory i'm going to call them tribes but some of these places were really proto-states or states so let's understand tribes is a bad word but as goldsworthy says we're kind of stuck with it but this tribe located in what's now modern day switzerland caesar says decided that they were going to move

They didn't like being neighbors of the Germans, and they felt too constrained in this land hemmed by mountains and not enough territory. So they were going to move, and they were going to move in a way where they were going to cross Roman territory. This southern France area that the Romans had to take, had to take, of course, to protect this road to Spain, they called it the province, province today, I think, um,

Caesar just always called it the province. And this group of Gauls from modern-day Switzerland, numbering, the ancient sources said, in excess of 350,000 people in a migration, you know, men, women, children, the whole thing, burn your possessions, burn your towns, three years in the makings and leave, 350,000 plus people are going to cross Roman territory. And Caesar and the Romans basically say, no, they're not.

Now, this is where Caesar's narrative begins, where he starts explaining, you know, the Gallic Wars. The first thing he does is for a paragraph or two, he lays out the land for your average Roman consumer of his media, we would say today, because once Caesar gets away from the close parts of Gaul, right, Toga wearing Gaul, the next is short-haired Gaul. Once you head on into long-haired Gaul, you are continually moving into less and less well-known territory the farther you go.

caesar becomes a bit like a lewis and clark expedition at some point in this endeavor a very heavily armed one it must be said but he sort of has to lay out initially the lay of the land for the people in rome and he talks about three big cultural groups that inhabit this whole area and the differences between them in one of the more famous passages in all ancient literature

napoleon all the greats read that caesar in the doesn't matter which translation you use it's it's suitably awe-inspiring in my opinion in all of them i'll use the carolyn hammond translation for this but um you know here he is laying out the land for you and by the way notice how he's also kind of beginning the transition idea the softening idea that roman luxuries soften these people

And by the way, I'm going to say Belgae. You can say Belguy. Some people say Belgee. There's an old saying that there's a right way and a wrong way to mispronounce Latin. So hopefully we're mispronouncing it the right way in this program most of the time. Caesar says, and it's amazing to think about the Caesar writes. You have Caesar's writings. It's crazy to me. Caesar writes, quote,

the whole of gaul is divided into three parts one of which the belgae inhabit the aquitani another and the third a people who in their own language are called celts but in ours gauls they all differ among themselves in respect to language way of life and laws

The river Garan divides the Gauls from the Equitani, and the Marne and Seine rivers separate them from the Belgae. Of these three, the Belgae are the bravest, for they are farthest away from the civilization and culture of the province, meaning the Roman province.

Merchants rarely travel to them or import such goods as make men's courage weak and womanish. They live, moreover, in close proximity to the Germans who inhabit the land across the Rhine, and they are continually at war with them.

For this reason, the Helvetii also exceed the other Gauls in bravery, because they are embroiled in almost daily battles with the Germans, either when they are warding them off from their own frontiers or when they themselves take the fight into enemy territory. End quote.

Historian Andrew M. Rigsby goes to great lengths to point out that Caesar is actually establishing his own boundaries for his own purposes here, and that these may not have been boundaries that were recognized in other places necessarily. I mean, Caesar is creating boundaries so that he can come to natural extensions of them and stop. I mean, it's all very interesting, but the point is, is that take what Caesar says with a grain of salt, as always, but he's

but he's basically telling you the lay of the land in Gaul. And then right after he does that, he starts talking about a conspiracy, a conspiracy conspiracy.

that will legitimize actions in Gaul beyond stopping the migration of this tribe. But according to Caesar, it's behind the migration of the Helvetians. These 350,000 people or more that Caesar says burned their 400 villages and 12 towns, maybe some of which may have been proto-cities,

before setting off so that they would know that we're not going home right it's the same old thing when the captain of the ship you know the shipwreck burns the ship so you don't think of going home we're going to burn these villages and there'll be no going back and napoleon referred to this part of caesar as being simply incomprehensible hans delbrook scoffed that there could be all these tribal peoples on the march like this he was you know talking about the logistical disaster it would be

But a couple of modern day historians had an interesting way of looking at it, kind of comparing it to the way you would have compared people who showed up for the Woodstock rock concert in the 60s, right? Small groups of people sort of migrating at a time, carrying most of what they needed on their back or with a single wagon and having the migration take a longer period of time. So instead of having like one army moving around, you have groups of people migrating. And the way Caesar tells the story, it sounds more like that.

Now these are, it should be pointed out, probably heavily armed migrants. So let's not make a bunch of lions out to be little lambs, right?

But Caesar claims that the migration is all part of a plan and that a leader of this tribe of Helvetians is trying to become a king. But the tribe doesn't have kings anymore. They have magistrates and elected officials and some sort of aristocratic oligarchic senate of a sort. And the punishment for trying to turn the society back to a kingship is to be burned alive, Caesar says.

now i should point out that this information is delivered to us by caesar on like the very beginning of his commentaries right after he lays out the way the gaul is divided into different groups he then explains this story the story involves three gaulic noblemen powerful guys in three different powerful gaulic tribes

he then describes a scenario that a couple of historians you know point out and it's obvious and ironic and there's some kind of psychological thing maybe going on with caesar but he describes

a three-headed gallic first triumvirate if you will in other words he's explaining that these gallic noblemen are working together to help each other get what they want in terms of more power a situation caesar's involved in back in rome with those two other guys that make up the first triumvirate right and he's a lot more critical of their triumvirate than he is of his own

He makes it out to be sinister and he says that these three Gallic noblemen are plotting to take over all of Gaul, which, you know, again, if we're looking at it from the point of view of the Gauls, isn't that what you'd want them to be doing? And by the way, it had already been done by other Gallic tribes in other areas that the Romans had already taken over. In Spain, by the way, it was common. There's a national hero of Portugal that did it too.

consolidated the tribes and the locals and fought the romans for a long time happened in happened in galatia too happened in the balkans too so it's sort of standard from the gallic point of view these three guys might have been national heroes like winston churchill type saying the romans are coming the romans are coming quickly we have to combine it's a national security question but caesar plays it off to be a raw grab for power by these three guys and one of them is the helvetian ruler and the reason he's moving his people is much more sinister than just they need more territory it's part of the plot

either roman diplomacy or the tribe's own people find out that he's involved in this plot and the helvetians are about to have a big trial and they're going to burn this guy and he shows up with like 10 000 of his best friends you know his retainers and whatnot to the court and the court basically has to gulp and let him go and then caesar says then a civil war is about to start and then mysteriously the dude dies his name was orgeterix

but the tribe's still going to move because it was in the plan. And so that starts this chain of events that will eventually lead to Celtic culture in what's now France being mortally wounded. So what's the cause of all this if you're at a war crimes trial and they're saying, how did this ethnic cleansing or whatever come to be? Well, it all starts with the rationale. And here's how Caesar lays it out in my S.A. Hanford translation. Quote,

The foremost men among the Helvetii in rank and wealth was Orgeterix. In the consulship of Marcus Messala and Marcus Piso, he was induced by the hope of obtaining royal power to organize a conspiracy of noblemen and persuaded his countrymen to emigrate en masse, telling them that they were the best fighters in Gaul and could very easily conquer the whole country. End quote. He then explains that

This Orgeteric sort of leads the entire movement to get it together to burn the homes eventually and migrate en masse and then as part of the process of negotiating with nearby tribes you know that they would have to pass through he starts making a couple of important friends at these other tribes they decide to work together and Caesar says quote

Orgederix convinced them, these other two aristocrats, that these schemes were quite easy of achievement by telling them that he intended to usurp the sovereignty of his own state, which he said was beyond question the most powerful in Gaul, and then he would use his wealth and military strength to secure them the possession of their thrones.

his arguments proved effective the three men swore an oath of mutual loyalty hoping that once they had made themselves kings the great power of the warlike peoples they ruled would enable them to get control of all gaul end quote if you're looking at this from a pro-gaulic perspective though that might be a good idea caesar portrays it as otherwise but remember in this story it's darth vader's account that we get to have

celtic expert barry cunliffe you know offers an idea or a way to look at this where the people of gaul were unusually threatened during this time period and maybe in a crisis situation if you will in which case the migration of the helvetians might have been much more like a cherokee trail of tears if you want to compare it to something from the native american terminology

He says that Caesar's oft-quoted rationalization that Gaul would have to be taken over by the Romans if it were not to become Germanic, he says, quote, may have been an unbiased interpretation of the evidence he had before him, end quote.

cunliffe also points out that events quite a distance from here could be having effects ripple effects for example he talks about the dations which are a barbarian people that may or may not be germanic also having a huge offensive against another celtic people in the hungarian plain which has a domino effect or an accordion effect that you know caesar ends up dealing with the end result of you know as these helvetians start to move because tribes to the east of the helvetians are being displaced

So the Celtic peoples of Europe and Gaul specifically are threatened from multiple directions and different peoples. This tribe, the Helvetians, would have been on like the bleeding edge of what maybe was starting to look like the sick man of Europe for this time period. And they were having pieces of their territory bitten off from every direction. The Germans from the east, the Dacians from the southeast, and now the Romans from the south.

Darn right you'd be talking about consolidating your power to try to resist this if you could. Caesar's great period in his history begins when he confronts this 350,000 person column of humanity, if you believe either the numbers or the way they showed up at Roman doors, over a river with a bridge that Caesar had just destroyed.

basically this group of people the front end of this tribe has reached caesar and now they're going to have to ask him for permission to come into the province caesar's going to say let me think about it go over there camp out while i think about it meanwhile while they're doing that he's you know organizing the raising of armies far away he's got the troops with him building a giant 16 mile or something long fortification

with guard towers at regular intervals no doubt with some roman bolt throwers in them and when the tribe comes back for their answer you know after they've been how are they eating you know they mean you could have lots of people dying on this little baton death march from the swiss alps to where caesar was and they say okay can we cross now and caesar now with this giant fortification behind him and more troops with them says no no i'm just curious

If you're in this Golic mass of people and you've been camping out, eating up maybe what little of your food is left and you're waiting for a Roman decision and more people are showing up as the trail of the mass of humanity keeps arriving and you're waiting and you're waiting and the Romans are building these fortifications and you show up and you say, well, can we please cross now? And then they say, no, what do you do?

caesar says that small groups of people in the night and the daytime try to cross over themselves over the river to get on the other side it doesn't sound like a big armed mass of humanity it sounds like a bunch of people desperately in like small family groups and whatnot trying to cross over and overwhelm the defenses or sneak by on any given point and the romans concentrate missile fire they say and you know kill all these people in the water and drive them back here's how historian adrian goldsworthy describes the situation he says quote

When the Helvetii returned for Caesar's decision, he bluntly informed them that, he's quoting Caesar now, "...according to the custom and precedent of the Roman people, he could not permit anyone to journey through the province, and that he would stop them if they tried to force their way through."

Goldsworthy then says, The new fortifications were there to demonstrate that he meant what he said. However, it was difficult for such a great mass of people suddenly to change direction and purpose. The period of waiting by the river had also probably been very frustrating, and many of the Helvetii were determined to keep going, especially after the years of preparation and the willing destruction of their old homes.

Small groups began to cross the Rhône, either using the fords or rigging up rafts to carry themselves, their animals, and vehicles. It is possible that these were deliberate probes, sent by the chieftains to test the strength of Caesar's defenses, but more likely they reflected the loose central authority and individual independence that seemed to be characteristic of many of the tribes of Gaul. They were certainly not full-fledged assaults on the lines of fortifications, but

Most of the crossings took place under the cover of darkness, but a few parties were bold enough to risk the attempt in daylight. None succeeded, for Caesar's men were able to concentrate and meet each group in turn, overwhelming many of them with missiles as they struggled to cross. End quote. It seems to be that goals worthy twos may be leaving open the possibility that this is more of a humanitarian situation than Caesar let on.

eventually the celtic tribe will move away they have a plan b which they tried to avoid because it's a much tougher route and they have to get the permission of a bunch of different other tribes but they start heading away and caesar decides maybe he can't let them migrate to the other location that they want to do even if they don't have to pass the roman territory could be a problem anyway

Then he says that one of these conspirators, one of the Gallic triumvirate, the three-headed Gallic monster, is working with

the helvetians to negotiate and you know pass over all these differences between these tribes right smoothing it out maybe so they could work together more and they organize a situation where the helvetians promise we won't do anything what will be very nice as we cross through your territory we won't do anything bad and then they go through the territory of these tribes that are allies of rome and then they start breaking stuff and stealing stuff and

and devastating the territory and so these gallic tribes that are allied to rome say to caesar or so caesar says help us how can you let this happen to your allies right when you have an army right here and caesar says hmm i can't let that happen to my allies he justifies in the book that way and then he goes after the helvetians

caesar will go raise some more armies real quickly he'll catch up to the helvetians as they're migrating across another tribe's territory caesar will come upon the tribe while while they're in the process of crossing a river and he says three quarters of the tribe had already crossed he says it took 20 days shows you how long this mass of humanity is taking to move whatever the real numbers we're talking about here might be because caesar's must be inflated

but it's a lot of people one way or the other and they're hard to feed and caesar comes upon he says this tribe where three quarters of the tribe had crossed but one quarter was still on the other side waiting that was the side caesar was on too so he attacked them killed a bunch this is women children wagons warriors a bunch of them ran into the forest and now the tribe comes to caesar and basically says you know what do you want from us

caesar says this that and the other thing reparations and oh yeah a bunch of hostages now this is a moment we should just discuss this for a second because it's wild also this practice of hostages for good behavior

This is very common in the ancient world, but I always think to myself, what if this happened today? What if that's how we ensured good behavior today? What if when we were having problems with Saddam Hussein and you have your first Gulf War and at the end of it he stays in power, but in order to stop fighting you demand a couple of his sons as hostages?

would be an interesting way to handle modern diplomacy, wouldn't it? But that's what Caesar says he wants from this tribe, and I want hostages. And they're always going to be like the sons and daughters of the nobility. So the people he's negotiating with are the ones who have to give the sons and daughters, and they say, hey, hey, hey.

Don't get cocky just because you beat us in a situation where we were, you know, refugees over a river. We're basically still undefeated. Heck, we beat you a couple generations ago. We're in the practice of taking hostages, not giving them. And so the meeting broke up. The Helvetians, who would not provide hostages, go back along their merry way, continuing their migration. The Romans go back to tailing them.

and caesar now is looking for a way to strike at them because they haven't accepted his terms before he can manage to do it though he begins to have severe supply problems more on that in a minute it forces him he says to break off the pursuit and go in an opposite direction towards a friendly gallic city where he can get supplies and caesar says when they change course away from the migrants the migrants turn around and come after them

so caesar stops he puts his entire force on a hill where it's covering the hill with legionaries in the traditional three-line formation he's preparing for the battle caesar says in a very grandiose move for the folks back home but one that has real world dividends to be paid caesar will get off his horse and send it to the rear and take his place in the front line with the soldiers sharing their fate encouraging them

And remember, at this stage in his career, Caesar's not the great general that we know as Julius Caesar. He's seen a lot of fighting, but this is really his first true command. And this is where he's making his name. And part of making his name is showing that he's something special. Napoleon did a bunch of things like this, and so did Alexander. It's a typical general move, but it can work wonders over the long haul. Caesar's earning the trust of his army. And he says that these Gallic troops, these ferocious troops,

soldiers come charging uphill at the romans so you already sense disaster right this is not a good move but the gauls are not known for tactical brilliance in fact it almost seems like the inevitable trade-off in the price you pay for being these out of control impetuous warriors that lose your mind in battle lust is that you're inevitably less tactically cohesive and less

concerned about things like making sure you save enough energy to be able to fight for a while the traditional book the playbook the opposition handbook on fighting Gaul says that the initial charge of these people is ferocious

wild and hard to hold but if you can stay strong and hold the initial charge they begin to get tired and then they begin to get disheartened and that impetuosity fades and then the lack of the armor that they normally have the fact that they've totally lost cohesion after a little while all this stuff begins to tell so if you can sit through and weather the initial storm and

you tend to be okay. Charging uphill at a bunch of Romans, throwing heavy javelins downhill, not a good start. Caesar says that the Roman pila got stuck in the shields of the Gauls. Of course, it has that little narrow weak neck deliberately designed to bend so that all of a sudden it's dragging down the shields of these Gauls. Caesar says they shake their arms for a long time, then throw their shields down. So you take a people already not...

heavily armored and take away the shields and then the romans charge down at them with swords and it begins to be you know a typical roman battle against gauls where they're going to get chopped up pretty good he says you never see their back they don't run but they conduct a fighting withdrawal up to a nearby hill and when the romans pursue them they're hit in the flank by two other tribes that were nearby

now we should point out caesar has every interest to exaggerate how dangerous this enemy is and how difficult the conditions he faced were because obviously if he prevails and wins well it's that much greater of a victory to cite to the folks back home nonetheless when caesar is hit in the flank he says the people that he was pursuing charge at him from the front again so he's surrounded and his flank is hit if this is a greek army instead of a roman army it's done for at this point

because the romans could do what the romans could do a tactical flexibility that was pretty much unique in the ancient world caesar's able to take one of the three lines of the roman army the one that's not yet fighting and shift its facing so it's now facing the enemy that has hit the romans in the flank now they're facing romans from the front

So in a hard-fought battle now, Caesar's troops get the upper hand. The warriors will retreat to a wagon fortress. They've taken all the wagons that they're migrating with and they've put them in a giant circle and it's defended by all the noncombatants and whatnot. And the Romans attack it. That's the last stand of the battle. And by the time the whole thing is over, the Romans may have killed 200,000 of these people.

by hand if you believe those numbers historian michael sage says this about the numbers quote in the aftermath of the battle caesar claims that tablets were found in the helvetian camp written in greek characters containing lists of men of military age women boys and the elderly who had joined in the migration

There were also counts of the other tribes who accompanied the Helvetians, for a grand total of 368,000 people, of whom 92,000 were capable of bearing arms. Caesar then records a census taken when the Gauls returned home, which totaled 110,000. It is difficult to assess the accuracy of these figures, and this is the only case in the Gallic War where Caesar refers to such lists.

The Gauls did write Celtic in Greek letters. Numerous inscriptions in Celtic written in Greek characters have been preserved. The figure of 92,000 warriors is plausible if the total of 368,000 is accepted. In pre-modern populations, about one quarter of the population consisted of males of military age. The total number for all those migrating is also in the realm of possibility. The 110,000 survivors...

representing a third of those who set out is more of a problem. The loss of more than two-thirds is possible, but it must have had a number of causes. The migration from beginning to end probably consumed about three months, with the final battle in late May or early June. Many, especially the sick and the infirm, may have perished along the way, and others simply settled along the route of migration. Once the battle casualties are included, which Caesar does not give, the figure for losses still seems too high.

but there's no other evidence and at least it's in the realm of possibility end quote by the way sage's book i enjoyed immensely on this but his point is well taken we don't know how many people really were there and you don't know how many people really came back and it might have been more of a trail of tears type situation a baton death march as we said type situation where a lot of people died along the way rather than have caesar snuff out their lives

But you can be sure that since the Helvetians were one of the great tribes of Gaul, that we're talking about a lot of people here. And you're not just talking about combatants at all. The end stages of this battle with Caesar had the Roman legionaries assaulting the wagons, brought up into a great fortification with all of the stuff that these people owned in the middle of them.

The Gauls and the Germans on a bunch of occasions were said by ancient sources to have the women staying back by the wagons, yelling encouragement to their men, deriding the behavior of cowards, providing first aid and medicine help to those who staggered back from the battle line wounded. So when the Romans, you know, drive back

the fleeing routers after they've just decimated their formations and those people run back to the wagons pursued by the roman army what do you think the roman army does when they get to the wagons they kill everybody or they try to one of the main things that actually protects lives on a battlefield like this is the prospect of selling the people that you can capture

The one thing a person on a battlefield facing the battle lust of other people has in their favor and the only thing they can work is I'm worth more alive than dead. And there's no doubt that lots of slaves were sold after this battle and you can hear in your mind a cash register ding every time one of those people sold because one of the reasons Caesar's there, if you recall, is he has these horrible debts at home.

One of the ways for a great Roman to pay off these debts is with a successful, profitable campaign. And one of the main things you profit off of is the people you sell afterwards. Nonetheless, the reason Caesar came to this entire area to begin with has just been dealt with. After the battle, the Helvetians, essentially what's left of them, come to Caesar and say, you know, we're in your power. We'll do whatever you want. He sends him home. He sends him back to where they came from and he feeds them on the way, arranges for food and everything.

Good old Caesar. I'll take care of you. But the end result is you lose hundreds of thousands of people to return things to the status quo. So why doesn't Caesar go home now? Well, he's noticed something, he says in his works, that's been brewing for a while. And he's been doing some investigations and he's uncovered a bunch of

Well, stuff that the people in Rome should know about, stuff that he can't overlook. For example, he was already noticing that weird stuff was happening with the Gallic troops, the friendly Gallic troops he was using in his army. The Romans, for example, don't produce cavalry anymore during this period. They produced legionaries, heavy infantry men armed with a heavy-throwing javelin and a devastatingly nasty sword.

The cavalry is raised from, you know, local friendly peoples. In this case, a lot of Celtic peoples with tribes allied to Rome. But they're doing things on the battlefield that make Caesar suspicious that maybe, just maybe, they're not altogether loyal. I mean, one famous thing that Caesar talks about, he has thousands of these Gallic cavalry and they go up against a few hundred of the enemies and then all of a sudden flee in terror. He got very suspicious then and started doing some inquiries.

Then, while he's pursuing the Helvetian columns, the Helvetian columns begin moving away from rivers and stuff where Caesar can get supplies. Shouldn't matter because all these friendly tribes that asked Caesar to come up here and save us from these people that are stealing and despoiling our land, they were supposed to provide the food, but the food's not coming. And he says he keeps getting these excuses. Oh, it should have been here. Oh, we're still raising it. Oh, it's on the way. What? You didn't get it? I mean, that kind of stuff.

