An Education in Romanness

Julius Caesar: Gallic War. In The Landmark Julius Caesar. Edited and translated by Kurt A. Raaflaub. New York: Anchor Books, 2017.

 

Caesar came, saw, and conquered, frequently, but why? In his excellent introduction to this volume, Kurt A. Raaflaub remarks that the Gallic War goes well beyond military history, encompassing geopolitics, comparative politics, and ethics. He calls Caesar’s book “an education in Romanness,” and truer words have seldom been written. One may add that for Caesar, Romanness isn’t merely Roman. Romanness is the preeminent example of what man, a citizen, and a country should be. Scarcely some latter-day ‘cultural relativist,’ Caesar intends to show Romans why they deserve the vaster empire he and his men have won for them and what virtues will be needed to keep it. He does so, not in the manner of a moralist—a Seneca, a Cicero—who names and describes the virtues, inquiring into human nature, but as one who shows these virtues in actions. The original title of the book was Res gestae—simply, “achievements,” and particularly public achievements. ‘Caesar’ is the public man, almost exclusively, not the private man who married, cut business deals, and wenched. ‘Caesar’ isn’t Julius; he is the model Roman and therefore the model man and citizen, preeminently worthy of emulation, just as ‘De Gaulle’ in Charles de Gaulle’s memoirs isn’t Charles but the model Frenchman, the man ‘of Gaul’ who understands that when the French follow that part of their heritage that the Roman conquest bestowed upon them, “all is well.” 

Caesar designs the Gallic War as a narrative proof of the Roman right to empire, the justice of Romans’ claim to rule the others. The three parts into which Gaul is divided, ruled by the Belgae, the Aquitani, and the Celts, differ in languages, institutions, and laws, and the peoples of Gaul also differ from the surrounding peoples—Germans, Britons—and from the many Gallic tribes even differ from one another—the Helvetii from the Boii from the Sequani, and so on. But almost all of these tribes and peoples strive for rule by means of warfare. Some are more warlike than others, but there isn’t a commercial republic, a Venice or a Singapore, among them. In Caesar’s victories, in his way of war and his way of peace, Romanness demonstrates its superiority over Gaulishness, Germanness, Britishness. Given the universal human political purpose of ruling, and the universal human military means to that end, the Romans excel everyone because their regime, their way of life, brings them victory and sustains them in their rule over their defeated rivals.

Romanness could weaken, however. Caesar sees that, too. The “most warlike” Gauls are the Belgae “because they are the farthest from the civilized sophistication” of Transalpine Gaul, the province ruled by Rome; “merchants come to them least often with imports that foster an effeminate disposition; they are also the closest to the Germans living across the Rhine River, and they are constantly at war with them.” The Helvetii, too, “surpass all the Gauls except the Belgae in bravery,” fights the Germans “in almost daily battles, either trying to keep them out of their own country or else actually waging war in the Germans’ territory.” Potentially, Rome might endanger itself by its own civilized way of life, which might foster ‘effeminacy’ or weakness, cowardice, softness. To keep the edge of its moral sword sharp, to maintain the virtus of its citizens, it needs war, imperial rule, even if that rule might, if fully secured, lend itself to what Montesquieu would later call the decadence of the Romans.

At the same time, warlikeness alone fails on the battlefields it craves when set against Roman civilization. In 61 B.C., “the most noble and wealthy person” among the Helvetii was Orgetorix. “Tempted by desire for kingship,” he allied with the aristocrats (his fellow ambitieux) and “persuaded his nation to leave their own territory with all their forces” on a mission to “take over the whole of Gaul and rule it.” Geopolitically, “the Helvetii are closed in on all sides by natural boundaries”: the Rhine River on one side, separating them from the Germans, the mountain range separating them from the Sequani, and the waters of Lake Lemannus and the Rhône, separating them from the Roman province. We can break out of nature’s confines, Orgetorix asserted, since we “excel all others in bravery.” But Orgetorix never got out of (the future) Switzerland, betrayed by an informer and brought to trial. A ‘populist’ of sorts, as indeed Caesar himself had been and would continue to be, on his own road to kingship, Orgetorix escaped by summoning some ten thousand slaves and freedmen clients from throughout the country. He was soon hunted down and recaptured, dying by what might have been suicide.

