The Discovery of Middle Earth by Graham Robb

Author:Graham Robb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

50. The Gallic War and Gaulish strategy

The thousands who died on the paths of the sun god would be reincarnated. At a certain moment in his battle with the Nervii, Caesar came very close to seeing this mysterious process with his own eyes:*

But the enemy, even in the last hope of salvation, showed such great courage that, when those in the front rank fell, the men behind stepped onto their prostrate forms and fought on from their corpses.

Almost every one of those battles was won by the Romans. Not all were military triumphs. Some were not even battles, unless fleeing children can be counted as enemy combatants:

The rest of the multitude, consisting of boys and women (for they had left their homes and crossed the Rhine with all their families), began to flee in all directions, and Caesar sent the cavalry in pursuit. Hearing the noise in their rear, the Germans saw their families being slain; they threw away their arms and abandoned their standards.

Caesar’s report to the Senate on the German massacre appalled Cato, who thought that it brought shame on the Roman people. Pliny later described Caesar’s career total of ‘one million one hundred and ninety-two thousand men’ killed as a ‘crime against the human race’ (‘humani generis iniuria’), but he acknowledged that circumstances had forced Caesar’s hand: to the imperial mind, Caesar was avenging ‘insults’ to Rome and consolidating the frontiers of the empire, and if the buffer zone eventually stretched to the ends of the earth, that was all to the good.

Within eight years, a large percentage of the population of Gaul was wiped out. The pre-war population can be roughly estimated at eight million. Caesar’s figures suggest a total military force of two million: the Helvetian census (p. 150) implies that combatants, who included women, made up a quarter of the total population. Eight million people could easily have been supported by Gaulish agriculture in its pre-Roman state. The death count is obviously hard to establish. ‘A great number’ is Caesar’s usual indication of the tally – he uses the phrase ‘magnus numerus’ twelve times, coupled with verbs meaning ‘to kill’ – but there are enough statistical details to give a sense of scale:

Helvetii and allies: reduced from 368,000 to 110,000.

Nervii: reduced from 60,000 men to fewer than 500; of 600 senators, only 3 survived.

Aduatuci: about 4000 killed; 53,000 sold into slavery.

Seduni: over 10,000 killed.

Veneti: most of the tribe killed in battle, the remainder sold into slavery, and the entire senate put to death.

Aquitanian and Cantabrian tribes: ‘barely a quarter’ of 50,000 left alive.

Bituriges (at Avaricum): reduced from 40,000 to 800.

These figures refer to civilian as well as military casualties. The 39,200 killed at Avaricum (Bourges) included ‘women, children and those weakened by age’. People who died later on as a result of famine and disease are, of course, missing from the figures. Taking only the war years into account, an average death toll applied to all the tribes that were slaughtered ‘in great numbers’

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.