So he starts investigating that too, calling some of these nobles into his office and saying, where the hell's the food? What's going on here? And it all comes to a head after this battle with the Helvetians because he says that all the other, with a few exceptions, big Gallic leaders come to his location to congratulate him on his victory and all these kinds of stuff. And then they say to him, can we see you in the back room privately? So he calls them into the back room privately and they instantly all fall to their feet, you know, beseeching him, tears in their eyes. And they give him, he says,

this sob story about please please please you have to save us from this german king who's taking over gaul we told you about this guy right he was the guy who was brought in when these two tribes of gauls that were historic enemies were looking for an edge and so the one tribe thought let's invite these germans over and they'll give us the edge and we'll win the battle which they did and they you know destroyed the nobility of the other side but then the

group of people that comes to Caesar. He's taken all their children hostages, and anytime they move the wrong way, he tortures them and does bad things to them. Caesar's now speaking to a Roman audience and basically saying, can you believe what this German king is doing to these poor Gauls who are allies and friends of the Roman people? Can Caesar stand for that? Of course Caesar can't stand for that.

what's more these Celts have been telling Caesar stories that they've got people in their own tribes who are disloyal right you know the tribes that are enemies of Rome are disloyal but these are people in tribes that are nominally friends of Rome but they have huge numbers of fifth columnists that want to work for the Gallic cause instead now again Caesar's portraying this as sinister and bad to a Roman audience but

It's hard not to see these troublemakers that Caesar talks about, though, as anything other than Gallic patriots,

If you're looking at it from their point of view, I mean, the people that are here beseeching Caesar for help, these are like the quizlings, aren't they? The traitors of the Gallic cause. But just like the Native American tribes, just like the tribes in Africa, these people have historic enemies amongst their own kind with disputes and memories of tit-for-tat wars

Revenge cycle killings that go back forever and these were able to be exploited in Africa and the new world by European powers in Gaul by the Romans exquisitely. I mean it is the Romans who invented the phrase that we use today to divide and conquer.

That's what they're doing in Gaul, and Caesar's using some tribes against the others, and these tribal leaders are telling him, we just want you to know we have large factions in our own tribes that are working against you. They're the ones that kept the food from coming to you. They were the ones leading your cavalry when the thousands of your cavalry turned and fled in terror from a few hundred of the enemy. In other words, Caesar's got them all around him.

And this becomes an excuse to stay. What's more, when Caesar says this German king is oppressing all these people, he basically says, so the Gauls want us to stay, I have to stay to defend them. And the enemy has just shifted from Gallic people to a new people. Now, let's understand whether or not these new people really were a new people is open for debate.

caesar makes them a new people in his writing because it serves the purposes of his writing it's an outside power caesar's going to use it to defend now these people that are closer to home these people he's just killed a hundred thousand or more people of he's now the savior of the gauls and he's staying now i should point out that there's no consensus at all over caesar's decision making at this point

Everyone seems to agree that at some point Caesar decides he's going to take all of Gaul over, and most seem to think that that was not his initial plan once he originally set out to change the course of the Helvetian migration. But there's a lot of disagreement over at what point Caesar crystallized this idea that to heck with it, I'm taking it over. Many historians have spoken about this idea.

Andrew Rigsby, for example, this tendency in Caesar's writing sometimes to give a hint of the idea that Gaul is maybe kind of doomed anyway and that it's like a vulnerable animal in the geopolitical herd and somebody's going to get it and better us than the Germans.

it's the germans that form this new counterpoint in the story when they appear on the scene because up until now caesar hasn't really had an antagonist when you're stopping a migration of a tribal people who's the bad guy in that right even though caesar had some bad guys involved in the conspiracy initially by the time he's involved they're dead so he's never having any sort of a one-to-one darth vader versus another sith lord confrontation

Then, of course, he's also got that conspiracy, this shadowy thing going on, you know, where it's almost like a guerrilla war now and he can't trust, you know, the Celtic people who are his friends. Don't know who your friends are or your enemies are. They all look the same. But again, not a single opponent for Caesar to really measure himself with until he comes face to face with this German king, Ariovistus, king of the Suebi.

Now let's step back a minute for the sake of those who are huge Julius Caesar fans because how can we ignore how quickly everything here has happened? That's a hallmark of Caesar, by the way, the moving with speed and determination, focusing on, you know, the core issues and the most decisive points and whatnot. I mean, this is all happening in the year 58 BCE.

the dealing with the helvetian migration is during the same year and let's remember they hardly ever campaign in the winter so this is really like an eight maybe nine month campaigning season and right after he deals with the helvetians and has those what was a huge battle

He now, you know, marches to another part of this area to where the German king is and begins to deal with him. In Caesar's narrative, this guy is sort of the root cause of everything here. I mean, why is Caesar even having to do all of this in Gaul? Well, because the Germans destabilized the whole situation. Came in there with their 120,000 warriors or whatever, began settling in Gaul and has set the whole place in motion.

So when Caesar confronts Ariovistus, he's confronting the root of the problem. And if Caesar were a less ambitious man, this could be the end of his story. This could be the culmination. He goes to the root of the problem, you know, solves it, comes home, celebrates a triumph and lives happily ever after. I do have to remind myself, though, how this has a feel of Caesar's kind of being at the end of the earth. We said earlier that he's like a heavily armed version of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

He feels the need in the narrative to tell the people back at home, you know, what these Germans, he calls them, are like. What are their customs? What gods do they believe in? What do they look like? How do they fight? Supposedly, the Romans had dealt with these people militarily before, right at the time Caesar's born. Remember, the Cimbri and the Teutons invaded from the north unexpectedly, a national security crisis.

If you've forgotten, Caesar will remind you over and over again in his commentaries. It's a great way to justify going after the Germans to remind you that every now and then they come after us. But other than that, not a lot to go on. So Caesar explains to the folks back home, you know, that these Germans are essentially like the Gauls on steroids. The Gauls are tall. The Germans are that much taller.

The Gauls are blonde, the Germans are blonder. If the Gauls fight in a war-mad, berserker, crazy frenzy, the Germans do that more often and their frenzy is deeper than the Gauls. And Caesar kind of says that compared to the Gauls, the Germans are primitive.

So if we're using our tribal scale and the Gauls are moving up to like threes and fours and fives, the Germans are a one. Just, you know, Caesar would have you believe just graduated from caveman status. He says they don't even really practice agriculture, which none of the modern histories or, you know, stuff by archaeologists that I've read, none of them believe that. They all think the Germans practiced agriculture, but there you go.

Caesar says that the Gauls used to be able to stand up to the Germans in battle but that they can't anymore essentially saying that they're gun shy that they've lost so many battles that they've lost the psychological edge if you will and that becomes another one of those unquantifiable things doesn't it that affects human history completely.

You know, we talked about intimidation on a personal level, but, you know, what happens when you get a group of skittish, scared, unpredictable human beings together and then try to quantify the impact of the mass amount of psychological intimidation? I mean, if you've lost three battles to the Germans already and you're lining up to fight your fourth, how much does the history of how you've done against them recently play into your ability to stand up to them now?

And of course, if the Celtic people can't stand up to the Germans anymore in a dog-eat-dog world, well, what does that mean for the long-term ability of Gaul to remain free and independent? So if you're looking at this from the Roman viewpoint, you can kind of see how they might come to the conclusion, uh-oh, we're going to have all these German people right next to us in Gaul soon. So Caesar goes and begins a conversation with this German leader where he essentially tells the German leader, okay, all this stuff has to stop.

He says he begins a correspondence. He sends a message to him. He says, can we please meet halfway between our two locations because we have important matters to discuss. And this is all in Caesar's commentaries, by the way. He says that the German king replied by saying, essentially, if I have something to say to you, I come to you. If you have something to say to me, you come to me.

And then begins a line of discussion that's hard to understand if you're looking at this from Caesar's point of view, because the German leader begins to question Caesar about, maybe you could say, the legality as they would understand it in the ancient world for all these things he's doing and cites legal arguments that you couldn't use now. I mean, you'd have to be a Nazi to use arguments like right of conquest today, right?

but that was something that was actually sometimes part of the rules back then and this german leader will cleverly say over and over again we're not doing anything you don't do you know so why are you interfering the arguments that ariovistus makes through the pen of caesar are just as compelling as the ones that the helvetians kind of made when they were trying to ask the romans can we please come through your territory it's a humanitarian crisis maybe but

And a modern readership has a whole different feel for it maybe than Caesar's audience would because Ariovistus looks to the modern reader maybe to be making some really good points when Caesar tells him in the next letter, which is much more direct, you will do this, you will do that, or we're going to have problems. He says you're going to release the hostages of our allies, you're going to stop attacking our allies, you're going to stop bringing more Germans from over the Rhine River.

And Ariovistus straight up answers him, Caesar basically says, with defiance. But here's the problem. The only information you have about this is from Caesar. And in one sense, he's the best person in the world to give it to you because he met this guy face to face and talked to him. On the other hand, he's the worst person in the world to tell this to you because nobody has more of a vested interest in slanting it his way.

Caesar says that the message that came back from this barbarian, again, not sounding very much like a barbarian, maybe barbarian lawyers helping him out with the legalese. He says to Caesar, this is from the S.A. Hanford edition of Caesar, quote,

In reply, Ariovistus said that it was the recognized custom of war for victors to rule the vanquished in any way they pleased, and that the Romans acted on this principle by governing their conquered subjects, not according to the dictates of any third party, but at their own discretion. Since he did not dictate to them how they were to exercise their rights, he ought not to be interfered with in the exercise of his. It was because the Edui—

that tribe that's allied to Rome. It's because the Edui had tried the fortune of war and were the losers in the fight that they had to pay him tribute, and Caesar was doing him a serious wrong in coming to Gaul and causing him a loss of revenue. He would not return the hostages to the Edui, but would refrain from making any wanton attack upon them or their allies if...

They kept their agreement and paid the tributes regularly every year. If they did not, the title of Brothers of the Roman People would not save them from the consequences. I am not impressed, he concluded, by Caesar's threat to punish my, in quotes, oppression of these people. No one has ever fought me without bringing destruction upon himself. Let him attack whenever he pleases. He will discover what German valor is capable of.

We have never known defeat. We have had superb training in arms. And for 14 years, we have never sheltered beneath a roof. End quote. In Caesar's mind, that's basically the equivalent of saying it's on. And so he starts to send his army toward the German. He says the German starts to send his army toward Caesar. There's this strategic town that ends up between the two armies. So Caesar, you know, basically going day and night, you know, pushing his men to get there first, gets there first.

Like all great generals, he understands the value of speed. And they lock themselves in this Celtic town and they're prepared to defend it. And all looks pretty good for Caesar, except that the people that have taken over this town, his soldiers start talking to the local Gallic people. And those people start telling Caesar's troops about these Germans and what they're like and how they can't even look them in the face without, you know, running away. And Caesar says all of their gossip makes his army scared.

And the rumors of what the Germans are like freak him out. And he specifically singles out, you have to love this, the folks back home in Rome probably did too. Those young men on the make, sort of the sons of the rich senators and whatnot, who need a little military experience on their resume before they start their running for Roman office. Nothing too scary, you understand. So maybe just a nice, you know, we could go after some migrants with Caesar, look good on the resume, and all will be well. Caesar says that when they're looking at facing these ferocious situations,

scary, unknown beasts from the edge of the world that the Gallic people, who normally scare the Romans a little, have said, oh, they scare us. Caesar says these young men on the make all of a sudden are finding good reasons why they're urgently needed back in Rome.

He says the fear spreads to the rest of the ranks and people start drawing up their wills. And he says they're breaking into tears, you know, at strange times and they're bemoaning their fate and all these kind of stuff, which, of course, let's be honest. Now, Caesar's built up his enemies so that when he conquers them, he'll be that much greater. He's also creating a need in the army for him because he's going to go in there with a combination of shaming people, but also logical arguments, throw in a little bit of

Theater and you know you can Caesar says anyway whip the army into shape and let's be honest we've seen this with other great generals also it's often a quality that people associate with great generalship right the ability to turn around the morale of your troops and rally them right.

Caesar says then as soon as the German approaches that the king of the Germans Ariovistus says okay now that I'm here we can have this discussion you wanted to have and Caesar has this wonderful moment where they meet on like a hill in the middle of a giant you know flat area and they weren't allowed to bring their armies close to each other so their armies are like in the distance and only 10 guys on horseback are supposed to accompany each leader and we're told they have the conversation in Golic.

So this German king supposedly speaks Gaelic and Caesar probably had a good friend who could translate for him. Caesar says basically the same thing he'd said in the note to the German ruler and the German ruler says something similar to what he said before back. You know, questioning Caesar's right to do this, pointing out that we all live by the same rules. You conquer your people and you decide what happens to them afterwards. That's the rule we live by. And then he says, and it's a wonderful line where he questions Caesar's motives. And he says, I think all this...

is just so much pretense for you coming here to crush me.

And then he says, and unless you take your army out of this country right now, you know, he's going to finish Caesar. And then he tells him, but if you do leave right now, I'll be happy to be your muscle man here in Germany and in Gaul. And anytime you need a favor, you won't even have to lift a finger and I'll do it for you. So it's a little bit of a carrot and stick sort of offer. And once again, if you were a neutral arbitrator, you might say something like, hey, that's not a bad deal.

So let's stop for a minute and say that you're really dying at this point in the story for an outsider's viewpoint. Anyone else besides Caesar here, because he's really tough to read at this point. Why is he putting these sorts of, you know, accusatory good arguments into the mouth of one of his characters that he wants you to want him to conquer?

We mentioned earlier there were a couple of Roman writers that came after Caesar. Suetonius is one, and that's not very long after Caesar. About a century and a half or two centuries afterwards, there's a guy named Cassius Dio. And Dio has a much more gritty character

view of caesar and his motivations and essentially is one of those guys that falls into the camp that sees caesar doing this for the most base reasons you can think of he's involved in this monumental gamble in the politics of rome where his involvement in this region risking his life and devoting his entire existence year after year to this cause in gaul is only because of what benefits he can glean from it in the politics of rome

And he's desperately in need of things like money and conquests and honors. And he's got to keep this military command going because the moment that his term in office is over, he's prosecutable by his enemies and they're licking their chops back in Rome waiting to get to him. At the same time,

You know, at least at this point in history, he has to assume that this is not a permanent command. So he's on a bit of a time clock. If Caesar really wants to do these great things he's going to end up doing in Gaul, he's got a limited amount of time to do it. And Cassius Dio is one of the people that says that everything Caesar's doing here is the equivalent of poking the Germans with a stick, trying to get them all roused up so you'd have an excuse to go in there and kill a bunch of them.

Dio, by the way, confuses us entirely by saying that Ariovistus isn't a king of the Germans, he's a king of the Celts. That means one of two things. Either Cassius Dio is a lazy Roman ethnographer and there were plenty and doesn't really draw a distinction, but if he's accurate...

Then you have to say, well, why did Caesar call him a German? What's the point of Caesar doing that? What does he gain by creating this new group of people that may have been a generic name that once upon a time only applied to one tribe in modern-day Germany? This from my Herbert Baldwin Foster edition, by the way.

And I should point out that Dio's pronouns and use of pronouns is sometimes confusing, so I'm going to insert the name of the person he's talking about in place of the pronouns so it makes more sense. Dio writes, quote,

Now Ariovistus was the ruler of those Celts. His dominion had been ratified by actions of the Romans, and he had been registered among their friends and allies by Caesar himself in his consulship. In comparison, however, with the glory to be derived from the war and the power which that glory would bring, the Roman general, Caesar,

caesar heeded none of those considerations except as insofar as he wished to get some excuse for the quarrel from the barbarian so that it should not be thought that there was any grievance against him caesar at the start therefore he sent for ariovistus pretending that he wanted to hold some conversation with him ariovistus instead of obeying replied and this is close to caesar's own description by the way

If Caesar wishes to tell me anything, let him come himself to me. I am not in any way inferior to him, and a man who has need of anyone must always go to that person. At this Caesar showed anger on the grounds that Ariovistus had insulted all the Romans, and Caesar immediately demanded of Ariovistus the hostages of the allies, and forbade him either to set foot on their land or to bring against them any auxiliary force from home.

This Caesar did not do with the idea of scaring him, but because he hoped to make him furious, and by that means to gain a great and fitting pretext for the war. What was expected took place. The barbarian, enraged at the injunctions, made a long and outrageous reply, so that Caesar no longer bandied words with him. End quote. That's a completely different view, isn't it?

Cassius Dio also gives a very different account of Caesar rallying his terrified Romans in the Gallic town that we just discussed. Rather than being one of the few non-terrified people who could then spread his lack of fear to his entire army, Dio basically has...

the troops looking at what they're up against and thinking maybe that they shouldn't even be up against them they're not so mad at the germans they're mad at the guy who put him in a situation where they should be fighting the germans and according to dio they are very aware of what role they play in this whole thing they're the pawns in caesar's game to further caesar's career and they also seem to realize politically speaking that

that this is outside the boundaries maybe of what the Romans themselves would consider a legal military venture. Cassius Dio says that when these Romans are scared in that Gallic town, they're scared because they keep hearing about the Germans and the Germans are coming. He says it leaves them deeply dejected. And then he says, quote,

alarmed by the stature of their enemies by their numbers their boldness and consequent ready threats they were in such a mood as to feel that they were going to contend not against men but against uncanny and ferocious beasts

and the talk was that they were undertaking a war which was none of their business and had not been decreed merely on account of Caesar's personal ambition, and they threatened, also, to leave him in the lurch if he should not change his course."

That's not a bunch of scared soldiers who get their fear rallied out of them by a charismatic leader. This is a bunch of troops who fully realize what's going on here, are angry at their leader for putting them in this position and are threatening mutiny if he doesn't change the course he's on. I mean, that's a very different story right there, isn't it?

I'm not sure it really matters, though, in terms of how it reflects on Caesar's reputation, because either way, it really says something about the guy that he was able to rally those troops and put them in a position and a state of mind where they could face this German leader, either a king or maybe Ariovistus was an elected war leader for a confederation of tribes, it's argued about.

But that's a guy, Ariovistus, who has the entire, at least central part, and in fact you could say most of Gaul cowed by his power and authority. And Caesar turns these either mutinous or petrified with fear or some combination of the two troops and gets them out in the field against this guy. Now the way the battle shapes up supposedly is it starts with a bunch of maneuvering. This is the very unsexy side of military history, right?

people like yours truly who like to cut right to the chase we like our nice you know well organized and set up field battles in a nice level valley where you've had a lot of time for both sides to set up and then you have your super big encounter but truthfully in real history if one of the generals had done his job or her job um you should have the other side beaten by the time you get to that point

And it's sometimes the big maneuvering on the strategic level that does that, but sometimes it's just the little shading here and the slight advantage there, and they all add up. Generals throughout history have been almost neurotic about figuring out the little elements, you know, to gain advantage.

And there are quite a few different periods in history where because of the military technology and the limitations, if both sides didn't actively want to fight a battle, sometimes it didn't happen. If one side wanted to avoid it, oftentimes it was easy to do.

The 17th and 18th century, probably like the high watermark of that a few hundred years ago, where because of the way things were, you know, if one side didn't want to fight a battle, it almost never happened. So in this period, Caesar and the German commander are both sort of jockeying for position and maneuvering.

And one of the things about the Romans that makes them so, you know, again, another unsexy side of military history, but the Roman soldiers are about half devastating soldier and about half construction worker. And these people could set up fortifications anywhere.

In real time, in a way that actually affected the battles in a day-to-day situation. I mean, in the case with Ariovistus, the maneuvering actually takes the form of both sides trying to march around the other and camp on their lines of supply. So cut them off.

When the Germans did it, they would take wagons and whatnot supposedly with them and sort of, you know, put them in a circle like pioneers in the old West used to do. Of course, they had a lot more wagons. We're talking about a lot bigger structures. But when the Romans would build a camp, even a small sub-camp, they would build it like an old fort, right?

in the old American West. You know, I mean, we're talking about with timber and guard towers and maybe even artillery in the guard towers. And the Romans were so good at this and often did it every night when they were out in the field that they had this down to a science. I mean, everybody knew exactly where to go and how to do and what it was going to look out. And the layout was always the same. So when the Romans camped on your line of supply, you'd wake up the next morning and there would be a fort there where there was open country the day before.

So then after the initial maneuverings, once the Romans have this fort in too good of a position, the Germans are launching attacks against the fort and those are beaten off. And there's a bunch of this kind of preliminary but still pretty large scale skirmishing before Caesar maybe, some historians think, is beginning to have supply problems himself. There's a lot more of the natives around him here and he seems to be in danger and needing to fight a battle or get out.

And so he says he draws the army up in battle formation and marches it out toward the Germans on several occasions, by the way.

By this time period, the Roman battle formation, by the way, is three big lines deep usually. And Caesar says that's the way he lines up. And just so you know, that means a different thing from ranks. Ranks are the number of troops that are lined up, you know, one behind the other. And oftentimes each of these lines is between, and this is not just for Romans, for anyone, four to like 16 ranks deep. A pike formation may be 12 or 16 ranks. The Romans more four to eight ranks.

but then there'll be a dead zone of maybe 50 yards 30 yards 100 yards and then there'll be another line of men lined up in rank so this would be the roman second line and then the romans would often have a third line

this seems like common sense when you think about it today but in the ancient world this was very unusual the romans have reserves and time and again it will save them in these battles because they will find out oh something's going wrong someplace and oh guess what we have about 20 to 25 percent of our total force unengaged just sitting back there throw them into the troubled area and time and again it saves them

In this battle, Caesar is very cut and dried. Remember, this is not a true history he's writing. This is supposed to be sort of in the format of, you know, dispatches from the front. And sometimes he'll talk about, you know, what's going on in the battle at length. But you would think with a really important one like this one, he'd go into great detail and he doesn't.

He basically says when the real clash of arms comes, this battle is supposed to have been fought. Most historians think in what's now Alsace, but no one's sure. Probably on the west bank of the Rhine somewhere. The Romans probably had in the neighborhood of 30,000 men. The Germans, who knows? You usually see from 50 to 100,000, although you get the occasional outlier.

i love hans delbrook as you know and he's usually a great neutral arbitrator unless there's germans involved in which case he's got his homer glasses on and he doesn't see things quite as unbiased and he thinks the romans outnumbered the germans but he's unusual so we'll set him aside there and just assume the romans were probably somewhat outnumbered perhaps two to one in the worst case scenario

Caesar says that the battle takes place so quickly there's no time for the usual exchange of missiles. The Romans love to throw those heavy javelins. They do a lot of damage when you throw them, you know, all at once. Hundreds of thousands of men throwing these heavy javelins all at once. But the Germans and the Romans end up charging each other too quickly for that and it gets right to a sword slog right away. Caesar says that the flank he's on begins to push the German flank opposite them back.

but that the other Roman flank on the far side of the battlefield is being overwhelmed by the German numbers. He then says that a Roman officer that he names by name, because he's on horseback, can see the problem from a distance and realize, uh-oh, somebody better order the third line that's not doing anything right now in to fix this situation. And he does so, and he saves the battle. Caesar, by the way, names this person as...

the son of the richest guy in Rome, Crassus, who, if you recall, is one of the members of the first triumvirate, along with Caesar and Pompey. So you see, in a way, Caesar still doesn't forget, you know, where his bread is buttered and how to play the wonderful game of politics. And you scratch my back and I scratch yours. Remember, Caesar was allegedly not able to leave Rome at one point because his creditors wouldn't let him out of the city. And,

until Crassus paid the bill. Well, now all of a sudden, here in this battle where Caesar doesn't go into depth about much of anything, he goes out of his way to mention a single individual, the son of the guy who paid the debts for him. And oh, by the way, he's basically saying, without that guy, you know, we'd have lost that battle against the Germans. That's a little bit of a honor to the family, isn't it? So maybe paying back a favor, or maybe...