But even so, “the Helvetii did not give up their efforts to realize their intention to migrate from their country.” In 58 B.C., with their Gallic allies, including the Boii (latterly the Bohemians or Hungarians), they planned a mission to occupy the territory of the Santones. But between that territory and Helvetia lay either the territory of the Sequani or the province of the Romans. Geographically, the route through Transalpine Gaul was the easier to traverse. News of this plan brought them to the attention of Caesar, “hastened to leave the city” of Rome and, “by the most strenuous marches possible…hurried to Ulterior [or ‘Cisalpine’] Gaul and arrived near Genava.” Repeatedly, Caesar will cite Romans’ excellent ‘intel,’ as we now call it, their “celerity,” their quickness to act in light of such information, and their energy in so acting. The surprised Helvetii assured him that they merely intended to pass through the Roman province, doing no harm. They asked permission to do so, which Caesar had no intention of granting, for several reasons. One concerns justice and memory. He “remembered well that the Helvetii had killed the consul Lucius Cassius, routed his army, and sent it under the yoke”—this, nearly fifty years earlier. That is, he “remembers” the event not from experience but from the histories he has read, and perhaps from the accounts he heard as a child. Romanness is mindful; Romanness remembers. Romans write histories. More immediately, knowing not only the plan of the Helvetii but their warlike nature, he doubts that such a people, with their “hostile attitude,” “would be disciplined enough to refrain from committing outrage against persons or property” as they passed through Roman territory. Romanness is mindful in more than justice and in memory but in prudence.

In his prudence, Caesar duly noted that his legion alone could hardly survive a battle with the Helvetii on their own territory. Temporizing, he told their emissaries that he would consider their proposal, that they should return at a set date for his answer. This would enable Roman reinforcements to arrive. Meanwhile, he set his soldiers to work building a long wall and digging a trench along it, placing outposts at intervals along these structures and fortifying them, “so that he could prevent the Helvetii from crossing over more easily if they tried to defy his orders.” When the emissaries returned, he cited “the custom and precedent of the Roman people,” which “did not allow him to let any people make their way through the Province.” Custom and precedent being defenseless in themselves, “he made it clear that he would prevent them if they tried to apply force.” This they did attempt, but his defensive measures prevented them from crossing the Rhōne. 

This left the Helvetii with the alternative possible route, thought the territory of the Sequani. Geographically, this passage was too narrow to traverse without their permission, and that was not forthcoming. They asked an ally of theirs (Caesar calls him their “friend,” in the Aristotelian sense of a political friend), an Aeduan, Dumnorix, to serve as an intermediary, as he was “very influential among the Sequani,” owing to his “kindness and generosity to them.” [1] (His bond with the Helvetii was his marriage to the daughter of Orgetorix, the originator of their planned expedition.) Like his late father-in-law, Dumnorix wanted the kingship of his people “and was eagerly scheming for political change; thus he wanted to have as many nations as possible bound to him through his favors.” He agreed to the proposed diplomatic intervention and succeeded in winning both the Sequani’s and the Aedui’s consent to Helvetian passage into the territory of the Santones.

Well informed as always, Caesar learned of this and liked it no more than the Helvetii’s preferred route through the Province. In this, he displayed his prudential sense of geopolitical advantage. The Santones lived near the Province; Helvetian occupation of that territory “would place the Province in great danger with a warlike population, enemies of the Roman people, right next to land that was open to attack and very abundant in grain crops.” Again exhibiting Roman celerity and energy, “he rushed to Italy by long marches,” enrolled reinforcements and returned to Transalpine Gaul “by the shortest way through the Alps.” By June of 58, he had five legions poised across the Rhône from the Helvetii. Calling attention to Roman prudence again, he notes that before leaving for Italy he had installed his legate Titus Labienus as the officer in charge of the fortifications along the river. Labienus was a tribune of the Roman plebeians; Caesar’s political and military friendship with him betokens Caesar’s own ‘populist’ strategy in Roman politics. Caesar is the wiser Orgetorix; where the ambitious Gaul failed, he will succeed, both as conqueror of Gaul and, not so long afterwards, king of the empire he expanded far northward. 