Putting Crassus in debt for a future one. Nonetheless, Caesar's never far from playing the game. In this case, the game is deadly, as you might imagine.

These Germans, once again, are supposed to have come with the wagons and the families and the women on the wagons, you know, with the disheveled hair screaming at the men, please don't let us fall into slavery. The problem with having all these women and wagons on the battlefield is obviously that at some point the battle moves from where it started to the wagons and the people in the wagons. And once again, we have a battle where

It's implied more than laid out for you, but that the Romans kill a lot of civilians, including some of the relatives of Ariovistus, who somehow gets away, but we don't hear any more from him. The Germans will run miles to the Rhine, Caesar says. There will be more Germans that are just about to come over and help, and as soon as they hear about the big defeat of Ariovistus, they turn around and go home.

what caesar's doing here from a macro perspective though if you think about it is that there were a bunch of powers that were the power brokers in this region before caesar intervened and that would have been last year so think about how quickly everything's happening caesar has essentially neutered one of them the helvetian one of the most powerful tribes of the celts is now a shadow of what it was just months before because of what caesar did to it and now this

player from outside the stratego or risk map board who'd come in and intervened in gallic politics is smashed and sent packing back over the rhine this thing that caesar portrays as a border what's crazy to think about is that all of this has happened in the year 58 bce because when you think about the ancient world you think about a world that in many cases moves much more slowly than the modern one and yet caesar has a blitzkrieg going on in gaul

He says, and some historians will date three battles, some will date two battles, depending on whether you consider that first slaughter of the Helvetians when a quarter of their number were caught on the far side of the river to be a battle or not.

But nonetheless, in that one really six to eight months, because they don't campaign most of the time in the winter, Caesar's done all this damage and changed the power structure of this region. If he thought it was destabilized before he got involved and that was the excuse for getting involved, he's totally destabilized it now. But winter's coming. So what does Caesar do?

Well, he puts his army in winter quarters and he goes back to the area just north of Rome to keep an eye on Roman politics and sort of think about his next move. Now, here's the thing. You could make a case if you wanted to. And some have that everything Caesar just accomplished was done, you know, in a crisis situation in hot pursuit.

whether it was the migration of the helvetians which is you know as we said earlier it's like if you woke up this morning and found 200 000 people you know on your border just unexpectedly it'd be some sort of a crisis so that's the way caesar portrays it so if you give him the benefit of the doubt you say well you know he had to react you couldn't go back to rome and ask for votes and authority you just

That's part of what you do as a head of the province. You go in there and you roll with the punches. So Caesar had to do that. And then the Germans and their involvement, I mean, that was also the same thing. I mean, they were coming over the border. It was getting worse. You had, it was a critical situation. But now you're taking the winter off. We go from a hot blood situation to cold blood where you can think about what you want to do now.

I love the way Tom Holland, as an author, he's great at building this sense of suspense. And he portrays the Gauls at this point in his book Rubicon as sort of waking up together to the fact that they're in the process of being conquered. It's a strange thing, but it's happening so quickly. And because the Gallic tribes are...

you know, separate from each other. If they conquered the tribe next to you, does that mean you're being conquered? Well, not necessarily. And you might not be too panicked necessarily.

But if enough of the big tribes near you are being conquered, and if you happen to know just a little of the history of Roman behavior in other Celtic areas, Spain, for example, or northern Italy, or what's now southern France, you understand that these Romans have a track record. They come in, they defeat the Celtic people, they begin to settle, and in a generation or two, the Celtic people become short-haired Gauls, and in a couple generations after that, they become Toga-wearing Gauls.

And Tom Holland presents this case where once Caesar puts his troops in winter quarters in the middle of Gaul, it sends a signal to everyone that, hey, wait a minute, he's here to stay. And if we're going to prevent a complete takeover, as has happened to other Celtic peoples, it's time to get serious about defending this place. Tom Holland writes, quote,

That winter of 58-57 BC, rather than withdrawing his legions back into his province, Caesar left them billeted a hundred miles north of the frontier, deep in the territory of a supposedly independent tribe. Once again, an illegal measure was justified by the proconsul as an act of forward defense. This was an argument that may have satisfied public opinion back in Rome, but it did nothing to ease a mounting sense of outrage in Gaul itself. The

The full implications of Caesar's new policy were by now starting to hit home. What precisely would satisfy the Romans' desire for a defensible frontier? If the Rhine to the east, then why not the Channel to the north, or the Atlantic coast to the west? Across frozen forests and fields, from village to village, from chieftain's hall to chieftain's hall, the same rumor was born. The Romans were aiming to pacify all Gaul.

that in quotation marks as warriors burnished their glittering jewel rot shields and striplings eager to prove themselves ready for battle forded ice sheeted streams with full armor on their backs so rival tribes sought to patch up their differences free gall prepared itself for war end quote i think a sure sign of the way caesar was thinking during this time period is

is his excuse for going back into Gaul and continuing to fight, even though these things, you know, these crisis moments that had forced him to respond are done with. He says the very act of these people deciding to work together against him justified him going after them.

This is from my Carol and Hammond translation. When Caesar refers to Caesar, he's talking of himself in the third person. And when he talks about the Belgae, he's talking about this kind of Celtic people, as he describes it, to the north of the area he's been campaigning, the people that actually make up

what was the population of modern-day Belgium, part of the Netherlands, part of Germany, and part of northeastern France, a much larger area than modern-day Belgium. And some of them may have migrated across the channel to southeastern Britain, too. But it's these tribes of Belgae that are uniting against Caesar. So he points out that, well, obviously, it's a conspiracy. The Hammond translation says, quote,

As we mentioned above, Caesar was in nearer Gaul, where he heard a host of rumors, confirmed by a letter from Labienus, that all the Belgae, who make up one-third of Gaul, as we said before, were hatching a plot against the Roman people and exchanging hostages. The reason for this plot were as follows. First, they were afraid that our army would march against them now that all the rest of Gaul had been subdued. Secondly, they were being stirred up by a number of the Gauls,

some of whom had been unwilling for the Germans to have any further involvement in Gaul and were equally reluctant for the army of the Roman people to overwinter and become established there. Others were of a volatile and unstable disposition, the sort of men who delight in changes of rules.

Yet another group incited the Belgae to conspire because it was common in Gaul for men who possessed some degree of power and the means to higher support to seize regal power, something which would be more difficult to achieve under our rule. End quote. Now, if we look at this as a neutral arbitrator here, once again, Caesar is essentially indicting these people for doing exactly what they should be doing, if you think about this logically, because Caesar's just smashed...

one of the most powerful tribes in Gaul he's got the support of another who are Roman allies he just kicked the dreaded Germans out if you believe that these really were Germans and he's taken the surrender and submission of a bunch of other Gallic tribes who are cowed now by what he's accomplished and these people to the north all these tribes that Caesar says are he kind of implies that they're part Celtic and part German but this is free Gaul at this point and

These are the tribes that have the ability to raise a lot of troops and still fight Caesar. And Caesar says, and it's not hard to believe, that these fifth columnists from friendly tribes and tribes that have already submitted are, you know, secretly whispering in the ear of the Belgae too. In other words, there is an anti-Roman insurgency in Gaul. And Caesar's talking about it here. And once again, the simple fact that it exists legitimizes his involvement in the region to stop it.

Allegedly, this tribal confederation in the north, these Belgae tribes, will be able to put together almost 300,000 warriors. Not women, children, old people, and all that, but warriors. Once again, you can't help but contrast that with what the Native Americans are trying to resist today.

you know expansion in north america with you know 1500 or maybe 2000 on a really good day warriors and here caesar's trying to figure out how to tackle with no guns right with no cannon nothing like that 300 000 native peoples even if that number is high what if it's 200 000

One of my favorite stories, which kind of in my mind shows how, you know, you can do things in different ways and accomplish the same goals. When you think of the really bureaucratic ancient states, when you think of an Egypt or a China or an Assyria or a Rome even, and you think, okay, when they needed an army, how did they muster it? How did they put it together? How did they raise it? And you think of a really bureaucratic affair.

The only thing missing are the iPads for these people. I mean, there'll be paper records. There'll be all kinds of stuff. It's a modern, you know, organizational situation where you raise armies. So how did tribes do it? Especially tribes that had lots of people. Well, there's an ancient source that says that the Celtic method for this was a variation, if you will, on the idea of last one in is a rotten egg. It's last one who arrives to the muster gets tortured to death in front of the army.

isn't that wickedly efficient and yet in a decentralized sort of tribal way we're not going to get too uh we're not going to get too specific about it there's not going to be written records not going to do all that but the last guy who shows up to the muster yeah we kill him by slow torture in front of the whole army just so you know see you soon i love that i hope that's true just because that's that's wonderfully colorful

And yet the problems that these tribes have is that they need all these people to resist Roman encroachment. But the larger these so-called barbarian armies get, the harder they are to feed. I mean, just imagine instead of 300,000, we'll play with a nice smaller number, 200,000. Well, that's, what, two, three modern football stadiums? How long can you feed that with barbarian logistics?

Hans Delbruck, you know, I love to quote because he's so materialistic and down to earth and scoffs at everything. He points out that this is where the unsexy advantage of the of the so-called civilized bureaucratic states really is the ability to feed people in the field so that they're there to fight.

doesn't matter how many people your opponent has if they're starving they're not going to be that good or if the army has to break up because they can't find food well you're not really an army of 300 000 people then are you you're a bunch of smaller armies spread out over a wider area trying to find enough stuff to keep your troops from starving to death and that means the enemy can defeat you bit by bit which is what caesar does

Caesar will also have his Gallic allies attack individual tribes that are part of this Belgae confederation and keep them busy while he concentrates on other ones. Once again, Caesar says that these people are particularly ferocious. And once again, he blames it on the fact that they're not corrupted by Roman luxuries, that they're a long way from Rome, which keeps them somewhat insulated.

And I've read archaeological works that do say that the farther north you go from Rome, the smaller the towns get, the less urbanized sort of core you have, the more the governments begin to resemble governments that have gone out of fashion in the parts of Gaul closer to Rome, like aristocracies and kings. So maybe there's some truth to it.

It's hard to explain why these Belgae people were so much tougher than the surrounding Gauls, if indeed they were. They don't seem to have been more numerous or better led. They don't have better equipment or training. They don't have more money. I mean, none of the things where you might be able to say, well, there's a legitimate reason why these people lorded over the Gallic neighbors. Caesar says it's basically because they're tougher and more ferocious.

If you don't accept that because that's a stereotypical rhetorical trope and it is, well, how do you explain it? A friend of mine that was a military history major I went to college with, he had the best answer I'd ever heard to this. His answer was he just wasn't buying any of it.

He wasn't believing any of this stuff Caesar said. In his mind, any question about how tough this tribe was versus how tough that tribe was is all stuff Caesar throws in there to make Caesar look better.

He says you can never know about that kind of stuff. So he's going to use the only, you know, facts that you have out there on the table to form a most likely scenario. He said the one fact on the table here that is clear from everything and that screams through the sources is that this Roman army was incomparably better than the foes that they faced.

It's not a very good story, though, if you talk about how, you know, you pitted the Roman army, maybe the best of the Roman armies, arguably the best of the Roman armies that was ever fielded. If you say that, yes, our army came, it cut through the barbarians like butter. It was no competition. A child could have commanded the Romans and destroyed the barbarians. That's not a very good way to frame your self-promotional piece that you're sending back to Rome, is it?

My friend just doesn't buy any of that. In his mind, the only thing you know for sure is that these battles sound like slaughters.

And even though Caesar usually tries to throw in a near-run moment, yes, it was touch and go for a while, but then we crushed them. It doesn't really seem that way. And the Roman advantages are hard for most modern people, certainly for me, to really understand because there's something about the way we're raised in this technological era that we live in, that whenever you talk about vast differences between military capabilities, we assume it's got to be mostly technological. And that's easy for us to conceptualize.

If you say one side in this battle had machine guns and the other had bows and arrows, our modern brain goes, oh, well, that's a slaughter, right? The technological difference is going to equal a certain outcome.

But if you tell us that two armies, you know, 2000 years ago were really different in terms of what they could do to each other and how nasty they were, but they're very similar in terms of actual weapons technology. It's hard for us to understand what it is that makes up the differences that could account for that.

And of course, all the experts who really understand, and there are few experts on real ancient warfare, but they'll tell you, you know, this is what drill and discipline does. This is what equipping basically most of your troops with armor and metal helmets does. And we used an example once of imagine two NFL teams deciding to have a football game, but one team's not allowed any pads or helmets or anything.

And now imagine that both sides are actually playing with edged weapons and it's a lot more nasty even than pro football. You could see where that might be a big advantage also. So you throw that in with the drill with I mean, there's a lot that goes into it. But it's not, as I said, a very good story if you say the Romans came and destroyed the barbarians and it was no trouble at all.

And in my friend's mind, that's why you need to keep pumping up this next tribe that Caesar's going to face. And you thought that was bad. This one's even worse because it begins to get a little monotonous. Caesar's not losing any of these battles and he's not even coming close, really, until you end up with one of these tribes doing this.

What common sense would dictate at a certain point you should do, which is if Caesar's got this incomparably fantastic army and if it's eating you alive on the battlefield, stop facing it.

You don't have to, right? It's not prescribed. And it's hard for certain cultures sometimes because when you get to these warrior cultures that have a heroic sort of personal ethos where how you do in battle and bravery and conspicuous bravery right out in front of other people and fair fights and duels and all that is part of your makeup to talk about subterfuge and ambushing and stuff like that.

Well, it doesn't always mesh so well with the warrior spirit. But believe me, necessity is the mother of invention. And when Caesar goes to take on the various tribes of the Belgae, the Belgae, by the way, is another way to pronounce it. The first thing that happens is they get these large numbers of people together, which they can't feed. So Caesar apparently waits them out.

There'll be some skirmishing, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but it looks like Caesar's plan is to just sit there and absorb all the food he can from his own logistical services while he watches the enemy around him, supposedly in the 300,000 numerical range, begin to starve. So, of course, I have to quote Hans Delbruck here because he's the logistical guy. Delbruck explains Caesar's foray into northern Gaul where the Belgic or Belgic people live and says, quote,

The Belgae, also Belgae, had a premonition of their impending danger, united their forces, and when Caesar crossed their borders, moved out against him with a large allied army.

But civilization has means of warfare that are lacking to barbarians. The Belgae were no doubt capable of assembling a large army, but not of holding it together and feeding it. Just as the Cimbri and Teutons, those barbarians from Caesar's birth period, had to split up on their campaign into Italy and were defeated individually by Marius, Caesar, instead of moving immediately into a decisive battle against an army of the same size as his or perhaps considerably larger,

found the means of splitting up the allied army so that he could then deal with only individual tribes in the meantime delbrook writes caesar had organized two new legions so that he now had a total of eight with his auxiliary troops of numidians cretans balearics and gallic cavalry his army may have well numbered 50 000 combatants and a grand total of 80 000 to 100 000 souls

in order to feed such a mass in one place for a rather long time one must have a very strong and reliable organization transport suppliers and finance system the romans had such means whereas the belgae did not and then he points out that wicked ability of the romans to sort of make stationary field fortifications a battlefield weapon

Delbruck says, quote, but Caesar had still other means at his disposal. He set up a camp on the north bank of the Aene, Aene River, and his army was so well equipped with tools and his soldiers so well disciplined and so well trained in their techniques that within the shortest possible time an impregnable fortress stood there, end quote.

To give you an idea of size, and size varied depending on how large the Roman force that needed to be in the camp happened to be, but some of these camps could be well over 100 acres in size. And they always had a ditch and they always had a rampart and the Roman soldiers carried sharpened stakes when they marched so that at night they could stick those stakes into the earth and rampart so it became a pin cushion around the camp.

there were guard towers and walls and every day the camp stayed in the same spot and didn't move it became more sophisticated deeper more defensible more finished and if you were there long enough roman tents which were laid out on a prescribed roman road grid system which included a main street inside you know this little roman town is what it amounted to these tents would turn into cabins if that camp were there long enough there'd be artillery

And they could put it up so fast. You know, as we said earlier, I believe the Roman soldiers, about half soldier and about half construction worker. And that construction worker side was more important than you might think.

You fans of the Romans know already, though. It's something that they brought to the table, which was unusual. There were other armies that could create camps and were obsessive about creating camps to protect themselves, for example, when on campaign. But the Romans almost used their construction ability in an offensive way. It's fabulous. Unless, of course, you're a Gallic opponent, in which case, you know, how...

disheartening is it to think okay we've got a nice relatively open battlefield here where we're going to fight these romans tomorrow and then wake up in the morning to find fortifications on that battlefield and artillery and i should point out when we say artillery we obviously mean roman and greek style artillery nothing gun powdery

In this case, a lot of it was what's called torsion devices. And I've seen these things and I still don't understand the principle, but it involves twisted sinews and it stores up a lot of energy. And when it's released, you can fling stones or projectiles that look like big heavy arrows or spears from these weapons. And by the way, these weapons come in all shapes and sizes and the very largest of them are rather enormous.

but in this case most of the ones we're talking about are lighter weapons caesar specifically in one of my translations refers to one of the artillery pieces involved as a one pounder and i had to go look that up a one pounder means the stone itself that this weapon

flung weighed one pound but i read another source that talked about the fear that these stones flying through the air at high speed and the sound they made the fear that that generated sometimes if you were on the receiving end of those maybe this is how you outclass an opponent

When your weapon systems are not all that dissimilar, I mean, they're both using edged weapons that are metal. They've both got spears. They both, you know, use human sinew power for, you know, tactical battlefield stuff. But the Roman artillery is pretty awesome. And having the logistical and organizational capability to build a fortress overnight, that's pretty important and effective too.

Add to that what we've been talking about, the ability to feed your army on campaign, and it easily explains how Caesar's campaign against these tribes of Belgae actually work out. As we said, he may be facing 300,000 of these warriors up in the north here near the English Channel, but how do you feed a barbarian army that large? The answer is apparently you don't.

Caesar says the tribes come together and have a meeting and say, we got to go home. Everybody's got to go back to their own homes. We know we can feed ourselves. So we'll all go back to our own homes. And when we get there, if Caesar attacks any of us, everybody will come to the aid of the attacked, right? Historians are divided as to whether or not that is a realistic defense strategy, some sort of pact, or whether it is a cop-out sham to cover up every man for himself or every tribe for himself sort of attitude.

for those curious hans delbrook falls into the latter category but these tribes decide to break up and go home well let's pretend it is 300 000 people when they decide to go home and they've been facing caesar how do they even go about this i mean is it like didn't we compare things to woodstock the woodstock rock concert earlier well what happens when woodstock breaks up well lots of people in large masses just sort of go streaming in the opposite direction

so what do you do if you're caesar and you're an opportunist well you attack don't you and he sent his cavalry running through these crowds of people spearing them shooting them just running them dead killed untold numbers and all of these belgic tribes ran back to wherever their tribal homeland was they seemed to have decided that they were going to hold up most of the time in these hill forts of theirs which by the way if you've never seen one go look at an aerial photo they're awesome

basically what these peoples did was find you know nature's fortification where nature had crafted a wonderful area to defend and then added you know human touches some timber here some stonework there and what have you but if you have a nice flat giant hill and you have maybe a nice river that curves around a whole side of it forming a defensive obstacle i mean you're you got a pretty good start and a lot of these tribes maybe thought that they could hold out in these locations and they were wrong

apparently all caesar had to do was show up to some of these nasty scary tribes that he talked about and the second they saw him they gave up one tribe big nasty tribe tens of thousands of warriors caesar says they saw the roman siege weapons and went i'm out if you're going to use those i'm out so overawed by roman technology there he says another one of those big nasty tribes he didn't even get within five miles of their hill fort and they were coming out to say we're done

He says the last of the big tribes that was opposing him were this tribe called the Nervii, or the Nervii, way up in the north, right? The scary north. He says that they took their people, their wives and their children and their elderly and their animals and their baggage and possessions, and they took them into the deep, dark swamps where the Romans couldn't get them and were going to resist. So, of course, Caesar takes the army into the land of the Nervii.

And he says one day, you know, they're deciding where they're going to camp for the night because we talked about that, right? A little obsessive about the camps. But if you're as bad at scouting and reconnaissance as the Romans are always joked about being, as one of my friends also said, if you're as bad at scouting as the Romans are, you better have a good camp with big walls and towers, right?

And in this case, Caesar has his army arriving in a long column down a road because where we like to talk about field battles all the time, let's understand that most of the time these armies are on the move. And when they're on the move, they're stretched out in a long line like a snake all the way into the distance. Very vulnerable position to be in.

And when the head of the snake arrives at the campsite for the night, Caesar tells those legions that are there first to start building the camp. The legions at the very tail of the snake won't be arriving for some time.

caesar chooses another one of these hills that if you've been paying attention he likes all throughout his writings he likes a nice hill that could put most of his army on it size wise he likes a nice gentle slope on one side he loves it if you can have a terrain feature to guard a flank and in this case there's a river at the bottom of the softly sloping hill he says it's only about three feet deep but it's there

Then he says on the opposite side of the river is a mere image of his hill. It slopes up from the river gently. He says there's about 200 paces. So think about a couple of football fields of sort of open country. And then there's a wood on the top of the hill.

So Caesar has the, you know, lead legions put down their packs, you know, put their military stuff aside, get their hammers, their nails, the timber, the shovels, and begin making the camp and transform themselves into these amazing construction workers. Meanwhile, he says, and this could be open to question, by the way, folks, because what's about to happen here will earn Caesar some criticism during his own lifetime and from military experts ever since. But he says...

I put out my cavalry and my light troops and had them screening this whole operation, right, to protect the vulnerable legions that were, you know, under construction at the moment as more and more of my troops arrived from the column. Eventually, Caesar will have six legions there building the fort with more on the way and

and he says my cavalry is skirmishing with some of the belgae cavalry and he says and then my baggage comes into view in the distance so the roman baggage is in the middle of this long column and it comes over the horizon and everyone can see it and he says when that happens that's the signal for the ambush to start he says that there's an army of nervii in the woods on the opposite hill from caesar's an army

As my friend said, right? If you're going to be so bad at scouting, you miss the army of barbarians in the woods across from where you're building a camp. You better have a strong camp. In this case, right around the time Caesar's cavalry gets close enough to the woods maybe to figure out what's in there, what's in there charges out of the woods. Caesar says at astonishing speed. That's by Carolyn Hammett. Carolyn Hammett has the great line, astonishing speed.

Caesar then goes on to say that they brush aside his cavalry and light infantry screen like an insect, basically, and they come screaming down the hill. Now, we have no idea how big this hill is. All we can say is that they scream down that hill, they cross the three-foot river, they start up the next hill, and that's the hill Caesar and six legions are on, not ready for this.

Now, we talked earlier about why we chose this as a subject. And I said I was fascinated with the tribal people in this situation that we've seen all throughout history trying to resist the encroachment of a more technologically and organizationally superior or more efficient culture. And I chose this one because unlike the Native American example or the African example, these people had a chance to win.

Now, they were never the betting favorites, and the way that they've performed so far in battles against the Roman army demonstrates that. But the numbers are so much larger than what the North American Native Americans, for example, could have put together that you can see why you got to give these people, you know, to quote a boxing line, the puncher's chance. Good luck figuring out how many people there are here. If you're going to believe Caesar, you're going to get up to numbers that are like 75,000.

Those seem absurd, but there's a lot of Romans there, and that's pretty confirmable, so it's not going to be too low. If you said 20,000, that's going to be four times the largest Native American force I've ever heard of. Four times. And we're talking about it charging out of the woods all at once. 20,000 would also be about how many Zulus were at that famous battle in the late 1800s where they wiped out a force of 13 or 1400 soldiers.

um soldiers from britain but the truth is it's probably larger than that so if you said 35 000 35 000 men charging out of a woods within running distance from you and that's how long you have to get your act together before they hit you and try to blow you away like a wave blowing through a few bathers on the beach caesar goes into overdrive at this point and you begin to see

you know, what makes the guy so special. He's not Alexander the Great grabbing a spear and leading the cavalry into the charge. Caesar does grab a shield, he says, but he begins to go and demonstrate leadership.

He also says that these veteran troops do a lot for themselves, and Caesar had left their officers with him, and so all of them would simply throw down their work tools, grab a weapon that they could find. Caesar says their shields were still in the leather cases, their helmets weren't often around, and they just ran to the nearest standards. They forgot anything about going to their own unit. They're just trying to form a block of human beings that can resist this onrush that's coming toward them at full running speed.

And let's understand something. The Nervii tribesmen here are participating in a huge gamble because they certainly know that they are going to be like blown horses by the time they reach the Roman lines. They're taking this gamble that there won't be any Roman lines when they get there yet and that they're going to be able to attack these Romans while they're still divided and in small clumps that are unconnected to each other, in which case they should be able to just blow them away.

But the gamble is, if they don't, they're not going to have a whole lot left. If this turns into any kind of a long-term slog, they're doomed. Caesar says he grabs a flag. He says a couple of words of encouragement to the unit that he's with before going to the next unit to talk to them. But by the time he gets to the next unit, they're already engaged. This is a moment here where these legions and Caesar with them could easily be overrun.

And it allows us to play with some counterfactuals we haven't really been able to discuss yet. The first counterfactual is, what if Caesar loses here? The second counterfactual is, what if Caesar dies here? In the first case, you know, we had said earlier that the Roman expansion into the tribal territory, the rich tribal territory to the north of them seemed inevitable, just like Manifest Destiny seemed inevitable.

But maybe the question to ask is, how many deaths would it take to make something that seemed inevitable not inevitable anymore? Because we can see that only about 65 years after this battle, the Romans will be ambushed by another tribe of people or tribes of people, this time in Germany, modern-day Germany, and they're probably what we could call Germans.

They will destroy this Roman army in a famous battle called the Teutoburger Wald. In 9 AD, I believe it is, the Roman commander will commit suicide on the battlefield to avoid falling into the hands of his barbarian opponents.

which if you believe the hyped-up Roman sources, is a good thing to do because the Romans conduct... It's legendary would be a good way to put it. A legendary mission a couple years after the defeat and debacle to recover what's left of their dead comrades. And they go into the deep, dark forest and supposedly these lurid details of Roman skeletons stapled to the trees and piles of skulls and religious...

altars with you know dead romans and blood everywhere i mean just this horrible tribal nightmarish visitation of all shall we say the native frustration at the situation and you have the famous story of the roman emperor at the time who will beat his head against the wall and supposedly yell the name of the general who killed himself veris and say veris give me back my legions but that was only about 15 000 dead romans

And whatever happened there was one of the main components supposedly that made the Romans decide, you know what, we don't need to advance any farther in Germany anymore. That's a good place to just set the border and we'll expand elsewhere. If that really played that large of a role in the Romans deciding not to go into Germany any farther, what if Caesar lost twice that many men at this battle?

And what is twice that many men in the larger scheme of things? So if you say, gee, could the natives have ever done anything to short circuit manifest destiny? Well, I don't know. What if they killed 30,000 American soldiers in an afternoon? I went and did the math.

And, you know, these numbers are debatable, too. But I went to some common sources and I added up all of the combat deaths that the United States has suffered from the wars of independence when we got our independence in this country up until the First World War started. And then I subtracted the Civil War because those are crazy deaths and everybody on both sides dying is an American casualty. So total U.S. combat deaths excluding the Civil War up to 1917. And it's only...

almost certainly under 30,000. If you lost all the people you lost from independence to the First World War, minus the Civil War, in an afternoon, would that have slowed down Manifest Destiny at all? How much? If the United States ran into a Gallic kingdom on the other side, the western side of the Mississippi early on, and they inflicted a 30,000 death afternoon on the United States, what's the ramifications of that? Who knows?

But remember, the Romans have no guns. They have no cannon. They're on this hill trying to deal with these people that are going to smash into them. And Caesar's running from unit to unit trying to help. It's the most critical point of his career so far. If he dies here, which is very, very possible, does the Roman Republic fall? Does the empire ever start? I mean, the dominoes start tumbling if there's no Caesar, you know, at the end of this afternoon.

And remember, Caesar is going to maximize his chances of becoming a casualty by continually, you know, running over to whichever part of his battle line, if you can even call it something as organized as that, whichever part is the most threatened, right? Wherever the 911 call is, he's going to go there. When the Belgae, when the Nervii manage to hit his troops,

His troops on the left are able to get off, he says, a throw of their pila, the heavy javelin, and then charge down the hill at this one group of Celts or Belgae. They will beat them, chase them down the hill, chase them over the river. The warriors will then regroup and charge the Romans again, only to be beaten by the left wing of the Romans again. And that left wing will start advancing up the hill towards where the Celtic camp is.

caesar's center will also weather the storm and manage to do something similar by beating in hand-to-hand combat the warriors that they run into to their front and will also advance now the problem is is with the left and the center advancing you end up with an open space the roman right wing no longer has any protection they're uncovered on the flank you might say

and caesar says a giant group of these nervii tribesmen with the commander in like a giant hammerhead column push through this gap and then once they're past the center point some of them turn around and begin to smash into the flank of caesar's right-hand units some of them go straight on ahead toward the roman camp with thoughts of looting and burning and pillaging

So Caesar's right-hand legions are now in trouble. He runs over to them to try to help. Meanwhile, when the Celtic forces, the Belgae forces break into Caesar's camp and start looting, the people that see that think the battle's over.

Caesar says his cavalry and light troops that had been brushed aside like insects and beaten so badly when this first starts are just now wearily straggling into camp. They look up and they see the very people who just beat the hell out of them running rampant through Caesar's camp and they go, that's that, and they run away.

all of the civilian and you know average joe camp followers run in fear we're told even that caesar is very tough supposedly uh celtic allied cavalry sees these belgae running rampant through the roman camp and figures they're done too so they turn around and go home in other words

you know caesar's bad situation is getting worse by the moment so he runs over to the right flank where these units are in desperate trouble and basically portrays the situation as dire and collapse of the right flank as imminent here's the way caesar describes the difficulties on the right flank this from my essay hanford translation and remember when caesar writes caesar he's talking about himself in the third person quote

After addressing the 10th Legion, Caesar had gone to the right wing, where he found the troops in difficulties. The cohorts of the 12th Legion were packed together so closely that the men were in one another's way and could not fight properly. All the centurions of the 4th cohort, as well as the standard-bearer, were killed, and the standard was lost.

nearly all the centurions of the other cohorts were either killed or wounded including the chief centurion publius sextius baculus a man of very great courage who was so disabled by a number of severe wounds that he could no longer stand

The men's movements were slow, and some in the rear, feeling themselves abandoned, were retiring from the fight and trying to get out of range. Meanwhile, the enemy maintained unceasing pressure up the hill in front, and were also closing in on both flanks. As the situation was critical and no reserves were available, Caesar snatched a shield from a soldier in the rear. He had not his own shield with him, made his way into the front line and

addressed each centurion by name and shouted encouragement to the rest of the troops, ordering them to push forward and open out their ranks so that they could use their swords more easily. His coming gave them fresh heart and hope. Each man wanted to do his best under the eyes of his commander-in-chief, however desperate the peril, and the enemy's assault was slowed down a little." But the legion next door to that was having even worse trouble, so Caesar ran over there.

He ordered the commanders of that force to put his soldiers into a square so that they couldn't be outflanked and attacked from the rear anymore, and that stabilized that situation. Historian Adrian Goldsworthy writes about this moment, saying that Caesar had stabilized the situation on the right flank, but the collapse was still imminent. It was just a matter of time. The Celtic force was battering these Romans down.

but two things happened that ended up having the same effect on this battle as the romans having a third reserve line has done in the previous battles remember they don't have a reserve line here because they don't have a line they're not deployed

But what ends up happening is those Romans that had been victorious initially on the left that had gone and captured the barbarian camp on the opposite hill were now able to look down and see the problem that Caesar was facing. So they began to come down the hill to renew the fight themselves. Plus, the legions in the very end of the column, the tail of the snake, have finally gotten to the top of the hill and looked down and see what's going on.

and they now entered the fray. So even though Caesar wasn't able to create the traditional Roman third line, the reserve line to throw in, you know, when everything was going to hell in a handbasket, the circumstances had, in effect, created one. And the legion that came down after capturing the Celtic camp and the ones that came up from the rear of the baggage train...

Turn the tide of the battle. And remember, these Belgae, these Nervii and related tribes had sold their soul for that initial charge. They were like blown horses. As we said, the arrival of fresh troops is the worst thing that could have happened to them.

but caesar says they were tough they were ferocious they would not give in even when he had them basically you know compressed into a disordered mob and he was he was killing them all with missile weapons so that he didn't even have to risk his troops he said the warrior stood on top of the corpses of their friends pulled the spears

of the enemy out of their shields or caught them in the air and turned around and threw them back you know yelling defiantly to the romans even as they know how the afternoon is going to turn out a ferocious warrior enemy allowing themselves to be absolutely decimated rather than running away once again let's remember caesar has every interest in portraying them to be as incredibly nasty and brave as possible nonetheless maybe they were

Caesar says that after the battle, the families that had taken shelter in the deep dark woods or swamps came out sort of begging his clemency, which Caesar gives and was known for giving plenty of times. Let's point that out and be fair to him. It was part of his act a little bit, part of his shtick, part of...

you know his je ne sais quoi sometimes i'll let you live but he did he also says though they gave him a rundown of what they suffered in the battle and he says that they told him out of 60,000 fighting men they only had 500 left who could carry arms now that doesn't tell you if those people are all dead or if they're incapacitated from wounds likely a combination of both but we have no idea what the breakdown is

Then they also point out that Caesar has destroyed their leadership in this battle. They say out of 600, and the different translations say different things. One says senators, another says counselors, another says magistrates. But out of 600 of these leading figures in the tribe, these survivors tell Caesar only three are alive. So for all intents and purposes, he has destroyed this tribe. Now he did it in battle.

And that's going to make a crucial difference soon. Now, there's one little bit of leftover business, though, that Caesar accomplishes right at the end of this battle. One of the tribes that was coming to help the Nervii never made it to the battlefield. Found out the results, turned around and went home. But that doesn't get you out of trouble with Caesar, who follows them back home with...

He has a very confusing incident involving, you know, the deals of a surrender that maybe were misinterpreted. Nonetheless, bad things happen. So Caesar eventually had to storm the town, kill a lot of people. He says he sold 53,000 people from the population into slavery and points out that he sold them all in one lot, a Roman version of storage wars or something. How much for this entire city of slaves? Hey, you got 53,000 at a bargain price.

And the slaves now, let's recall something. This is money. Cha-ching. You sell the slaves. You make money. It's one of the things that comprise booty.

money, stuff, you know, whatever you can take and sell or whatever you can take for yourself. Sometimes Caesar would gift slaves, you know, who weren't slaves five minutes ago, let's point that out, to his soldiers. You know, each one gets a slave. That is a nice little Christmas bonus if you're a Roman soldier or any soldier.

And a couple of historians say, but no one knows because it's not like we have a financial statement on how Caesar is doing each year. But you stop hearing about Caesar's terrible financial crunches now. And he's seen distributing money more. He's allegedly paying his troops more than the going rate. And he's sharing the winnings with them, which is pretty normal. But if you're doing really well, the winnings can be really good.

And as a side note, all of you who know the Roman story understand this, there's a process underway here that will play, you know, mightily into the destruction of the Roman Republic very soon. And that's the allegiance of this army, not necessarily being 100% entirely to the Senate and people of Rome, but increasingly more and more to this man, Julius Caesar.

And he's far from the only Roman general this is happening to. His fellow members of the Triumvirate are getting into similar situations. When the allegiance of the troops, because, you know, how they're doing in life is so dependent on that single figure at the head of their particular army, when their allegiance shifts from the state to a single individual, you can see how the recipe for disaster is just...

Well, the chain reaction has already started, right? Rome's problems go deep into the distance, but that's a key component that has to happen. And what I always tell people that think they see parallels with the United States today and the Roman Republic is, yes, there are some, but you're missing that key component and it's important. We don't have armies that are beholden to single military individuals more than they are the state. Increasingly, as this army and Caesar bond together and share the fruits of their labor, as they are,

So the question of whether Caesar's in debt anymore seems to be that he probably isn't. And in fact, this little business venture in Gaul is working out pretty well indeed. So Caesar says after this little battle with the Belgae, he sends a message to Rome and he says, and let me point out, not for the last time in his commentary, Gaul is pacified.

now let me stop for a minute because if you say not for the last time is gaul really pacified because again you have to wonder what caesar's doing here he may have had a whole lot of reasons for going back to rome at this time period and telling them hey the war is over and we won you can see some advisor going listen caesar you have no idea what it's like on the ground in rome right now we're trying to get these people elected to the senate it would really help if the timing were good and you said we won in gaul right i mean

I guess what I'm saying is I trust Caesar and his intelligence, both his mental intelligence and his reconnaissance, enough to think that I doubt whether he thought Gaul really was pacified. Because let's look at what just happened here in two campaign seasons, so less than two years. Caesar conquered a place the size of Texas. Plutarch says 300 tribes. Really? And you expect it to stay subdued?

Well, if he did expect that, he was wrong. And if he didn't, well, there must have been another reason for telling the people back in Rome that the war was over. Caesar, in a rare, obvious brag in the commentaries, points out that when the Romans heard that Caesar had just won in Gaul, they proclaimed 15 days of thanksgiving in the capital, which Caesar points out is a longer amount of time than anyone before him had ever had a thanksgiving declared in their honor.

So maybe that accounts for it right there. Let's remember why Caesar's in Gaul doing all this to begin with, because of how it's looking back home. 15 days of Thanksgiving, an unprecedented amount. That makes it all worth it right there, doesn't it? Depends on what your goals are, of course. Now, the other thing that needs to be pointed out here is how victory has a way of forgiving everything, right?

because there is an undercurrent in rome amongst prominent individuals admittedly prominent individuals that don't like caesar anyway and would find something to get him with if they could anywhere but that what caesar's doing is grossly illegal on many fronts he's raised legions out of his own pocketbook and without permission

opponents in Rome have pointed out things that he's done during this campaign that are violations of Roman honor and one or two of them will suggest maybe he should be handed over to the former Roman enemies as a well let's put it this way the Romans have done that before where some Roman general on the ground made a deal with a

Another city came back. The Roman Senate repudiated the deal, sent the general back to the former opponents in chains, left him out sort of in front of the front gate and said, sorry, he couldn't make a deal like that. That's against Roman honor. But since he did here, you can have him do with him what you want.

And there were people, you know, of the Cato camp that were maybe suggesting that Caesar deserved treatment like that, but very few people were listening. You know why? Because the guy just conquered an area larger than all of Italy itself in two campaign seasons.

You can hear the crowd going, Rome, Rome, Rome, we're number one. I mean, come on, when in human history have the populace not celebrated unbelievable victory? It's almost weird to imagine the general public ever doing the opposite. So what it took for Caesar to get these victories, legal or illegal, are totally overshadowed by the result.

The result may be an illusion, though. Caesar says that after he's done here, he goes and starts to look at the next big venture he's going to do. He's finally going to go into Illyria, around where, you know, the modern Adriatic is, and he's going to start conquering some tribes there, which had been a plan of his all along. But now that Gaul is pacified, he can, you know, put some time into it. And he says, while he's there, Gaul erupts back into war. It happened so fast, you can't help but wonder if it was ever pacified at all.

And there have been some theories floated in a bunch of books I've read lately, which I think is fascinating. I'm going to run it past you because it would make a lot of sense, wouldn't it? And it's the idea that maybe the reason Gaul almost immediately erupts into trouble after Caesar says it's pacified is that maybe they didn't fully understand what they were agreeing to when they said that they were going to submit to Rome. In other words, Rome is treating them as though they have signed a contract with

And if you break the contract, the ramifications are, you know, mafia style in nature. So don't break the contract. And maybe like a bunch of Native Americans who are expected to read like a lawyer this treaty, and yet they can hardly write their names in the white man's language. Maybe these Celtic leaders were essentially taken for a ride. They're barbarian lawyers, not as good as the Roman ones, right?

And maybe as soon as they started living under the real terms of the deal, maybe it was a little different than they thought. And one of these historians had a great line. He said, these tribes were accustomed to making themselves clients of other barbarian peoples.

who very well may have treated them in a much more laissez-faire, hands-off kind of fashion. That might have been their idea of a client in their world. But now the Romans were coming in, and these are going to send, you know, they'll send surveyors to your property. Let's see where the property line is here. Oh, we're going to settle some former soldier veterans on part of your property. We're going to take your son into the army. And oh, yeah, taxes are going up this year, and we need extra wheat because the army's starving. I mean, whatever it might be, the Gallic people are chafing at what it's like to be a Roman.

But now I think we get to the crux question that we started this talk out with. You know, what would you be willing to sacrifice everything for? If you're chafing, isn't that the word I just used? If you're chafing from Roman domination, at what point is the chafing bad enough for you to risk having the Romans come back and

beat you in some sort of field battle kill you you know what did we say before kill you kill your sons rape your wife send your daughters off to slavery destroy you i mean at what point is chafing bad enough to earn that and you begin to get into this question of human motivations what is it that's worth risking that kind of terrible outcome for caesar says it's liberty

and freedom and independence. And that's weird. Not because those are weird motivations, but because Caesar's the guy who's going to stamp out these people. And once again, he's giving them aspirations that we can sort of relate to, that make them sympathetic characters to us. In the same way he's put, you know, the voice of an almost war crimes prosecutor in the mouth of his German opponent, Ariovistus, he's going to put...

You know, the words of people like Patrick Henry, give me liberty or give me death and all those kind of people into the mouths of these Gallic opponents whose liberty he is smashing. It's fascinating. And again, it's very complicated. I don't fully understand it. I enjoyed Andrew M. Rigsby's book, as I said, on the on the whole analysis. But no consensus exists. They just analyze the three dimensional chess game Caesar's playing.

And of course, the first question we all ask, right, is if Caesar says that these people are fighting for liberty and freedom and when he puts words into their speeches and they talk about liberty and freedom, what the heck do people, barbarian people, 2,000 years ago mean when they say that? Or if Caesar's putting those words into their mouth and they're Caesar's words, what does Caesar mean for it to mean?

well according to andrew rigsby it's just what you think it means maybe only more so he writes the word and then gives you the latin word caesar actually used he says quote freedom libertas was an even more politically charged term for the romans than it is generally today for it is deeply rooted in the pervasive social institution of slavery despite the many and varied situations to which it was applied

libertas remained a powerful slogan because of its unambiguously positive primary sense conversely slavery servetus recalled the degradation of slaves seen daily in a society which as we have already noted personal dignity was a fighting matter end quote

In other words, you know, Caesar's basically giving an excuse for these rebellions to the Gauls that he says right away, right, is a question of freedom versus slavery, implying that Romans understand that and would never settle to be slaves and that we today look at and go, well, I can fully see what the Gauls are about because I'd be on their side, too.

It's a very interesting document, and it says a lot about the tenor of the times and the audience he was writing for that he could position the whole story this way and still expect you to cheer on his victories when he crushes these freedom loving Gauls. Right. That's really what they were.

And just with every story of revolution, by the way, for every account you hear of the Gauls trying to preserve their own liberty and freedom in a very high-minded Patrick Henry sense, you will read the accounts that get much more gritty and ascribe much more base values to the people who are doing these things. You know, this particular group run by this aristocrat wants more power within his tribe, but Roman domination, you know, thwarts his ambitions, so he's wanting a revolution.

Or this other tribe who used to collect all the tolls on this river before the Romans took over, but now they favor the rival tribe. And so, you know, receipts are down from the river tolls. So we're going to rebel.

To ones who are just plain fickle and tired of living under the same set of rules for a significant period of time. Caesar says that the Gauls all have a bunch of men who just delight in the change of governments and they get bored easily. And so they're easily roused to some sort of change just for change's sake. So who knows what the actual reasons are. The bottom line, though, is Caesar barely gets to enjoy life.

the winter off before he's back in Gaul, right? Recently pacified Gaul has exploded into problems three or four months after Caesar declares mission accomplished. There's a strain of historians who think this is all part of the plan. Caesar doesn't want to give up his command. Remember, he'd be vulnerable in Rome. Plus, there's still places to conquer, money to be made, reasons to stay, armies to keep assembled and in your hands.

But a pattern is going to emerge for the next couple of years. And it's a pattern actually that's not that dissimilar from other Roman conquest of Celtic peoples in other parts of Europe before this time. The pattern is charismatic leaders emerge who can manage to unite at least local groupings of tribes into larger confederacies who then challenge the Romans by rebelling against them. And the Romans will respond with extreme violence.

It's actually a very interesting case study for modern people. And if you're interested in military affairs and guerrilla warfare and civil wars and things like that, to watch how Caesar approaches and the Romans during this period approach, how you quell domestic resistance, you know, by a population. Because when I was growing up,

In the wake of the Vietnam War, there was so much talk about if you'd only fought the Vietnam War, you know, with the gloves off was the phrase used, you know, to take away these modern cultural inhibitions that tell you, you know, you can't do this and you can't do that. You go in there and you really just are ruthless and you'll change the battlefield scene overnight. So the Romans are an example of that.