He attacked and routed the Tigurini, one of the four Helvetian tribes, along the east side of the Arar River (today’s Saône). This was the tribe that had killed Lucius Cassius and sent his army under the yoke. “Thus, whether it was by chance or by the design of the immortal gods, the part of the Helvetian people that had brought this immense calamity on the Roman people was the first to suffer punishment”; having been elected Pontifex Maximus, Caesar allows himself the occasional glance at Rome’s civil religion. And the occasional glance at his family: “Caesar was avenging not only a public outrage but a private one as well,” as “the Tigurini had killed the legate Lucius Piso, the grandfather of his father-in-law, in the same battle in which they had killed Cassius.” The Roman memory is long, and so is the reach of its justice.

Caesar had his soldiers built a bridge over the river in order to pursue the other Helvetii, who “were very disturbed at his sudden arrival.” They had taken twenty days to get across the river but Caesar, in his celerity—made possible by Rome’s superior civilization in the form of military engineering—got across in only one. The unpleasantly surprised Helvettii sent emissaries to him, and the head of the delegation argued as follows: make peace with us and we will go and stay wherever you say, but if you continue to wage war, “remember the Romans’ past misfortune and the warlike spirit the Helvetii had always shown.” Our virtue is bravery, not cunning—evidently a suggestion that Caesar’s surprise maneuver must have been some sort of trick. The emissary thinks and speaks like a citizen of Crete or Sparta as described in the opening of Plato’s Laws. Caesar replies that he does indeed remember the Romans’ past misfortune at the hands of the Helvetii, “and to the extent that the Roman people had not deserved what had happened to them, he was even more outraged.” You Helvetians were the tricksters, then, catching the Romans off guard by attacking them for no reason. And currently, they had attempted to trespass on Roman territory and had “rendered the lives of” Rome’s Gallic allies, the Aedui, Ambarri, and Allogbroges, “miserable.” As for your past victory, again speaking as Pontifex Maximus, with Roman auctoritas, “it was the habit of the immortal gods,” whose memories are even longer than those of the Romans, when they wished to take vengeance on people for a crime, to give them unusually good luck for some time and hold off punishing them in order to cause them even more pain later from the drastic change in their circumstances.” All this notwithstanding, Caesar exhibited another Roman virtue, magnanimity; he would overlook these acts of injustice if the Helvetii provided hostages (insurance against any treaty violation) and compensated the Aedui and the Allobroges for the damages they had inflicted upon them. The Helvetian rejected the offer, proudly announcing that the Helvetian way was “to receive hostages, not give them”—thereby illustrating the difference between Roman magnanimity and Helvetian hubris.

Preparing to continue the war, Caesar demanded the grain his Aeduan allies had promised for his troops and animals. He then learned something about the Aeduan regime. Their “highest official” admitted to him that the unofficial and real rulers of the Aedui were holding back the grain and making patriotic appeals to the Gauls to expel the Romans. The hapless man protested that “there was no way that he could gain control over these people,” and that in betraying their secret plan he was putting his own life at risk. The Aeduan regime was no ally of Rome, at all, and Caesar suspected that its head was Dumnorix, the Aeduan who had ties with both the Helvetii and the Sequani. Liscus admitted as much in a private conference, explaining that Dumnorix, “a man with singular boldness, armed with huge influence among the lower classes because of his generosity,” had obtained lucrative conflicts by intimidating all rivals, thereby “accumulat[ing] lavish means for bribery” and supporting a small private army. He hated the Romans because he calculated, as the husband of a Helvetian, that the Helvetii would support his ambitions for a kingship, while the Romans, if victorious, would reduce the influence he had amassed. 

Caesar would have done just that, except that Dumnorix’s brother, Diviciacus, had long exhibited “the highest devotion to the Roman people, the greatest goodwill toward himself, and outstanding loyalty, justice, and moderation”; Caesar “was afraid that punishment of Dumnorix would strike Diviciacus to the heart.” The true Roman exhibits fides, trustworthiness. Moreover, to rule like a Roman, one must understand political friends and enemies alike, not only in their political ambitions but in their family connections. In their interview, Diviciacus tearfully confessed that he knew of his brother’s treachery, acknowledged that he had even undermined Diviciacus’ own position among the Aedui, but still begged Caesar not to deal with him “too harshly.” He asked this out of “brotherly love” and also because all the Gauls would assume that it was Diviciacus who had betrayed his brother to the Romans. In response, “Caesar took his right hand. He calmed him and asked him to stop begging. He said that Diviciacus’ friendship was worth so much to him that he would refrain from punishment for the outrage done to the Roman state and overlook his own hurt feelings in order to accommodate Diviciacus’ wish and requests.” He contented himself by bringing Dumnorix before him, laying out the charges against him, then letting him off with a warning and taking the precaution of “assign[ing] guards to Dumnorix so that he could be informed of what he did and with whom he spoke.” 