In later Roman history, they will be very good, you know, at the game of the carrot and the stick, and they'll learn how to bribe tribes and when it's better to spend money than to beat people over the head with a stick. In the Caesar period, they're much more in the beat the other people over the head with a stick mode. And Caesar will go back to Gaul and spend the next several years truly pacifying it. The methods that Caesar will use, though, to quell this resistance are rough, though.

One of the first people he'll deal with, and it's a confederacy of peoples on the Atlantic seaboard in 56 BCE. He will defeat. He has to build a fleet to do it. The Romans are crazy good that way. Defeats the seafaring people.

And because in Caesar's mind, all of this area has already been pacified, we're now dealing with rebellions. This isn't a contest of, you know, virtues on the battlefield. May the best man win and you'll probably get clemency afterwards. This is you are rebelling against the authority of the state. You are setting a bad example for other people we need to keep down. So we have to make an example of you.

And on the main tribe called the Veneti, or sometimes Veneti, Caesar killed their entire leadership, beheaded them, sold the population into slavery. He will deal with a German incursion again, or so he says, in 55 BCE. So he launches what you might call a foray, a raid, a punitive expedition into Germany.

meanwhile manages to have another battle against a German tribe. This is the incident, by the way, that some of the Cato crowd back in Rome suggested that Caesar maybe should be handed over to his German enemies in chains.

Because what he did, and he admits it freely in his commentaries, is this leadership of this German tribe, sounds like a large number of people, showed up to Caesar maybe to negotiate what they thought was a surrender. And instead, Caesar grabs him and holds him and sends his army out to attack the now leaderless and unexpecting German tribe.

And the numbers that die here are crazy. Unbelievable and crazy. I mean, Plutarch says, wait for it, 400,000 German tribespeople died. And Caesar himself in the writing talks about a moment in the fighting where there's just crowds of women and children. And what does he do? He sends his cavalry to, and this is a quote from the

Hammond translation hunt them down so perhaps we're moving from one potential UN war crimes tribunal set of charges when we're talking about free and understood warfare and a contest of arms and something like this the most amazing thing Caesar does we have to point out the wow factors don't we is that he will build a bridge over the Rhine River right no small river that and

He will do it in 10 days. And I mean, it involves cranes and pylons and rams to put pillars into the riverbed. It's incredibly tribes come and submit to him simply because they've seen him build this. He said he had to build it because boats did not seem like a good way to cross the river. And he wasn't sure it was in keeping with Roman dignity, he said. So you spend 10 days and you build a trestle bridge.

The Romans crossed the bridge, burned lots of villages, you know, killed quite a bit of people in these raids, took 18 days, comes back over the Rhine on the bridge they built, and then they destroy the bridge. It's generally assumed that Caesar was trying to send a message. The message is at least one is clear, and that's that we can come over this river anytime we want. It's no barrier at all. Don't pretend like you're safe.

the other one which is what some historians have also said is that it was also caesar's way of saying and by the way this is the border you come over here expect a response not from these gallic peoples whom you've come to expect you can beat in battle but against us that you just lost yet another battle too how many dead four hundred thousand caesar says there were four hundred and thirty thousand people there and he talks about great numbers of them dying

Even Michael Grant says the numbers may be exaggerated, but maybe not that much. What do you do with Caesar's death ledger there? It just went up by a lot, didn't it? And if you believe Cato and that segment of the Romans, it wasn't something that had to happen. Caesar prompted it. Maybe he wanted it.

After this defeat of the Germans late in the campaign season, right? He should probably pack it in after that big German thing. No, he takes a fleet and crosses the English Channel and goes where no Mediterranean army has ever gone before. The foggy, misty, almost legendary in Mediterranean circles, island of Britain.

lands there talks about the natives being in chariots and painting themselves blue and caesar has a battle and of course it's you know near run thing because of all kinds of problems but of course he wins uh the fleet almost gets destroyed by a storm there are howls of protests among his contemporary political opponents and let's be honest armchair generals ever since going what the heck are you doing what does this have to do with anything how do you justify this and yet the publicity is outrageously good

Earlier we said he's leading this expedition like a heavily armed Lewis and Clark exploration team. Well, gee, he just landed in Britain and the people back home can't stop talking about it. All those people that keep talking about him exceeding his wartime authority and what have you, you know, can hardly make themselves heard above all of the positive comments.

By the way, little side note here, the debate is ongoing whether or not these people in the British Isles during this period should be classified as Celtic or not. And again, we're not talking in terms of ethnicity as much as in culture.

It's a little confusing because Caesar says one of these tribes that lived on the now French side of the English Channel did some migrating over. So when Caesar goes to Britain and describes people that sure sound Celtic, they sound a lot like the people we've been talking about in terms of their dress and their styles and their attitudes and their religion and whatnot.

You don't know whether or not he's running into that one tribe or whether or not the people all through the rest of it. And they all have Celtic names. I mean, again, I'm not qualified to weigh into this ongoing debate. Apparently, Caesar doesn't refer to them specifically as Celts. And in the ancient world, they used a different name for them. And I'm going to use my Barry Cunliffe get of a jail free card and say that a Celt is anyone who considers themselves to be Celtic. I don't know.

now caesar's obviously created a problem not a hard one to imagine happening either when he takes a big chunk of his army from what's now modern day france and takes it over into britain because that means it's no longer in what's now modern day france

you can already feel, you know, 2000 plus years later, sort of the rumblings going on, right? If Caesar's not actively here, you know, the cauldron starts bubbling again. The next year, 54 BCE, Caesar launches a much better prepared and significant raid was what the earlier expedition to Britain probably was. This is more like an, a reconnaissance in force or a minor invasion. He lands there, defeats a major British tribe and,

And here's sort of, I mean, if you're following Caesar's story and Caesar's narrative, throughout the entire narrative, we said there's been this fifth column entity in Gaul itself. People who are in these tribes, certainly in the less friendly tribes, but even in Rome's greatest allies who don't like the Romans.

And so Caesar, when he's going to go back to Britain for the second time, realizes that, you know, he's leaving all these troublemakers back in Gaul. So in a very ancient, typical Roman thing, he asks for them to come to him. Honored guest would probably be the way the invitation said, but hostages is the way, you know, you would call it today. Hostages for good behavior. We're going to take the troublemakers with us.

There's a whole bunch of famous troublemakers in Roman Celtic history. These people that are like the Geronimos of Celtic resistance. And in this case, one of them, you know, not that I expect everyone to remember, you know, that magician Gandalf Dumbledore, religious leader, druid guy we talked about earlier. He was sort of the reason this whole thing happened, though, if you believe the official narrative. Deficitious.

By the way, you will also see Divicaecus and Divitiacus, but we're going to go with Divicacius. Well, Divicacius is sort of a Roman friend, but he's got a brother. Think of like two heads of the same coin. And his brother in this tribe that are Rome's greatest friends in the region is anti-Roman.

And his druid brother's been covering for him all this time, and Caesar says he's been nice about the whole thing because he appreciates this druid guy and likes him and needs his support and his tribe is very important. But this is one of the guys. His name is Dunorix, one of the guys Caesar wants to take with him to the British Isles so that he's not causing trouble when Caesar's away.

And this Dumnorix character decides that this at least, you know, once again, we're going from Caesar. Caesar says Dumnorix thinks Caesar is going to take he and all the other troublemakers across the English Channel and kill them there away from the prying eyes of his own people, able to come back and make up any old excuse why they're not with him anymore.

And if Dumnorix doesn't believe this himself, Caesar says he's going to all these other, you know, tribal leaders and saying, you know, don't go with Caesar to Britain. He's going to kill us there. Caesar then talks about, you know, many excuses that this Dumnorix makes, you know, of the sort that, you know, I get seasick and I can't go with you for all these other reasons. Caesar says finally when, you know, Caesar corners him, the guy bolts.

basically showing his true colors caesar would basically have you understand he's just uncovered and unmasked this conspiracy he sends his men to go bring this guy back dead or alive they bring him back dead and this guy becomes just one of many troublemakers that caesar begins to go after now is his way of shutting down this gallic resistance right get rid of the the leaders of the resistance

Because, you know, some of these tribes have large numbers of people that are of a different political opinion than what the majority eventually gets. I mean, in one of these battles that Caesar's facing, he'll face a tribe that has reportedly killed all their senators who disagreed with the idea of rebellion. So when we were saying, what are you willing to die for? What are you willing to lose everything for? There might be disagreement in your community about that.

And Caesar says one of these tribes killed all the senators that had a no vote on rebellion and went unified to go meet their fate against the Romans. The troublemaker that Caesar had instructed be brought back to him dead or alive, that Dumnorix guy, he represents an example of a counter faction, an opposition party, if you will, in his own tribe. And he must have been charismatic and he must have been dangerous in the Roman eyes and

And he just becomes the latest victim in the Roman standard policy of how you deal with these troublemakers everywhere you encounter them. It's a sort of, if you will, a very mafia-like approach to the situation, but it's hard to argue about its efficacy when faced with, you know, charismatic tribal guerrilla leaders, if you will, kill them when you can. The Romans had done this many times, either directly or indirectly. I believe earlier we mentioned one of the

national heroes of the people of Portugal now when they were in their ancient version and he's one of these people that you know led a opposition to Rome and they managed to get him assassinated I believe by his own people I believe that was a bribe a paid assassination and

In another case, the Romans ran into one of these leaders, and this is in this conflict that was charismatic that they wanted to get. And during a cavalry battle, the Roman, this is from Caesar, by the way, the Roman leader on the site had instructed his cavalry. Remember, this is at least hundreds of men against hundreds of men and maybe thousands of men against thousands of men that when you go out there on the field for this large cavalry battle, don't pay any attention to any of the other people involved.

in front of you go right after that one guy and all i could think about was imagine being you know that guy and you're on the field with your hundreds and hundreds of cohorts thinking we're going to take on their big formation and everyone in their formation is after you personally needless to say

They brought his head back to the Roman commander. Mission accomplished there. And another influential, maybe irreplaceable leader of the Celtic opposition is no more. Right out of the Roman playbook.

And then in 54 BCE, you get one of the pretty good troublemakers, right? These are all sparks. This is a pretty good spark. His name is Ambiorix. He was one of several important people in a revolt. He's a national hero of Belgium now. And he fit this template of a charismatic Celtic figure who could unite a bunch of tribes together to oppose the Romans.

He's a particularly successful one of these rebels in that he manages by hook or by crook to kill a bunch of Romans. I think it's like 15 cohorts, like a legion and five cohorts, something like that. He gets out there and convinces them to leave the safety of their fort and then ambushes them when they're marching through some deep, dark woods, no doubt.

And the Romans would be in trouble all the time during the winter when they would break up to the various areas they had to patrol and keep safe in these forts and it becomes like Fort Apache. And anytime a rebellion happens, you know, this isolated legion or two of Romans will find themselves deep in Indian country surrounded by angry natives. And time and again, this becomes part of the narrative. But when Caesar will go back and rescue all these people or avenge them, a lot more of the Gallic folks die.

And you again have to ask yourself, you know, what's going on here and what do you form in terms of an opinion of whether or not it is a good idea, if you are a follower of Ambiorix, for example, to rebel against the Romans? Because on one hand, how could anybody rebel?

say you didn't have a good enough cause when you're talking about your freedom and your independence right your liberty your political liberty the sovereignty of your own people whatever it is those are pretty high-minded causes but if you're in the meeting amongst your peers and your countrymen and you're having this discussion of do we rebel or don't we i mean are you a coward if you stand up and say listen we have very little chance of actually succeeding here

and if we fail there's a hundred percent chance we're going to lose everything that matters to us including the liberty that you're worried about now maybe we shouldn't do this those are the kind of choices as the old saying goes that try men's souls right and just to get an example of what it might mean in practice take a look at what happened to this ambiorix character right this latest spark a guy who when he destroyed these roman legions in the deep dark woods on the march he

You know, Caesar made it out to be like a Custer's Last Stand situation with the officers and the men who are left over commit suicide because they're just, they're trapped by the natives surrounded. I mean, it's a harrowing, terrible story and Caesar launches

you know recriminations at certain commanders i mean it's a stain and so the bad guy well probably hero in the gallic eyes but the bad guy in the roman story ambiorix is going to be pursued as if to the ends of the earth and caesar has this ongoing you know attempt to track him down he finally has him getting away and riding off into the sunset with like only four bodyguards he says the only amount of people he would trust his life to

Of course, it's a good end to the movie, isn't it? I mean, the Geronimo figure here from the Roman point of view gets away, lives to ride another day off into the sunset, whatever. But unfortunately, his whole tribe can't do that, and Caesar will wipe them out of existence. Well, that's the way he frames it anyway. Historians are not sure if that was really what happened. It's pretty fair to say, though, that Caesar treats this tribe, the tribe that Ambiorix was a leading figure in, as

as harshly or more harshly than any other entity Caesar punished in his career. And so you might think to yourself, okay, now that these people have seen Caesar

what almost everything is. The Romans after this period will start going after Celtic cultural things that they think are inciting revolt or bringing tribes together. We mentioned Druids earlier. There's a pan-tribal nature to these Druids maybe where they come together from multiple tribes in meetings to debate things. And at certain points after this period, the Romans will think that the Druids are sort of a hotbed of resistance and

and target them the romans could be very accommodating to your local traditions as long as you didn't mess with them if you cause trouble and they decided that these local traditions had something to do with it goodbye local traditions so this is where some who will say that maybe we're not talking about an actual genocide here as much as we're talking about a cultural genocide may have a point there

As we said before, this genocide question is somewhat clouded by the fact that the people in this story have a choice, unlike those involved in the Second World War Holocaust, right? The choice is submit and stay quiet or die.

How does having a choice like that make this sort of a Holocaust, if indeed that's the proper term for it, the Celtic Holocaust? How does having a choice make it different? Because it obviously does from something like what the victims of the Second World War Holocaust went through. I would also be remiss if I didn't at least point out that this idea of choice may have been an illusion for most of the people in this story, right?

caesar himself said and i don't know how well we can believe him that there were really only three classes to use a modern term in the gallic society you had the knights you know basically the aristocracy and the nobility you had the druids and then you had everyone else and he said everyone else is basically a slave now this is probably roman hyperbole and and misinformation and whatnot archaeologists like barry cunliffe

And John Collis will point out that there's a lot more nuance to something like that than Caesar points out. But his point might be well taken. How many people, if you give the choice of, you know, if you just acquiesce to Roman conquest and submit, everything will be fine. But if you don't, you're all going to die and be sold into slavery. How many people get to make that choice in that Gallic society? How many people are in on that decision? I would submit that it's probably likely and common sense that

that most of the people in this situation are simply caught up in the gears of history like most people in any other period sometimes it seems like we're all just along for the historical ride doesn't it in this case caesar will spend the entire campaign season of 53 bce essentially punishing

punitive expeditions finishing off battles small things as adrian goldsworthy says he campaigns the entire campaign season in gaul but he doesn't fight a major battle what's he doing pacifying and it's ugly brutal business on the ground and we don't have details but goldsworthy has an interesting line where he says

that the archaeological record has shown that the quantities of gold and other precious materials found in sites in this area after Caesar's time in Gaul plummet he says quote overall the archaeological record shows a marked decline in the quality and quantity of material culture and suggests that the region did not recover for at least a generation end quote

So quelling the spirit of the population to resist, that's an age-old counterinsurgency strategy.

You don't just go after the rank and file, though, the people. You go after their leadership, as we said, and Caesar determined that this one, it seems, highly respected figure. It's hard to draw any other conclusion considering what his demise created in terms of resentment, but Caesar determines that this Gallic leader named Aco or Aco is in part responsible or was somehow involved in this resistance, maybe secretly supplying them with something, what have you, and Caesar decides he must die.

And so he has him flogged to death, whipped to death. You think of a bull whip or an electrical cord hitting you until you die. And then Caesar had his head cut off, which is an extra twist of the knife given the religious reverence the Gallic people and the Celtic people have for the head. And then Caesar

Caesar gets swept back into the maelstrom of Roman politics because all of a sudden, you know, if the Roman ship of state has been foundering for a long time and taking on water, all of a sudden in this year, the ship just.

goes straight down in the bow the the stern of it sticks straight up in the air and all of a sudden it's teetering and caesar of course because this entire life of his revolves around roman politics and how he's doing in it gets drawn back into the situation there's riots there's killings the senate house is burned down and the gallic celtic people hear of this

and they think maybe caesar's not coming back at the same time they're upset about this nobleman being whipped to death they're upset about the pacification there's a whole bunch of tribes adrian goldsworthy reminds me

that are some of the most powerful tribes in gaul some of the most sophisticated to the ones who have the most contact with rome which is why most of them are roman friends which is why up until this time they haven't really participated in the defense of gaul because they're on the roman side

but they're starting to realize that the Roman side is going to control all of them at some point. You may be a more favorite tribe under Roman domination, but you're still under Roman domination. Goldsworthy does a great job explaining the situation. He writes, quote,

Caesar's understanding and manipulation of tribal politics was generally good, but over the winter of 5352 BC, his policy failed badly. There were a number of reasons for this failure, but at its root was the growing sense of the extent to which his presence had changed things.

This was especially true of the Celtic Gallic peoples of central and southern Gaul, one of the three broad groups into which Caesar's commentaries divided, quote-end-quote, the whole of Gaul. These tribes had not yet fought against Caesar to any meaningful degree, although it was in their lands that the campaigns against the Helvetii and Ariovistus had been waged. Dominating the trade routes with the Roman world, tribes like the Aedui, Sequani, and

and Arverni were wealthier and more politically sophisticated than the peoples to the north. They had aided Caesar, and he in turn had favored the tribes and leaders most sympathetic to him, and he had fought, or at least so he claimed, on their behalf against the Helvetii and Ariovistus. Now, over the course of the next year, virtually all of them would turn against him. This was not simply a question of rebellion by those who had not received the procouncil's favor,

and had watched as rivals were elevated above them, the rebels eventually included many chieftains who had done rather well under Roman domination. That was at the heart of this new mood, the realization that Caesar and his legions were in Gaul to stay, and would not be returning to the confines of the Transalpine province after a few swift campaigns.

Rome now expected her power to be acknowledged on a permanent basis throughout Gaul. The ally had become the conqueror without ever facing serious resistance from the Celtic peoples, end quote.

Well, of course, they hadn't faced serious resistance because Caesar had been practicing the divide and conquer strategy on them. He'd been using these powerful tribes that were friendly to Rome against the powerful tribes that weren't. And now the ones that are friendly to Rome realize that it doesn't matter, you know, which side you ally with, you're going to be living under Roman control either way. And it makes them receptive to

to the ideas that come forward once it's clear that the political problems in rome may trap caesar there while his legions are wintering in gaul what if all gaul could unite against caesar especially while he was away

Think of how crazy the movie idea would be if some screenwriter developed a treatment based on the idea that all the North American tribes unite together in a common effort, militarily speaking, to defeat the European colonists on the eastern seaboard in, I don't know, 1650, we'll say.

They would have, of course, had to have conducted their own Native American version of the Lewis and Clark expedition so those eastern tribes could trek across North America and find out that there's a west coast and natives living there, rope them into the defense arrangement, and then at some point, you know, you could have this big face-off between all the native tribes of North America against the relative newcomer Europeans. It's too crazy to imagine, though, isn't it? You wouldn't be able to suspend disbelief. The premise is too far-fetched.

But that's what happens in Gaul. That's why it's such a rare moment. The divide and conquer strategy all of a sudden fails all at once. And these tribal people realize their predicament at the same time and are able to drop their age-old animosities and decide together that it's now or never.

If we're going to maintain our freedom, even our freedom to fight each other for tribal supremacy down the road, we're going to have to unite now and defeat this threat before it's too late. And it might already be too late.

But this opportunity of Caesar getting roped back into the politics of Rome opens up the door. Caesar says that, you know, there's a lot of other grievances that are coming to a head all at the same time, including Caesar's execution of that nobleman, Acco, or Aco, that he had whipped to death. And he says that these Gallic tribes come together. It makes them sound like the leaderships come together in the deep, dark woods.

archaeologist Barry Cunliffe suggests it would not be strange to think of the Druids being the ones who sort of officiated an event like this both for sacred reasons but also because they're sort of the diplomats and the pan-national sanctifiers of these tribes I mean they would have been the respected people to act as

as the referees and judges and arbitrators in a case like this. There are stories, by the way, of druids stopping, you know, marching to the middle of a battlefield between the lines of two armies about to clash and stopping the conflict. So these are people with huge amounts of moral authority and Cunliffe's suggestion that for such a sacred, important situation as this conspiracy in the groves, as Caesar portrays it, would not be, you know, beyond the pale.

And in fact, considering what these tribes are pledging to do, you would want to have a signed contract in blood. You'd want to have the Druids officiating. You'd want to have a lot of witnesses and a few notary publics because the challenge here is that now everyone is aware what the stakes are.

And everyone knows now that if they rebel, they're going to get the treatment that these tribes that have had everybody wiped out have faced. Everyone understands that to fight back now is to wager everything. Once again, the genesis of this story, ground zero, is Caesar himself. I would love to know if it's even true how he found out about it, but he gives an account of this tribal meeting in the deep, dark woods of

My Thomas Holmes translation of Caesar, which dates back to the early 1900s and has some fabulous different words in it than most of the more modern ones. I mean, instead of saying Gaul is pacified over and over, he uses the word tranquilized, which gives it a different sort of feel.

So he picks up the story where Caesar's back in Rome dealing with all the political trouble and the Celtic people in Gaul hear about that political trouble, which then prompts this meeting in the woods. Here's how my Holmes translation of Caesar has it.

picking up right after caesar talks about all those problems in rome keeping him there quote the news of these events speedily made its way to transalpine gaul the gauls amplified and embellished the story as the facts seemed to warrant spreading rumors that caesar was detained by the disturbances in the capital and that while these fierce conflicts were raging he could not rejoin his army the

The opportunity stimulated the Gauls. Stimulated, I love that. Stimulated the Gauls. They were already smarting. That's another good one. They were already smarting under their subjugation to the Roman people, and they now began unreservedly and boldly to form projects for war. The leading men of Gaul mutually arranged meetings in secluded woodland spots. They spoke bitterly of the death of Acco. That was the man who was whipped to death, by the way.

Telling their hearers that the same fate might befall them and deploring the fortune that oppressed the whole country. They made promises and offered rewards of every kind to induce volunteers to strike the first blow and risk their lives to restore the liberty of Gaul. End quote. There he goes again, Caesar making these people and their cause sound like the one you'd want to get behind, right? Gaulic liberty. Who would oppose that, right? You'd have to be Darth Vader to oppose that. What's Caesar doing?

and as we said earlier the experts disagree caesar's writing on multiple planes here um there's lots of speculation some of it's fun i'll just give you one of the ideas out there that might you know again speculation might help explain though what he's been doing this whole time where he's been making the celtic side out to be somewhat admirable well there's an idea out there that he's sort of setting the stage for what happens a generation or two down the road after they've conquered all these people

I mean, you have to kind of sell the idea back in Rome a little bit, don't you? Listen, don't worry. We'll incorporate Gaul into Rome. But they're assimilatable. You know, of course, sure, they're untractable and they're not housebroken and their culture is substandard by Roman measure. But we can fix that. You know, a couple of generations will turn them into good Romans. And the way you can tell is because look at how they have our same values. I mean, you know, if you put these...

phrases and concepts in the mouths of a roman character in a roman stage play the roman audience is going to cheer in other words you know he's sort of making the case according to one of these theories i read where the gauls are trainable but the germans are never going to be housebroken therefore we can incorporate the gauls and down the road you know after we break them to the

you know teach them upright look at how well those galls in short-haired gall have been doing now for 50 60 70 years um you know we could we could make these people into good romans and you can tell just look at how they're spouting phrases that would make them good romans today it's an interesting idea and it would explain um why caesar makes their cause sympathetic as he's crushing it

It does sound a little bit like he misjudged how serious it was when he got word of it back in Rome. The situation was starting to mellow out a little bit back there, he says. And then he hears about these problems. But as one historian pointed out, you know, he conquered this area, what, four or five, six years ago initially. And he's had problems with it every year. Headaches, right? Sparks, the way we describe them. Well, these aren't headaches and he doesn't know it yet. This is more like a stroke, right?

and all those sparks that we've talked about earlier finally fan into a general forest fire as all of gaul will go up basically in rebellion including the great friendly tribes of rome

And it starts with one of those moves that a tribe does as a way of sort of dipping their dagger in the assassination victim and saying, okay, I'm in. It involves a tribe that's always been hostile to the Romans, that is the one that steps forward allegedly at this woodland conspiracy and says, we'll strike the first blow. They go after this hillfort town.

of a Celtic tribe that's full of Roman traders and businessmen. And after they take the town, they massacre all the Romans. So essentially saying to the rest of the tribes, okay, we agreed to do this. We're all in. There's no going back for us. Who's next?

And the rhythm of the story is interesting because you will have the tribes join the rebellion, you know, usually in big chunks. But even, you know, all along the way, some big tribe will at the last moment change sides. And so slowly but surely, the rebellion gains steam.

The massacre that kicks it off that we mentioned earlier, the news of that spreads like wildfire and the central Gallic tribes go up in flames except for the ones most loyal to Rome. The Aedui are the big tribe that matter here. They're the ones who initially went to Rome and said, we need help because this German's been brought in. I mean, this is the ally of allies for the Romans here.

in this region. So they're the ones that they worry about. That's where the Romans get all their supply help, the grain. That's where they store their hostages when they take them from other Gallic tribes. It's sort of their administrative center in Gaul. These are our good allies and we can trust them. Well,

On paper, it may look that way, but remember what we said earlier. These Gallic tribes are not united. And even Caesar says they're split and rife with factions. So think Democrats and Republicans, Tories and Labor. I mean, whatever you want to say, right? You're two sides of the coin. And maybe just because a tribe is taking a particular course of action, it may be like 51% of the tribe wants to do it and 49% doesn't. So sometimes it doesn't take a whole lot of change to

to sort of make the scales tip the other way. And when the first big tribe of Gauls commits this massacre of Romans, it's on. And a number of these tribes start to get uppity because as Caesar says, that's kind of the Gallic character anyway, right? See excitement happening and want to get on board. And by the time he realizes how bad things are, he's in trouble because he's a long way from the action and he's got enemies between him

in Rome and Northern Italy now.

and Gaul where the armies are so the first chapter of this story has Caesar doing amazing things let's be honest he's an amazing guy and the speed of movement that he employs for example is crazy and his audacity he takes the great calculated risks Alexander would have jumped off you know the the cliff in darkness and whatever happens happens I'm a god right Caesar took these calculated risks but his audacity and his speed is continually on display and so he manages to

to get back to his armies. His armies managed to break out of an ambush when more of these tribes start going the other way. And while this is going on, a figure emerges on the scene that we only really know of because of Caesar, but he's

Fascinating. And in a way, could be an example of that beam sea idea we talked about earlier, you know, how the Celts might have been caught in a beam sea because they were in transition from a more ferocious barbarian way of life, to use a term from 100 years ago.

and a more Roman sort of existence, and that they had maybe lost, in my court jester silly theory, the ferociousness of the more barbarian tribes and not yet gained the advantages that comes with being able to handle logistics and supply and finance and organization and all these Roman things. This person that will crop up at the last available moment will try to turn the Celtic armies into something that can fight the Romans.

because just because you can make a lot of Gallic tribes decide to join a rebellion and maybe grab hold of more warriors than they've ever been able to put together in one place in Gaul, you still can't feed them, right? We learned that earlier in Caesar's conquest. These armies can't just get bigger. They have to get better, and they have to be able to support bigger, better armies. So how do you do that? Well, enter this amazing character,

you can pronounce his way several different ways and you can have fights over it i've always gone with vercingetorix but vercingetorix is also popular he is the great unifier of the gallic people in the last possible moment you know when resistance is possible he appears on the scene as a king by the time caesar runs into him

He came from a tribe that was pretty out of this whole Celtic-Gaulic war thing at this point. The Averni, that's a tribe, by the way, that's one of those developed ones that has more of a Senate and more of an oligarchic sort of Roman system. And Vercingetorix's dad had apparently been executed for trying to become king of these people, taking them back to an old way of government. And by the way,

Early in Rome's history, when their republic was new and they had ditched the monarchy, the crime of trying to reinstill the monarchy was equally harshly punished. But in this case, remember, you're supposed to be burned alive if you try to do that. So I guess without really saying so, maybe Vercingetorix's dad was burned alive for trying to become a king.

when this whole rebellion takes place as the story goes vercingetorix and his family members including an uncle will you know sort of fight over what to do vercingetorix will apparently be wanting to become a king and maybe take on the romans the uncle opposes him so vercingetorix gets thrown out of his city caesar says he goes out and using gallic liberty and freedom as his as his

rallying cry rally all these Caesar says desperados and dead enders but you could really see them as maybe patriotic young Gallic warriors finally ready to rise up I mean it depends on the way you're viewing this they must have been pretty desperate

decently intimidating because Vercingetorix will come back to his home city with all these desperados and dead-enders around him essentially launch a coup if you will against his home city become the king of those people and then begin to rally tribes together these tribes begin to cede authority to him as a war leader which is very unusual in the Celtic world historian and classicist Michael M. Sage says

points out that Vercingetorix didn't start this rebellion against the Romans, but he quickly came in and sort of took it over. He sent embassies everywhere and formed alliances, Sage says, and then he names all these big important tribes that Vercingetorix begins to communicate with and say, listen, the time is now. Remember, it's only been a few years since Caesar conquered this place. So these are all recently subdued peoples that

And they sort of understand that this is how it's going to be unless they move at some point. And Vercingetorix is sending embassies to all these tribes saying, that point is now. Michael M. Sage writes that Vercingetorix was chosen the war leader of these tribes and began implementing policies that were very un-Gaulic in nature, but that a Roman like Caesar could appreciate because they're more like Roman standards. Sage writes, quote,

Vercingetorix was chosen as commander and quickly set about organizing the rebel army. In accordance with standard Gallic procedure, he demanded and received hostages from each of his allies as pledges of good faith and issued orders to them to provide a specific number of soldiers for the allied army. He enforced his orders with ferocious punishments that included execution and torture. This was an extraordinary development.

During his campaigns in Gaul, Caesar had faced individual tribes or coalitions on the battlefield. Perhaps the largest was that of the Belgae in 57 BC. However, in these conflicts, there is no hint of any central organization among allied tribes.

After Caesar's initial refusal to engage the Belgic army, the tribes simply returned home to face Caesar individually. Vercingetorix represents an entirely new direction in Gallic resistance to the Romans. For the first time, their opponent was a centrally organized and directed army that represented an alliance of a number of different tribes. Its creation was in part due to the extraordinary personality of Vercingetorix and also to the effects of the Roman conquest.

End quote.

sage goes on to point out that vercingetorix's tribe was friends with the romans and that it was not unusual for gallic noblemen of friendly tribes to serve with the romans on campaign as allied cavalry and it's possible although he points out we have no evidence one way or the other that vercingetorix had done this once upon a time too and maybe was quite familiar with the way the romans fought

adrian goldsworthy even suggests the possibility that caesar and vercingetorix knew each other personally from years before this period which would add a completely new layer to things wouldn't it

nonetheless there are some things that vercingetorix now as the supreme commander the warlord of all these tribes in gaul with the exception of a few who are slowly but surely going to come on board you know he can control some things now with greater authority than any gaulic ruler since caesar first arrived on the scene but there's other things he can't change

He can start ordering tribes around now. So instead of having to beg a tribe you normally are enemies with but are temporarily fighting with for supplies and troops and whatnot, you can order it. So you can begin to

mimic in a maybe less efficient way things like roman supply and working together and telling one tribe to go over here and another tribe to go over there as part of some larger strategy which is a huge improvement but you're not changing the reality on the tactical level on the ground you're not turning your gallic warriors with their swords and their shields into roman legionaries

You're not inventing centurions. You're not getting battlefield discipline and drill and organization at that level. So you still can't face the legions in the field. And Verkingeterik seems to know this because he's going to be famous for telling the rest of the Gauls that they have to do something that runs against their nature in terms of this heroic ethos. He tells them they're essentially going to have war.

a guerrilla war and they're going to have to adopt a scorched earth strategy and they're going to have to destroy their stuff and where they live and everything in order to defeat these Romans. Now, we talked earlier about some of the greatest tragedies in human history being when some of the things on the list that you're willing to die for become the cost of other things on the list that you're willing to die for.

And this is the greatest test in the history of any Gallic leader that we've seen, well, maybe anywhere in the history books, where you are going to have members of rival tribes making decisions that tell you you have to burn down your homes and your city and leave.

The fact that these tribes listen and agree to adopt this strategy of their congederics is a sign, one, of the desperate times, and two, of his unrivaled authority. For the first time in history, Gaul, or most of it anyway, is acting under the control of sort of one mind, one will, as the Nazis would have said. But it creates a situation where Gaul,

the Gauls are now at least on par with Caesar in the ability to have a united strategy and this has never before been the case but just because you have more power than any Gallic warlord you can find in the previous history books doesn't mean you're the one who always gets to decide what to do we all know right war is a game of seizing the initiative and sometimes responding to the other person doing that sometimes you get to play offense but sometimes the other guy has the ball right and

In this case, there will be games that both Caesar and Vercingetorix will play with these cities. It's sort of ironic that one of the things Vercingetorix is known for is telling the Celtic people they have to burn all these cities. Well, where do all the major encounters happen? Outside these Gallic towns or cities.

much of this encounter involves sieges and the attempt to relieve sieges for various political reasons caesar will show up on the scene and go bam bam and take a couple of towns real fast reminding the celtic people that they cannot stand up to roman sieges very well then they will defeat some gallic cavalry in a skirmish sort of reminding the gauls that they can't face up to roman field tactics and field armies very well either so what do you do then

This is where the strategy comes into play of, you know, a scorched earth type deal. So Varric and Gatorix, according to Caesar, we should emphasize that, gives this big speech where he tells him you're going to have to destroy everything. It's great. It's worth quoting in full. And notice at the end, by the way, that he throws up one of those quotes.

you know you'll lose everything kinds of pictures to these people right i realize i'm asking you to do a lot and it's a bunch of things you'd be willing to die for maybe but it's there to preserve other things you'd be willing to die for remember the stakes this from the sa hanford edition and this is caesar putting this into vercingetorix's mouth remember

By the way, Caesar will mention these other cities that he's now taken already on the way to dealing with this rebellion, and they sound like names out of the Lord of the Rings, don't they? Quote, "'After this series of reverses at Vellonodunum and Cenabum and Noviodunum, Vercingetorix summoned his followers to a council of war and told them that their plan of campaign must be completely changed.'

This is Vercingetorix talking according to Caesar. Quote, We must strive by every means, he said, to prevent the Romans from obtaining forage and supplies. This will be easy since we are strong in cavalry and the season is in our favor. There is no grass to cut, so the enemy will be forced to send out parties to get hay from the barns, and our cavalry can go out every day and see that not a single one of them returns alive.

What is more, when our lives are at stake, we must be prepared to sacrifice our private possessions. Along the enemy's line of march, we must burn all of the villages and farms within the radius that the foragers can cover. We ourselves have plenty of supplies because we can rely upon the resources of the people in whose territory the campaign is conducted.

but the romans will either succumb to starvation or have to expose themselves to serious risk by going far from their camp in search of food we can either kill them or strip them of their baggage which will be equally effective since without it they cannot keep the field we should also burn all the towns except those that are rendered impregnable by natural and artificial defenses

Otherwise, they may serve as refuges for shirkers among our own numbers and give the enemy the chance of looting the stores of provisions and other property that they contain. You may think these measures harsh and cruel, but you must admit that it would be a still harsher fate to have your wives and children carried off into slavery and be killed yourselves, which is what will inevitably befall you if you are conquered."

That is, by the way, sort of Caesar pointing out, I guess you could read into this, yes, that's true, that is what I'll do to them. Caesar says that most of these tribes that were working with their King Guderix complied, and he says one of them burned 20 of their towns simultaneously, and you could see the smoke in the skies.

But one tribe begged the other Gallic tribes not to make them burn their city down. It was this special city, they said. I mean, they were wrapped up in it. It was one of the finest in all of Gaul. Please don't make them do this. It's like, please don't make me choose between one thing on my list that I'd be willing to die for and some other thing on the list.

So either Vercingetorix is softer than he seems in other parts of the story, or maybe he didn't have as much authority as is suggested by Caesar. But nonetheless, these people are able to get their city spared, this hilltop town of theirs. Supposedly, one of the arguments they made is, listen, it's impregnable, don't worry. And then Caesar took it. This is the city of Avaricum, and traditionally it's considered to be one of the three main encounters of

that formed the military side of this Gallic rebellion. But it's worth pointing out that in the same way that the word pacification covers a ton of low-level violence that doesn't quite reach the standards of making it into the history books, talking about this Gallic rebellion and then boiling it down to three sieges and the violence associated with that

is a minimizer also of all the things that were going on sort of under the radar, under the historical radar, so to speak.

Archaeologist Barry Cunliffe points out an interesting sort of ironic fact. First of all, you have Vercingetorix here saying they're going to have to burn the city so the Romans have no high-value targets, and yet here they are going after high-value targets anyway. All of the major encounters in this rebellion will happen around cities. So what happened there, you know, they should be burned down, shouldn't they? But each one sort of has an excuse for why it's still there. And Barry Cunliffe points out that what's sort of ironic is that it's only in the parts of Gaul

that have had significant contact with the romans and become more roman-like that you have these sorts of cities for the romans and julius caesar to target to begin with right if you go to the less civilized i'm using air quotes with my hands the less civilized tribal north up where the nervii and the belgae are and everything they don't even have cities like this they're much more decentralized you're going to have to chase the tribal people out of their little you know huts and into the woods

But here you can almost treat these Gallic states, remember that's the way some translators translate it now, not tribes but states, you can almost treat them the way you treat these states in the East or Greece. When the Romans go there, they just go to the major population centers and take them. Boom, war's over.

so some of these gallic tribes are becoming more like the romans so the romans can fight them more like their traditional enemies they can go after basically the capitals of these states the administrative center the tribal heart if you will cunliffe writes quote

End quote.

You know, it's funny, the knock on the galls has always been that they weren't able to work together and to take things to the next level, developmentally speaking, and form, for example, more organized states.

But John Heywood, I think, was the author that I read that went the complete 180 degrees on that theory and said that what would have kept the Celts safer longer was to be even more decentralized. And his theory, if I remember correctly, was that, you know, when the Romans faced

other urbanized centers in other places, Egypt, Greece, any place like that, they would destroy those states in one or two battles because the other centralized state brought all of its assets to one place and the Romans destroyed them there. But look how long, again, if I'm remembering Hayward correctly, he said it took to defeat the Celts

and the various other peoples of the Spanish and Portuguese area, right, of Lusitania and all there, because those tribes were so divided and so decentralized, you always had to keep going after another tribe. It's an interesting theory.

But in this case, the fact that there were even cities at all for Caesar to target is a facet of the Gauls becoming more and more like the Romans. And by the way, this is something Caesar now portrays in his writings, and it becomes a feature of what's going on. And the longer the Romans are out here now fighting the Gauls, Caesar says, the more the Gauls are imitating the Romans and becoming even more dangerous. So there's this now

undercurrent of need here that not only are the Gauls perhaps worthy of becoming Romans if we just train them up a little bit, but the more contact they have with us, the more like Romans they're becoming here in battle. So we better hurry. At Avaricum, Caesar and the Romans will be unable because of the fact that this hill fort, this

city on a giant mesa is a good way to put it that's what these hill forts that become hill towns that eventually morph into hill cities in these more sophisticated gallic states are like right it's it's not a man-made feature it's something what was the line from the lord of the rings that has stood here since the dawn of time and then man put some fortifications on top of it

a vericum has marshes all around it so the romans can't do their normal practice of building a giant wall around the whole place because where are you going to build it in the middle of a swamp there's only one entrance to the place so it looks like if this were a gallic besieging army they would be stymied but of

and over a course of almost 30 days they build a counter mountain maybe you could say it's hard to understand some of the sources talk about a ramp others talk about a mound but essentially caesar builds something on one part of one side of the fortification to equalize the height

And it takes the legionaries almost a month, and it's like 400 feet long, about 80 feet high. And you just marvel at what the Romans are capable of doing. And listen, a lot of other ancient armies could, too. When you have that many people involved in laboring for 10 hours a day, seven days a week, you can get a lot done.

Now the Romans, while they're building this, are under pressure because Vercingetorix's strategy of scorched earth is working. He's brought his army and he's keeping it 15 or 16 miles away from the Romans who are building their siege engines and creating this giant mound or ramp. And they're picking off Roman stragglers as the Romans look for food and they're looking for food. Already this strategy is starting to bite, as one of the historians I read put it. You know, the scorched earth strategy is starting to bite.

But the siege is working too and at one point Caesar says the men in the garrison decide they're going to try to slip out and get to Vercingetorix's army, live to fight another day. The problem is that that town contains not just those warriors but their families too. And Caesar says their attempt to sneak out, you know, without alerting the Romans was foiled when the women started screaming and crying.

You know, when they realized the men were leaving, begging and beseeching them not to leave them to the fate of falling into the hands of the Romans. Sort of screwed up their plan. They alerted the enemy because they were so loud and the warriors had to give up their idea of slipping away.

But it's an emotional reminder, isn't it, of the stakes here. You can get caught up in the, that this happened, and then this happened, and then this next year this happened, and forget that. No, we have women and children screaming because they think their men are leaving. Because it's better to save at least the warriors than to have everyone die, right? Because that's what's going to happen when less than a month after the siege started,

After a rainstorm begins and the Gauls sort of lose their focus on one part of the wall for a second, the Romans take over the wall and

close off the city and you know they kind of point out have you ever been to like one of the old towns in some of these European cities Stockholm for example has got one where when you walk through it you realize how really narrow and small all these old-fashioned medieval and ancient streets were and all the little side streets and how clogged they could be if you had crowds of people trying to oh I don't know get

get away from pursuers at the same time caesar points out that every place gets choked with people trying to get away and out of a population of 40 000 caesar says about 800 survived the romans killed everyone man woman child old infirmed everything

And Goldsworthy and others point out that this might not have been part of Caesar's plan. He will be very strategic as he sort of puts down this rebellion. Who gets clemency and who gets absolutely decimated? The important tribes that used to be friendly to the Romans, Caesar tends to be kind of light-handed with, right? Oh, we're sorry you left. You should come back to the Romans, right? But the people that have been nasty the whole time and that the Romans have nothing to politically gain with often are used as examples.

In this case, though, Caesar is giving up a lot of money when these people are being killed in the streets of Avaricum. And even these soldiers who stood to get a cut, right, they might have gotten their own slave, but they're busy killing the booty in these narrow streets of this Gallic town.

and some of the historians goals were these one of them i think made the suggestion that this might have been an army that was just so angry for all sorts of reasons including the killing of the the roman businessmen and traders to kick off this rebellion that they couldn't be controlled or were mad enough to think to hell with the money to hell with the slaves to hell with the booty i'm killing these people and they did and it's another one of those tragedies that goes into stomping down gallic resistance

normally a disaster like a vericum would have hurt a war leader's reputation but caesar suggests and it's not hard to believe that it actually helped vercingetorix's because he had been one of the people that said we should be burning this town down and then when his advice wasn't chosen because he's not an absolute ruler in any sense of the word he's sort of chosen almost like an outside contractor if you want to look at it this way by these tribes and if they don't like his leadership they can bolt singly or in groups

In this case, he looks like he was in the right all along. So after Avaricum, the Gallic army continues to harass and shadow Caesar's Romans. Remember, Caesar's Romans are the only Roman army here. So there's no other pincer that can come around and do stuff. If Caesar wants to do something in two places at the same time, he has to split the army he's got.

which means that the Gauls can keep Caesar's army sort of occupied somewhere. They're free to move around and do things in every other area of the theater. For example, Vercingetorix is continually sending his emissaries to all these other tribes that haven't joined the rebellion yet.

There's one in particular that would transform the situation if Vercingetorix could flip them. It's this tribe that's so close to the Romans, the Edui, the ones who got us involved in this story to begin with, that so-called druid Divicicius is a member of the Edui tribe, right? The reason that they're so important is because that's who's providing Caesar's food right now.

And they're guarding his food supply lines also with their warriors. What would happen if they flipped? So fast forward to what's going on. Caesar and this Gallic army are sort of shadowing each other. Vercingetorix takes his army up into some hills around this, let's call it a very large hill or a mini mountain, right?