Having thus assured himself allied support, he moved against the Helvetii. At the town of Bibracte he fought and won a “long and bitterly contested battle,” which resulted in Helvetian surrender with the exception of 6,000 men from the tribe of the Verdigeni, who fled across the Rhine into German territory. Caesar ordered their pursuit and capture, punishing them with death. As for the remaining Helvetii, he ordered them to return to their own territory after they rebuilt the towns and villages they’d burned. “He did not want the land they had left to remain empty; it was good land for agriculture”; without them on it, “the Germans living across the Rhine would cross from their own territory into that of the Helvetiii and thus become the neighbors of the Gallic Province and especially of the Allobrogres.” A Roman understands the need for geopolitical buffers.

The war finished, Caesar received emissaries from “nearly all of Gaul,” who offered congratulations on his victory. Although they knew he’d waged war for the sake of Rome, “the outcome had proven no less useful” to them. “The Helvetii had been extremely prosperous in their homeland, but they had left it with the intention to wage war on Gaul in its entirety, to establish their rule over it, and to choose, out of a great number of possibilities in the Gallic territory, whatever area seemed most suitable and fertile, turning all the other nations into tribute-paying dependents.” With Caesar’s permission, they requested a secret meeting amongst themselves, the outcome of which was a petition to Caesar, delivered by Diviciacus. 

Caesar’s political friend explained that Gaul had many tribes but only two main factions, the Aedui leaders of one, the Averni of the other. With their principal allies, the Sequani, the Aedui had attempted to break the military deadlock by inviting the Germans into Gaul. “Then, when these wild barbarians got a taste for the fertile land, the way of life, and the wealth of the Gauls,” they brought over still more troops, which now numbered around 120,000. The Aedui and their client states had “lost their whole leading class, their whole council, the whole of their cavalry class” in war with this coalition, either in battle or as hostages. Even the Germans’ Sequani allies had had a third of their lands confiscated by order of the German king, the tyrannical Ariovistus. He had ordered them out of another third. “It would not be many years before all the Gauls were driven out of their own territory and all the Germans had crossed the Rhine.” Only Rome could prevent this. 

Caesar assured them that he could and would. The Aedui were longtime allies of Rome. “Given the greatness of the empire of the Roman people,” he considered their distress “extremely shameful both to himself and to his state.” German expansion was also dangerous “to the Roman people,” given the unlikelihood that such “a wild and barbarous people” as the Germans would content themselves with the conquest of Gaul, only. Marauding German tribes had descended into the Italian peninsula before. To these threats to Roman honor and Roman lives, he added the character of Ariovistus, who had become “so proud and arrogant that his behavior was no longer tolerable.” His regime was tyrannical, the enemy of Roman republicanism. Moreover, “Caesar came to believe that he should take action against this threat as quickly as possible” because the Gauls who had talked with his own soldiers had frightened them with tales of German military prowess. “Panicked babbling” threatened to make cowards of them all, de-Romanizing them, undermining not only the Roman empire but the Roman regime that had cultivated the virtues by which Romans had won that empire, preeminently courage.