And it's very tops. It's 2400 plus feet above the ground level. And this is another Gallic hill city or hill town or fortified town or whatever definition you want to use. And once again, there's an excuse why it escaped burning. This is very King Gettarix's tribal capital. This is his home, basically. So maybe it's a do as I say, not as I do situation. You all burn down your towns, but I'm not burning down mine.

or maybe this place was so easily defended and so hard to take that their king getterix thought it was a place he could pin caesar down while he destroyed his supply and by getting this friendly tribe that was providing caesar's food to flip

caesar's in terrible trouble camped out in front of this city called jergovia and jergovia is normally considered the second big encounter one of the big three as part of these gallic wars it's also one where you have to take caesar at even less face value because this is not the high water mark of caesar's generalship

and so for a piece of propaganda like these war commentaries if you're ever going to shade the truth and try to make yourself look better and spin things this is going to be the place where you do it normally caesar would look at a place like this and think let's starve it out but given the supply situation he'd be more likely with his army to starve before the people in gergovia did

What's more, Caesar's a little light on troops at this point. This is one of the moves that some have criticized over the eras, but we told you earlier, Caesar needs two things done simultaneously in different places. He doesn't have another army in Rome he can call on. He has to split his own. And before this battle, this siege at Gergovia, he does and sends out about 40% of his forces to go handle something involving a couple of other tribes that need a good thwacking.

but it means that your govia they're not there so when you start considering oh maybe enclosing an entire mini mountain with walls and fences and things to cut it off from the outside world and you look at your six legions you may be thinking to yourself i really don't have enough people for that kind of strategy right now

now describing sieges is always difficult so i'll just use these these rough ideas but basically when caesar gets there and sees what he's up against he starts nibbling at terrain features nearby that will help him for example there's a little hill nearby where if he takes that little hill that the gauls haven't really defended it'll be harder for the gauls to get water so it becomes this little game of nibbling on terrain features building camps and doing all this sort of stuff and then while he's doing it he gets word that

that the edu we have flipped and that the baggage in his rear is compromised and the food may not be arriving so he takes a large portion of the legions he's working with the gergovia and goes down to deal with the problem with the supply lines and while he's gone supposedly vercingetorix and the warriors come out of the the heights down the hill and attack this roman camp

A Roman camp built for like six legions, but now only defended by two, which you could see would make it difficult. Caesar gets word of this when he's on his way back from dealing with the supply line problems with like four legions. And when he gets to the camp, he sees that they have managed to beat off the assault with artillery and all kinds of things, but they're in a bad way.

So Caesar devises this strategy where he's going to feint an attack on one side, get all the Celtic warriors to go to that side of the top of the mesa of the hill fort, and then Caesar will attack on the far side that's now abandoned with some more troops. So he sets this up, eventually gets to the point where the Gauls take the bait. They all come to the one side of the mesa to deal with Caesar's feint.

caesar sends his legions around the supposedly now undefended other side they start doing real well they get through the the main wall they're starting to cut up some of the camp and the women and the children and i mean maybe this is going to win and then the celtic warriors that have been drawn off to the other side of the mesa by the faint come back en masse there can get a rick's himself might have led the cavalry charge

that sent the romans careening back down the hill caesar will get together a bunch of legions that are not involved at the bottom somewhere near the bottom of the hill so that his own troops can then hide behind them and his new troops that are uninvolved in the combat can ward off the pursuing celts caesar says we'll admit to like 700 dead legionaries between 40 and 50 of these people are centurions

There's been an interesting debate you can read on whether or not this is the Roman habit of encouraging. Well, conspicuous bravery would be one way of putting it if you wanted to spin it one way. Reckless endangerment for personal gain might be another. But Caesar kind of blames that a little bit at the same time.

Caesar's been encouraging this kind of audacity forever, you know, where these legionaries and their centurions are rewarded for throwing themselves into the breach and being extra tough and extra aggressive. In this case, Caesar says that at one point, these Gauls will be throwing these dead Romans over the walls headfirst. And Caesar will name at least one of these dead Romans being thrown over the wall by the Celtic warriors who killed him by name.

So you know the guy who you're seeing thrown over the walls dead. I mean, it sounds like it was a nasty situation. Some historians have suggested the casualties could be a great deal higher than Caesar was admitting to. The military setback that Caesar suffers at Gergovia combined with the losing of

of the Edui tribe to the rebellion begins to flip yet more tribes. And to emphasize how quickly this is happening, everything we're talking about here is happening in 52 BCE. Normally, when you think of this period, you think of an era of almost glacial-like operations, whether we're talking about armies advancing or sieges or anything. Sieges could take years. All of this is happening in 52, which shows you how quickly events are unfolding.

And by the way, Caesar was not giving conventional dates. So you could say that all this stuff happened in this one year, but you don't know when. Sometimes he'll give you an inkling of a season, right? So you could say, well, this happened in the winter or this happened in the spring or what have you. But most armies I can think of from the ancient period well up into almost the modern era are

would have a hard time dealing with the speed of something going this fast. I keep trying to imagine, you know, European armies from the Middle Ages trying to crush this revolt this quickly. Part of it, of course, is Rome. But the other part is, and what sort of bad karmic luck do the Gauls have that this happened, that they get one of the great generals in all human history and a guy at the top of his resume when he's bragging about his God-given qualities is going to put speed and decisiveness of movement.

As if the Celts already didn't have enough going against them in this deal between the technology and the lack of centralization and all the things we've been talking about. They got to get this guy at this time, too.

In fact, it's worse than just that. Caesar's political antenna, as you might imagine from a guy honing his skills in the Rome of the late Republic, are exquisite. And his ability to read the proper way to respond to these tribes in order to play them as much as he can, you know, like a musical instrument is crazy.

you know some tribes get clemency others get wiped out and you got to know how to play this game to keep most of them in your camp or at least the 49 of the tribe maybe that wishes they were in your camp but are currently in the minority you think about guys coming from the era caesar was born in marius and sulla they might have been equally successful at destroying these gallic armies

But I imagine Caesar's going to look like a great big softy when it comes to the genocide or the Holocaust we're talking about, if it's Marius or Sulla dishing out the punishment. Maybe everything, when we talk about these historical genocides and crimes against humanity and all these modern terms, maybe they all need to be graded on a curve, eh?

Nonetheless, at this point in the story, this is about the low watermark of Caesar's entire career, and most other generals would be toast at this point. Remember now, this is an army, Caesar's, that was already feeling the bite of the scorched earth policy. So he was not doing all that great to begin with. The military setback at Gergovia is not huge in a military sense. The Romans can suck up those casualties, but in a political sense, it's big.

Several historians will point out that this shatters the aura of Roman invincibility. More tribes join the rebellion. But bigger than that is the flipping of the Edui tribe for all sorts of reasons. But just look at one of them. The Edui control Rome's administrative base in Gaul, their storage locker, if you will, where they put all their stuff while they're traipsing around Gaul. It's a city called Novi Odunum. And when the Edui flip, they take Novi Odunum with them.

then they sack it almost as if they were conquering their own city so that they can keep it out of the romans hands what did it have in it here's historian nick fields talking about novio dunum and its importance to caesar quote

Here were to be found all his Gaulish hostages, his grain reserve, his war chest, remounts for his cavalry, and the best part of the army baggage. Eporodorix and Viridomarus, two young chieftains of the Edui, turned on the Roman garrison at Novio Dunum and slaughtered them together with the traders gathered there, released the hostages, divided the money, and carried as much grain as they could transport and dumped the remainder in the river and torched the town."

Fields actually said Opedum, which is the word for a Gallic town. The point is, think about this from the Gallic perspective. This is an Apache raid that's successful and that takes an enemy who's already reeling from Jirgovia and stabs them in the back. I mean, this is a huge moment from a native perspective here. And the potential ramifications that become possible now, Caesar's defeat in the distance...

Well, that's a chance that the Native American tribes never had. I mean, even if they had gone after the very early settlements in Virginia and places like that, could they have wiped them out forever? Could they have had the Europeans draw a line and say, we're not crossing this ocean anymore because you can't live on the other side. The natives will kill you. Same thing with Africa. It was just too late in technology since the odds were too one-sided. But look at this here.

This is an opportunity for the tribal people to win. Caesar's in trouble.

Think about what just having the hostages does for a change in power and authority. Here, Caesar had been keeping the sons and daughters of the powerful and important people of all these Gallic tribes he hoped to keep under his thumb. And now, all of a sudden, they fall into the hands of the rebels. And, of course, the rebels can do any number of things with them, right? They could be magnanimous, give them back to these other Gallic tribes and say, see, Gauls stick together. And by the way, you owe me a favor.

They could also, if they wanted to play hardball, say something like, Caesar doesn't have your children anymore, we do. So you're joining the rebellion, right? Nonetheless, now that the Edui are on board, we are told that Vercingetorix has now a big tribal meeting. And in this meeting, the Edui are a part of it. They actually make a play for the leadership with their smackdown.

and almost all the other tribes in gaul plutarch says that there were like 300 tribes or states that caesar subdued i can't believe it's anywhere near that many some of these may have been really really small but let's just say it's 120 or 150 caesar says he's got like two that still support him so vercingetorix has this big meeting with all these other tribes the giant pan-gaulic council and

And you do wonder if, say, the Native Americans or some of these other people who were victims of colonial conquest ever were able to get all of their people together in one place or the representatives of them and all sort of try to unite and speak with one voice. This is an amazing thing when you think about it. All of Gaul, with the exception of a couple of tribes, are united against Caesar and Caesar's in trouble. This is a historic moment.

He's basically cut off from getting new troops in Italy at this point. And remember, the Romans don't use their own cavalry anymore. What do they use? Well, local allied troops. Who's allied to the Romans now? So Caesar's got an issue. Where does he get his cavalry from? Well, this is where we find out.

And, you know, those who enjoy little teeny tactical things on the battlefield that end up having perhaps huge effects on history love this part of the story. But this is where we find out that Caesar's been making friends on the other side of the Rhine with those German people that you can't housebreak. And you can't, you know, you can't incorporate and you can't assimilate. But if you need the cavalry bad enough, you can maybe work out a deal. And Caesar starts bringing this battle.

friendly German cavalry from some of these tribes maybe that were the enemies of the people Caesar was beating up on in Germany and we hear of their appearance and it's bedeviled well take war gaming for instance most war gaming rule sets when talking about this German cavalry in this period gave it special powers especially special powers over Celtic troops you know why because the Celtic troops were scared of them

These are the same kinds of forces, remember, that Caesar had noticed had driven off many more times their number in Gallic cavalry earlier. So what's going on, you know, when we talk about toughness or intimidation or all these qualities that are hard to quantify, what do you get when you take 400 German cavalry, which is not enough to make a big difference anywhere in these size battles, and they dominate?

What kind of supermen are we talking about here? And people have wondered ever since. Now, we can go into the unquantifiable things, but they are, of course, unquantifiable.

you could talk about the fact that these Germans had a way of utilizing infantry with the cavalry so they'd have one light infantryman to go with one cavalryman and they were supposed to operate together and the light infantryman supposedly would hold on to the mains of these horses as they rode into battle and they would almost act like a knight with his squire and that this combined arms mobile infantry formation was unique and deadly

There are also some theories that these Germans weren't just your average German warrior, but this is more like

you know, a bunch of German adventurers, and it's like the Magnificent Seven or something, but it's the Magnificent 400 or later maybe 600, and they're all these, you know, badass Germans. These are Germans who make other Germans scared, right? So it might be that kind of a deal that explains why they're so dominating on the battlefield. Once again, it's kind of confusing, isn't it? Why Caesar, who's writing this propaganda piece to please a Roman audience, blah, blah, blah, why is he saying such nice things about the Germans and giving them so much credit?

It's hard to figure out, especially for a non-expert like yours. Truly, all I can say is that in a number of different encounters, these Germans are going to make all the difference in the world. In fact, the reason that we're going to have the climactic battle, this great, you know, schwerpunkt, right? That's what the German generals would say. This climactic, intense, decide-the-whole-war, you know, situation in this one city is maybe because this German cavalry turned the tide at a battle that

where Verkingetorix had assembled all the dang cavalry he could get his hands on practically. Told the other tribes he didn't want any infantry, he already had 80,000. And as many historians will point out, 80,000 is a lot to feed already. And at this point in the story, and again, you got to love the way these things work.

Verci Gettarix may want that infantry more as a way to hold some of these tribes hostage. We've got your warriors. Be good, right? Don't flip back to the Romans. But at this late stage in the Gallic military development, it's their cavalry that's everything. And Caesar will end up re-hooking up with those forces that he had sent away to do other things before Gergovia. They will start to march in a direction that looks like maybe they're leaving Rome.

And this is where maybe Vercingetorix gets confused. A lot of the different histories portray this as an attempt to attack the Romans as the Romans march away. But Vercingetorix, who's put 15,000 cavalry, we're told, together, all of whom have pledged to not go home to their wives and children or anything unless they have ridden twice through the Roman column, attack these Romans on the march.

and the German cavalry, working in conjunction with the legionaries, once again saves the day and sends Vercingetorix and his Celts sort of reeling back towards the first place to rally, which is this Gallic city, once again remarkably untouched by flames, called Alesia. Caesar says, by the way, that he pursues the Gallic army so closely that he kills 3,000 members of their rearguard as they try to cover the army's retreat into the

hill town of Elysia. You can say Elysia too, some people do. This is a typical Gallic hill town in the sense that it is protected by natural features to make it pretty tough to take. Michael M. Sage says it is a plateau near Dijon, France right now, about 1,300 feet high, about 1.2 miles long, 650 yards wide.

On three sides, the terrain is like impossible. Rivers, craggy, rocky terrain. But on one side, on the west, it's a nice, gentle slope a couple of miles long. So as another historian pointed out, think of a peninsula, and it's a little like that. So Vercingetorix retreats to this city.

then turns around and blocks the entrance to the peninsula with his army digs a ditch builds a six foot tall wall made of loose stones and above him sits this hill fort city with the tribe whose home it is so a lot of civilians and he sort of waits for caesar caesar shows up takes a look at this place and decides well this is something you have to put under siege obviously but how do you put a

place this large under siege this is a huge endeavor if you really want to go there but as we've said all along the romans are you know one of their great secret weapons is the fact that their legionaries are about half construction worker half soldier historian michael m sage writes about caesar looking at alicia and deciding what to do quote

since a direct assault was precluded the only alternative was to capture the town by siege which required the construction of massive fortifications one of the striking aspects of the gallic war is the engineering skill the romans displayed in constructing siege fortifications

This expertise was part of a wider development in the use of fortifications by the Romans. They were used extensively not only in sieges, but also on the battlefield. The Romans constructed a continuous siege wall over 10 miles in length to close off Alesia. End quote.

Well, that's just for starters. But basically, once Vercingetorix sees what's going on here and the scope of what Caesar's about to do, he launches a cavalry attack down that one gentle slope of the peninsula of this plateau he's occupying and gets into a dust-up with both Caesar's legionaries and Caesar's German cavalry. And once again, the German cavalry make the difference and

And they pursue, along with the Romans, these Gallic cavalry members who Caesar says get caught up kind of in their own defenses. And they start clogging up around the narrow parts and they get just massacred in crowds of people. He's just crushed to death.

So Caesar says that this tells their King Gettarix that he's not going to be able to break this siege himself. And also as this, you know, fortification starts to become complete, what are you going to do with cavalry anyway? So Caesar says he sends his cavalry away, sends all the cavalry back to their home tribes, because this is an army that is a consolidation of a bunch of allied tribes now, right? Almost everyone. So he sends the cavalry back to their own tribes. And Caesar says he tells them to bring a relief army.

You know, put together a rising of the tribes and come here and save us. We've got Caesar pinned down right here. And as their King Gettarix is sending this cavalry all back to their home tribes, Caesar, again, putting the words in his mouth, has him saying, you know, don't leave me here. Don't forget who fought for your liberty. And then something to the effect of, oh, yeah, and I have 80,000 of your countrymen with me. You wouldn't want to see them die either, would you?

Which should bring us to numbers here for a second, because who the hell knows what else you're going to say about these ancient battles. Sometimes you can reliably come close to something on the Roman side, because they'll say something like, we had this many legions. You know they're probably under strength. You know they've probably got, you know, part-time combatants who are their servants and camp helpers and all that. So you don't know, but you can estimate better. On the Gallic numbers, you only have Caesar to go from, and he's outrageous.

But as every historian says, what do you fill the blank with? I like the way Adrian Goldsworthy figures out. He says, what's about to happen here? You don't know the numbers of Celts involved, but you can reliably say it involves more than had ever been assembled at a single place before. Because this relief army that begins to come together is going to be, according to Caesar, absolutely enormous.

now caesar may have expected the relief army may not have accounts differ and interpretations differ on that front but if he didn't expect it at some point he hears that it's coming so he begins doing what this battle or this siege is kind of known for he begins building another wall and another fortification facing in the opposite direction from the one he's already mostly completed

So in other words, he's besieging the Celtic army in this hill town while preparing to be besieged himself from without. The Roman army is going to operate within two separate siege walls. They're going to camp there. They're going to live there. And they're going to starve out this Celtic army on the hill while frustrating the efforts of the relief army that's showing up to rescue it.

So for visual purposes, if you imagine a hill or a plateau completely surrounded by fortifications, a ring of fortifications, and then an even larger ring surrounding that, I read somewhere it's like a 14-mile circumference or something, then visually you'll get the right picture.

imagine um watchtowers that had artillery in them i thought i read somewhere 1500 was an estimate somebody threw out there for the number of those watchtowers this is a place that's going to be able to house 60 to 80 000 roman soldiers and friends so i mean think of the size we're talking about here it has multiple camps each camp is a fort in and of itself and

It has 23 things that are like the Roman word means little castles or little fortresses. It's crazy. The best short description I ever read because they're hard to find because even Caesar, who's normally very spare with words, can't help but go on and on by Caesar's standards about all these pits filled with sharpened stakes. And I mean, all these things that are awaiting the Gallic warriors. John Worry wrote a great book on ancient warfare, and he described the

the defenses which is a weird word right because they're defenses in one sense but they're also the fortifications besieging the other army in another this is how he described the fortifications at alicia quote

The Roman entrenchments linked an encircling chain of camps and forts. The inner ditch was 20 feet wide, with sheer sides, i.e., not tapering at the bottom, and the main circumvallation was constructed 400 paces behind this ditch. Here, there were two trenches, each 15 feet wide and 8 feet deep. The river was diverted to carry water into the inner trench wherever possible.

Behind the trenches was a 12-foot earthwork and palisade, with antlered prongs projecting from it. Breastworks and battlements were overlooked by turrets at intervals of 80 feet.

Caesar also sowed the grounds beyond his fortification with prongs and pitfalls of various patterns, illustratively or humorously termed lilies and stingers. A parallel line of fortifications was then provided as an outer circumvallation against the inevitable relief force. The inner perimeter was 10.1 miles long, the outer 12.9 miles."

So if you're one of these Gallic warriors looking to strike a blow, maybe a fatal blow in the defense or reconquest of Gallic Celtic liberty, and you show up here to do battle with the Romans before you even get to the actual place where the Romans are, you know, they're standing behind their earth and timber fortifications there behind all these defenses, you get to get through the gauntlet.

And the gauntlet, as Worry points out, starts with a huge 20-foot wide... They don't say how deep, but the other trenches are 8 feet deep, so figure at least 8 feet deep trench. That'll break up the momentum of a giant human wave charge, won't it? But that's about 6 football fields, he says, from the rest of the defenses. When you run into them, you're running into things like a double line of trenches, 15 feet wide, 8 feet deep, one of them filled with water...

You're also running into, and this is something you can see, there's almost enjoyment on the Romans part when they say that they've constructed all these little traps. And they sound like the kind of traps when I was growing up, the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong always set. You know, these things where they'd put a big sharpened stake, you know, three feet in the ground and then cover it up with leaves and wait for someone to walk by. But the Romans have like thousands of those in front of their house.

And then they have a bunch of other things that are similar but disguised differently and they mix them all together so that as you're approaching, you know, you're coming towards artillery range. The Romans start shooting at you. You know, you're just starting to get your blood up. You're not worried about where you're stepping and everything. And then all of a sudden you run into all these traps, right?

And then right after the traps, there's, you know, the more trenches and then you run into these prongs, Worry called them. I was reading how they did this. The Roman soldiers would go cut all these branches and then they would cut the ends off the branches and sharpen all the ends. And then they would arrange them in a way so that it was like a giant hedge plan.

knife thorns I guess you could say a giant almost it's almost like ancient barbed wire and they would either put it at the bottom of one of these trenches or right as you were clamoring out of one of them so that you're clamoring out of this eight foot trench and you know your human wave attack has been somewhat disrupted and what's at the top of the trench this giant hedge of prongs and all this of course is before the Gallic warriors even make it to the Roman stockade and earthen sort of wall and

historian nick field says that 6 000 trees were logged to create these fortifications they might have been tough for the celtic people to overrun without all that stuff in front of them and let's not forget that behind these fortifications are these very same legionaries that have beaten these gallic warriors most of the time in the open field without even having the help of fortifications there are guard towers everywhere as we said artillery

and yet caesar doesn't have all the advantages remember there is a reportedly eighty thousand let's lower that to something more believable say thirty five thousand gallic warriors essentially in his rear that army he's besieging

If the army from outside the ring attacks Caesar, the relief army, and he turns to face it, well, he's got Vercingetorix and that army in his rear. So if they can coordinate their attacks, well, Caesar's got a heck of a challenge in front of him. If you are a tribal army trying to resist colonization from one of those, you know, as we said, those technologically more sophisticated, more centralized powers, you see it all throughout history,

this is one of the better chances as i said you're going to find it's a gamble this is wagering as we've been saying throughout this talk everything if you are these celtic peoples and yet at the same time this is a pretty good wager it might be a bit of a long shot but this is a chance that you would think for example native american tribes would have given everything to simply have a chance to maybe win

We said that maybe 80,000 Romans are here. We don't know how many Celtic people are coming in the relief force, but the people inside the besieged hill town don't know that a relief force is coming at all. Caesar points out that Vercingetorix and his army up on the hill fort are cut off from any news and information. They have this due date in their heads when they think the relieving army is going to show up, but the army doesn't.

Food starts running low and they start having these hardcore debates inside the hill fort amongst the various Gallic leaders and people of note. There's like 46 tribes, I think Caesar identifies, involved in this thing. So this is a pan-tribal group of people that are starting to think that there's no relieving army coming maybe, so what are we going to do?

One group wants to surrender. Another wants to charge out there in sort of like a giant bonsai charge of death, right? Make a good song at least. And then there's a third group that wants to hold out because they think a relieving army is coming. And Caesar puts one of these...

fantastic speeches into the mouths of one of these it's one of the longest i think i read it's the longest speech caesar puts in anybody's mouth in the whole commentaries and he means it in a bad way he wants you to look at this people and think aren't they disgusting because this gallic guy is saying you know we need to be prepared to be cannibals we need to just eat the old people and the useless mouths here as a way of holding out

and the speech is worth recounting out of caesar again he's trying to make this guy look like degraded by this but there's another way to look at it which is i mean again this is a commitment what does it mean when you sacrifice or are willing to sacrifice everything it means you're willing to go cannibal if that's what it takes this is from my thomas holmes translation of caesar so caesar says that this uh

this Gallic nobleman makes the speech, which he says should not be passed over, he doesn't think. In other words, somebody should say that this Gaul said these horrible things. And so here's Caesar with this Gaul and he has him saying, quote, I do not intend, he said, to notice the view of those who dignify the most abject slavery by the title of surrender. For I hold that they ought not to be counted as citizens or admitted to a council. I am only concerned with those who are in favor of a sortie,

meaning a raid, a bonsai attack. For as you are all agreed, in their counsel is to be recognized the memory of our ancient valor, to be unable to bear privation for a short span. That I call weakness, not manly resolution. It is easier to find men who will affront death than men who will patiently endure suffering. And yet I would give my sanction to this view,

"'So highly do I respect the authority of its advocates. "'If I saw no evil involved in it, save the sacrifice of our own lives. "'But in forming our plans we must have regard to the whole of Gaul, "'for we have called upon the whole of Gaul to help us. "'If eighty thousand men fall on one field, "'what, think you, will be the feelings of our friends and kinsmen "'when they are constrained to fight almost on the very corpses of the slain?'

To save you, they have counted their personal danger as nothing. Do not then rob them of your aid. Do not, by your folly or rashness or lack of resolution, ruin the whole of Gaul and subject it to perpetual slavery. Can it be that...

Because they have not arrived punctually to the day, you doubt their good faith and resolution? What then? Do you suppose that the Romans are toiling day after day on those outer lines simply to amuse themselves? If the messengers of your countrymen cannot reassure you because all ingress is barred, except Roman testimony that their coming is near, dread of that event keeps them busy upon their works night and day."

In other words, he's saying, if you doubt that a relieving army is on the way, tell me why the Romans are going to all this trouble. He then says that they ought to be prepared to eat each other if that's what it takes to regain Gallic liberty.

instead what one translation here calls the council of war decides to send out the useless mouths and prolong you know how long the food will last a little more sort of counting on the romans maybe to take in these women and children and old people and infirmed you know the people who used to live in that town before it became a battlefield so vercingetorix sends those people out to the roman lines and caesar promptly sends them back

It's been explained that maybe Caesar didn't have the food to feed these people. Those people were beseeching Caesar, make us slaves and then feed us like slaves. They just wanted to eat. And Caesar didn't have a ton of food himself, obviously, but also he thought sending them back might eat up Vercingetorix's food supply even faster. The problem is, is neither side relented and those people began to die in between the lines. Eating grass is the way one ancient source described it.

Think of these women and children, the families of some of these warriors dying in front of you day after day of slow starvation and exposure to the elements while the siege goes on. And you have no idea if your friends are coming. And then one day they do.

And they are visible in the distance. And Verkingetorix and his troops can see them parading on an open plain in the distance in a way that is all but like a sky rider saying, Rejoice! All of Gaul is here. You are rescued.

And on multiple hills in the distance, the Romans see what Adrian Goldsworthy said is almost certainly the largest Gallic army ever assembled, however many people that might be. Actually, Goldsworthy says probably one of the largest armies. It's Sage who says likely the largest army. But even our hopelessly outdated but impossibly logical friend from 100 years ago, Hans Delbruck, who thinks all these numbers are crazy, says,

admits that it might have been possible that this was a larger than normal army because even though he's the guy who's always going to say you know how are you going to feed him he says it's possible that these people were never meant to eat for very long that this relief army is like a cruise missile to be launched right at caesar the romans and these defenses and so you don't have to worry about them breaking up like the belgae did you know as they're starving over a month or something

so figure you have an army here if we're talking about the native americans having 2 000 warriors and it's a pretty good amount or the zulus having 20 000 and that's a large zulu army this army might be when you combine the numbers inside the hill fort with the relief army

120 000 130 000 the ancient sources have it well over 300 000 because 250 000 infantry in the relief force alone those are crazy but once again if this is 120 000 tribal warriors in one place well you know i like that napoleon quote that quantity has a quality all its own that'll make up for a lot of roman advantages won't it just having so many people

And you can understand Delbrook's idea that maybe these people are just meant to be used right away when you see how quickly everything unfolds. The relief army shows up, camps out in these hills about a mile from the Romans, goes down to this plain, which is the only part of the area which is really like a battlefield. It's the one open space, that western area, the gentle slope of the plateau. So all the real fighting, especially the wide open cavalry stuff happens there.

and they go out and they demonstrate there and that's where vercingetorix and all his beleaguered besieged starving people who've already seen those people from the town starve in between the two armies you know throw up a cheer caesar says and let's remember why we say caesar says all the time why we're so reliant on him he's the only eyewitness from this battle that we have any account from and anyone else's account of this battle often uses him as a source

So he's both invaluable and at the same time, obviously, biased as hell. Although anyone you got from this battle who wrote about it's probably going to be pretty biased. In this case, though, when Caesar plays up the fear, a lot of times when Caesar's playing up the fear or the dangerousness of a situation, you can perhaps suggest that he's doing it to magnify his own greatness. But this looks legitimately dangerous here.

This looks like a moment in history, as we said, where the tribal people kind of have a shot. 120,000, 130,000 warriors gives you a shot.

so when vercingetorix and his people see this relief army caesar says they come running down from their positions towards that trench that separates them from the romans and they begin filling it in in other words preparing to do their job in this whole attack which is to attack the romans from the other side when the big relief army smashes against them at the front so caesar says he has all his people take up the positions

And then he sends his cavalry down into this plain to engage the Gallic cavalry that's down there. Now, who knows about these numbers? Estimates are Caesar had about 6,000 cavalry, a wide mix of things. Still had some Gallic cavalry, probably had some Spanish, probably had some Numidian. We know he had some Germans.

And the Gauls, well, had Gauls, and they fight and skirmish all afternoon, apparently, and the Gauls are getting the better of it when Caesar says, all of a sudden, and not for the last time, these German cavalry once again turn the tide, kill a bunch of the Gauls, chase them off, win the day, and

And he says that Verking Gederich and his people who are, you know, standing by, having filled in the trench, waiting to attack, dejectedly head back uphill toward the town after they see that this relief army isn't going to be giving them any relief today. So then you get the next day.

And something happens that seems to validate some of those earlier points we were making, that in the later books of Caesar's, as Andrew Rigsby points out, he begins to point out that these people are growing and they're changing and their prolonged contact and fighting with the Romans is making them more dangerous. As we said earlier, this is the reason sometimes you...

used to explain why the germans will you know sack rome in 410 a.d right prolonged contact with the romans made them roman enough so that they could do that well caesar's kind of alleging as this you know commentary of his goes on that the celts are going that way and they need to be dealt with now before they get any better because they spend the next day during the day

calmly and coolly and logically and diligently the romans might notice because they always think of the celts as so lazy and liking to avoid hard labor but they're cutting down trees and they're making ladders and grappling hooks and putting together bundles of sticks so that when they run toward these roman trenches they can all throw their bundle into the trench and eventually the bundles fill up the trench and you can run over them

In other words, they're not rushing at the defenses like a bunch of war-mad, battle-crazed barbarians that you can just pick off because they're so stupid. They are calmly and logically planning for an organized assault. So in a way, that's scarier. And then when the sun goes down and things are only lit by torchlight, maybe moonlight, who knows, the largest army probably ever assembled in Gaul is

one that is infinitely larger than any North American tribal army ever assembled, exponentially larger, throws itself against the Roman defenses at night.

Caesar writes that after midnight, this Celtic army, right, just creeps up quietly and then launches its attack all at once, making a lot of noise all at once. I mean, imagine you're up in the Gallic hill fort besieged, wondering what's coming next because you're out of touch with these relief forces on the other side of the Romans. And then you're up in the Golic hill fort besieged, wondering what's coming next because you're out of touch with these relief forces on the other side of the Romans.

and then the stillness of the night is broken by this loud roar, and you instantly know something's going on down there. So there King Gettarix blows the trumpet, Caesar says, begins to get his forces together to support the attack on his side. Meanwhile, this Celtic force is throwing themselves against the Roman defenses in the dark.

and falling into all the pits and traps and spurs and all these things that caesar so lovingly and devilishly described they're bad enough in daytime but at night well you can see how it'd be even a bigger problem he says these galls are falling into the pits and they're they're being skewered by these stakes these sharpened pieces of wood the

size of a man's thigh some of them others are much smaller meant to go through your foot and disable you meanwhile roman artillery is shooting from the walls at you you're trying to get through the trenches you've got to deal with these prongs

But Caesar makes it out to be a near-run thing, and they are beating off this attack, well, like something out of one of those old westerns where the Native Americans are attacking the small little fort, and there seems to be an endless supply of them, and you seem to almost be at your last leg. Caesar specifically names, he's good at this, remember, two of his...

one of my translations calls them generals which is not a good translation but he means senior commanders on the scene one of them is mark antony marcus antonius and of course he'll be ancient tabloid fodder later when he hooks up with cleopatra but he's one of the people that will run to the aid of the beleaguered sectors whenever it's needed

Caesar says that even with all the traps and everything they've got set up, these Gauls are throwing down their bundles of sticks and they've got their ladders and it's a near run thing at several different places. And then the dawn breaks and the Gallic wave subsides.

And this melting of the Gauls back to their camp is portrayed to some historians as the failure of the assault. But other historians suggest that that first battle that they fought, the cavalry one that the Germans once again turned the tide at, made it impossible for these Celtic infantrymen to operate in this big field during daylight. So whatever the reasoning, the relief army loses its second battle against Caesar and the first assault that it makes against the fortifications of

of the Romans fails as well. And Caesar says that part of the problem here is that Vercingetorix and the troops besieged in the hill fort never got their act together in time to help. That by the time the relief force melts back toward the camp at morning, Vercingetorix hasn't launched his attack yet.

So that's a traditional Gallic coordination problem that's not surprising, although Vercingetorix had done a pretty good job avoiding those kind of traditional Gallic mistakes, so maybe it's surprising in that sense.

Caesar says that the Gallic leadership, which remember is made up of a ton of different tribes under several major war chiefs from different tribes as a Native American fan. I can't help but think of some of the chiefs that I've always thought most highly of working together. Obviously, they come from different time periods, but working together in some giant effort like this. But they have a conference to try to figure out what's going wrong because we've lost two battles in two or three days.

They were upset about the reconnaissance, pointing out maybe that, you know, we shouldn't have lost so many people to those traps that we didn't know about. And then they interviewed the locals who are, after all, Gallic themselves about the local lay of the land. Is there some weak spot in the Roman fortifications? Turns out there is a hill that Caesar couldn't incorporate into his defenses. The Celts find out about it.

Caesar says 60,000 of them under one of these war chiefs. You got to love it when 60,000 is a detachment of your forces, whatever the real number might be. 60,000 of them sneak over to this weak spot. And then when they launch their attack, there will be corresponding attacks launched elsewhere to help. Interesting to wonder whether the people at the time understood what this is. This is the actual war.

you know spin of the roulette wheel right now i mean this is the encounter that will decide and caesar will say this he says during the fighting to his men this is the encounter and they will come down caesar says to a moment that will decide the course of the war that he's been fighting for the better part of a decade and given what we know now decide the state of gallic liberty for the next five centuries

Caesar says that it is about noon that this surprise attack is launched against the weak part of the Roman fortification. And they say it's the weak part because instead of being able to be situated on top of a hill with a good view all around, this one part of the camp had to be situated below the crest.

but that means you don't know and can't see what's on the opposite side of the crest, the reverse slope. And in this case, if you believe Caesar, 60,000 hand-picked tribal warriors were. And around noon, they come galloping over that slope, heading towards a part of the camp. Remember, Caesar's troops are numerous, but they're strung out over the entire length of this 14-mile circumference or whatever it is. There's about two legions, maybe 8,000, 10,000 people right here close by,

With 60,000? Sounds crazy, so we'll say 30,000 screaming warriors coming down that hill at them. As we mentioned...

this isn't all caesar has to deal with because of course they launch a strike from the main area this great big plane that all the battle's been fought on the main roman defenses well those celts come out to play again too and historians are divided on whether or not this is a real attack intending to produce results of its own or whether it's purely a diversion but you can't just send a bunch of legionaries from there now to go bolster the weak area because they're busy and

And because this is the climactic battle, you would expect that Verkingetorix up in the hill fort with his lean, hungry, besieged troops would also launch an attack to help too. So they come down off the hill and they do the same. And then they begin to concentrate right near that same weak spot that the 60,000 Pictoguys from outside are concentrating on. This is now the crux of the battle.

so caesar goes to a place where he can see really well and his job as he sees it and he emphasizes this so instead of being the heroic commander on the ground wielding a sword and leading his men like king arthur or alexander caesar's job is to hold on to the precious reserves and dole them out stingily to wherever they're needed most and he does this but what's going to happen when he runs out of reserves

What's going to happen when you have a threatened part of the line and no more legionaries to send there to bolster it? Because he'll do this several times in the battle. Finally, the situation at the weak spot in the fortifications is so bad, it's in danger of being overrun, which everyone seems to think would mean the battle. So Caesar has to go himself.

The last thing he does before he runs to that spot of the line, though, and it turns out to be crucial, wouldn't you know, is to take a few legions that he scrapes together with some cavalry, including our German friends, puts them under the command of someone who says, "'Ride outside the fortifications and whip around and try to get behind the enemy that we're fighting in that area and see what you can do, basically.' And then Caesar grabs some more legions—I guess that's the bottom of the barrel—and heads there himself."

He arrives to the threatened part of the line and you instantly have this feeling that he's just walked into the Alamo when it's totally under siege and he's Davy Crockett. And he didn't have to be at a place where he might die in a few moments, but now he's walked into it of his own free will. Caesar says that everyone notices the red cloak, which is why you wear the red cloak. But he has the same effect that a super celebrity would have on both sides, he says, Celtic and Roman alike.

remember this is not modern warfare where because of the projectile weapons everybody stays as far apart from each other as they can this is ancient warfare where war is decided as the romans always say by hand strokes so you got to be close and everyone is and caesar says that they see him arriving and both sides fight harder because of it what's more a

A lot of this battle is visible from the battle lines of people who are not involved in the fighting, so they're cheering too. Caesar says the first cavalry battle on the plain, both sides are cheering. It's like a murderous, bloody game of Quidditch or something. In this case, Caesar says because of the way the hill is sloped, which made it vulnerable to begin with, most of the Gauls and whatnot, and a lot of Romans too, can watch this entire fight and are cheering and making noise.

And the way Caesar narrates this is it's a near-run thing. He says his troops throw their spears, fight with swords. People are cheering and yelling from different sides of the battlefield. Shouts are going up, he says, from the hillsides. And then he describes this moment. Again, you know, you can't help but think the eagles are coming. It's one of those moments.

You had to be – it's like the people who were at the sinking of the USS Indianapolis that delivered the nuclear bomb and they're in the water and the sharks are eating them and they've been in there for five days and then the rescue plane appears and there's that moment where you're just never happy in your whole life to see anything. Caesar looks and he sees, among other things, his German allied or mercenary cavalry, maybe the magnificent 400 of the German people,

behind the Celtic force that's about to overrun that part of the fortifications and a slaughter ensues. It's one paragraph from Caesar arriving at the beleaguered section of the fortifications to the complete turn of the tide from the wonderful Hammond translation Caesar talks about arriving on the scene in his red cloak and no word on whether he was doing the little Darth Vader breath thing when he did.

Caesar says, quote,

Caesar hurried to join in the fighting. The conspicuous color of the cloak he habitually wore in battle proclaimed his arrival. Because the downward slopes were in clear view from the heights above, the enemy spotted the cavalry squadrons and cohorts he had ordered to follow him and joined battle. A shout went up from both sides and was answered by another from the rampart and defense works. Our men threw their spears, then fought with swords.

suddenly the cavalry was glimpsed in the rear more cohorts were advancing the enemy turned tail and the cavalry charged them as they fled massive slaughter followed end quote once again caesar spare with words but you get the picture it was a nightmare we don't know how many people died in the fighting before that climactic moment in celtic history

We don't know how many died afterwards. I've seen estimates, although Caesar's not helping, that the Romans lost more than 10,000, which is a lot by Roman standards, but the Celts lost way more. They lost enough so that when these survivors of this charge and this attack on this one part of the fortification made it back to their own camp about a mile away, they knew it was over and they began to break up and go home.

And it's indicative of how hard fought this battle was that Caesar and the Romans didn't just totally destroy them then, but Caesar said the pursuit had to be postponed for a little bit while they recovered. And of course, let's not forget, their King Gederich and his besieged army, his allied army of many tribes, watched this whole thing and now know they're doomed along with, well, Caesar.

everything else. You know, I'm always fascinated by the extremes of the human experience and the emotional and intellectual edge involved in some of the affairs. I mean, think about if you could take a photo of what it looks like from Verkingetorix's point of view, you know, when this battle's over, as he looks out

at the panorama laid out before him you know the roman defenses the skyline and the disaster in the foreground what does that look like and what are your emotions as this all sinks in as to what this means and once again caesar makes him out to be kind of a noble savage if you will to bring up one of those literary conventions again and has vercingetorix basically saying you know do with me what you will i only did what i did for gallic liberty

He said, kill me or hand me over to the Romans alive, whatever you think best. And so Caesar says, you know, he sets up this chair and he's sitting outside this camp and they're bringing prisoners to him and notable figures from inside the siege as they empty this place out. And then Caesar,

Caesar makes no big deal about their King Gatorix surrendering, which may be closer to the truth. Some historians say, but Adrian Goldsworthy says Caesar would never allow himself to be upstaged in his own commentaries. And maybe he's suggesting you should believe the Cassius Dio or Plutarch accounts, which are more romanticized, but sound much more in keeping with their King Gatorix's status as a noble native tribal chief kind of.

I mean, you put an African king or a great Native American chief or a Pacific Islander king, for example. I mean, this works in a lot of places in that same position in the movie, and it works just as well. But the sources say, and if you allow for a little amalgamation of them, Vercingetorix will go and put on his best armor, adorn himself with his best weapons, and

get on his horse, ride down to Caesar who's sitting in the chair, you know, do a circle around him, get off the horse, throw his armor down, sit at Caesar's feet and not say a word to be led away by the people who will throw him into the Roman dungeon.

to await his fate which will have to you know come after caesar's schedule lightens up a little bit because he's got a whole civil war to fight and he's going to tear the guts out of the republic and when he finally gets a chance to settle down and party you know he'll have 20 days of thanksgiving proclaimed in his absence when rome hears about this whole thing

But for him to actually participate and enjoy himself, it's going to be a while. And when that happens, though, there's lots of different entertainment, very exotic stuff. And the highlight of this, the party favor of party favors, will be Verkingetorix, six years later, paraded in chains as part of this procession. He will be taken down to one of these dungeons, and he will be ritually strangled.

So think about the human misery that emanates from the results of this battle. I like the way historian Nick Field sort of breaks down the importance of these days. I mean, remember earlier in this conflict, I had mentioned that Caesar sort of breaks it down to like a frantic moment, practically, that the whole battle hinges upon.

think about what that moment going the other way which might lead to that battle going the other way would mean over the long haul historian nick fields writes about the effect of the elysia siege quote

Battles are singular moments in history, productive of strange events. Much may depend upon a small detail. The effects of a detail may be victory, and the effects of victory may be long-lasting. Elysia was such, for in a very real sense it symbolized the extinction of Gaulish liberty. Rebellions would come and go, but never again would a Gaulish warlord, independent of Rome, hold sway over the tribes of Gaul.

To gain liberty, Vercingetorix, a strong and popular leader, had hazarded everything at Alesia and lost. End quote. Which begs a more fundamental and difficult question. When you look at the cost of losing, was the fight and the goal worth it? The Gauls went from being political slaves to being actual slaves. Historian Paul Gavagon, in his book, The Cutting Edge, says,

had a statement that I thought was so deep. It just, it makes you question the entire paradigm when you think about admiring the resistance, the hard-bitten, never-ending, never-say-die resistance, which is the thing that makes the movie so great as the Native Americans, in the face of calamity, continue to resist against overwhelming odds, right? I mean, the outcome is known, the doom is upon them, and they still fight back.

Gavigan writes, quote, Unfortunately, the Gauls protracted the war, meaning the Gallic War, for nine bloody years. It has been estimated at least one million of the natives perished in the process. From another perspective, this was their war of independence, but they lost, end quote. When you're one of those Gallic warriors looking over the edge of the hill fort at the devastation after the Battle of Elysia, you're

You realize now what the downside of the give me liberty or give me death choice is going to look like. And the Gavagon quote makes you wonder about, you know, what's the proper amount of resistance to offer in the face of a conqueror who will take everything from you for resisting? It's a hard question because one might be willing to sacrifice one's own life and

but balk at the idea of sacrificing their children. I mean, it's one of those choices, as we said, where you're pitting things that you literally would give your life for against other things that you would give your life for. The hardest choices in the human experience, I think. The resistance of peoples that have been called Celtic or lumped in with Celtic would continue for many generations, and Celtic civilization would too.

this conquest of the Gauls and the submission that this supposedly enforces doesn't mean they're going to stop speaking a Celtic language in these areas for example and there will be you know people talking about this scourge of these Celtic languages that are still tenaciously holding on centuries after this

Whether or not you classify the people in the British Isles and Ireland as Celtic, I'm using air quotes with my hands here too, seems to be a judgment call best left up to experts.

But the DNA evidence, as we said earlier, may indicate that there are things that go well into the roots of all the people in that region that predate the Celtic period quite a bit. So if there are similarities in them, it might be a combination of cross-cultural contamination with some things that are very old indeed. Nonetheless, maybe those personality traits often associated with Celtic peoples aren't altogether gone or made up.

Much of this, by the way, as you know, probably was rediscovered over the last couple hundred years as part of the awakenings of nation states and their roots of who they are and who they were. I certainly know that the Irish consider themselves, you know, as Celtic as Celtic gets. And I happen to know that at least a few of them haven't given up the fight. Maybe the Romans think they won.

But maybe they just got outlasted. I remember when I was a kid, seven years old, maybe eight, and I had an Irish girl who was taking care of us, stereotypically named Maureen, about 19 years old, 20 years old. And she came upon me one day with my soldiers all set up having a battle, Romans against Celts. And she said, who's going to win? And I said, the Romans are going to win. I said, the Romans always beat the Celts. She said, oh, really?

What language are they speaking currently in Italy? She says, bear in mind, back at home, we're still speaking the Irish. Of course, Irish, Gaelic, is a Celtic language. And you'll note that it ain't dead yet. Go to dancarlin.com for information on how to donate to the show.