After Ariovistus refused to meet Caesar’s emissaries, Caesar called a meeting of his officers. As a citizen of the Roman republic, Caesar had studied the art of rhetoric, and he now exhibited it. He argued as follows: Ariovistus “would not reject either Caesar’s or the Roman people’s friendship,” once he had duly considered his proposals. “But if, driven by insane rage, he should start a war, what did they actually have to fear? Why had they lost trust in their own bravery or Caesar’s competence?” The Cimbrian and Teutonic tribes had in fact been defeated, decades earlier, by troops under the command of Gaius Marius. The Roman army had also put down a slave rebellion in Italy, winning a dangerous civil war. Given these victories, “it could be judged how beneficial firmness of courage is”—in contrast to the insane rage of the barbarian tyrant, which is no virtue at all. Indeed, the Germans had often been defeated by the Helvetii in their never-ending wars, and we just defeated the Helvetii. The only reason Ariovistus had rolled up his victories against the Gauls was that the Gauls were war-weary and because the Germans had surprised them. “His victory had thus been achieved by calculation and planning rather than bravery”—the same argument the Helvetian emissary had deployed against Caesar. “Though such a strategy could work against inexperienced barbarians” like the Gauls, “not even Ariovistus himself could hope that our armies would be fooled by it.” If any of your fellow officers conceal their fear “by pretending concern for the grain supply or the narrow roads,” you should understand that they are as arrogant as the Helvetii had been, “lacking confidence in their general’s ability to do his duty or else by daring to tell him how to do it.” As a matter of fact, Rome’s Gallic allies have already guaranteed the grain supply and he, Caesar, had mapped out a good route into German-ruled territory. His authority derives not only from his capability but his virtue: “Whenever armies had refused to obey their general’s orders, it was because of a setback when the general’s luck failed, or lese some crime had been found out and financial misconduct prover,” but “his own life had been shown to be blameless throughout, and his good fortune was apparent from the war with the Helvetii.” Having readied a just and reasonable peace offer, having exposed his enemy’s irrationality, having exhibited his own good fortune, owing to his own courage and prudence, and relying on his officers’ fides with respect to their commander’s authority and on the officers’ and soldiers’ courage—the virtue Gallic gossip about Ariovistus’ enormities had tested—it was now time to act. He drew the logical conclusion, a command to action: “move camp during the fourth watch of the coming night, in order to find out as soon as possible whether his soldiers were motivated by self-respect and duty or by cowardice.” However that may turn out, he still has his 10th Legion, “about which he could not have any doubts and which would in the future serve in the function of a praetorian cohort,” a just honor in return for their fidelity and courage. No worry of that, however, since “By the time Caesar had ended his speech, the attitude of all those present was marvelously transformed, and they were filled with the greatest enthusiasm and passion to start the war.”

Tyrants being moved more by the actions than by the words of others, Ariovistus, recovering his reason, now agreed to the meeting he’d earlier refused. With a precautionary guard, Caesar came to the enemy camp, offering an alliance. Reminding Ariovistus of gifts he’d received from Caesar and the Senate in the past and of the Romans’ firm alliance with the Aedui. The Aedui had enjoyed “a position of leadership” among the Gauls before their alliance with Rome. Rome had done nothing to ruin that position, it being “the habit of the Roman people to wish not only that their allies and friends were not deprived of anything that belonged to them but also that their influence, status, and honor were enhanced.” Germans too can enjoy such an alliance, if they desist from making war on the Aedui or their allies, return the hostages, and bring no more men across the Rhine. To this, Ariovistus replied that he crossed the Rhine at the invitation of the Gauls; the Gallic lands he ruled were granted to him by the Gauls; the Gauls started the war against him, and he won; he was prepared to renew the war if the Gauls offered war, but in any case, he had fought an exclusively defensive war. As to the Romans, he had arrived in Gaul “before the Romans did.” The Romans “were wrong in obstructing him in pursuing his rights.” He doubted the alleged firmness of the Roman-Aedui alliance, in view of the lack of mutual military support in recent wars. If it came to war between himself and Caesar and if he killed Caesar, “he would be doing a favor to many noblemen and leaders of the Roman people,” who disliked and distrusted the ambitious general, but if Caesar left and agreed to his “unlimited control over Gaul, Ariovistus would reward him on a grand scale, and whatever wars he wanted waged, he would carry them out for him with no effort or danger on his own part.”

Drawing upon Roman memory, preserved in Roman histories, Caesar denied that the Germans’ claim on Gaul predated that of the Romans, recalling the victory of Quintus Fabius Maximus over the Averni and Ruteni and 121 B.C. At the time, “the Roman people had forgiven them and neither turned their country into a province nor forced them to pay tribute,” unlike Ariovistus. The Senate had decreed Gallic freedom: “after it had been defeated in war, [it] was to live by its own laws.” This implies that the gradual conquest of Gaul the Germans were undertaking could have no legitimacy in the eyes not only of Caesar but of the Roman republic. 

Sure enough, while this talk was going on, Ariovistus’ horsemen had been moving closer to the site, harassing the Roman troops. Ending the discussion, Caesar withdrew with his soldiers, making sure that a report of this conduct and of Ariovistus’ words circulated throughout his camp. “The army was fired up much more and inspired with an even greater keenness to fight.” Upon receiving another invitation to parley, Caesar declined to attend personally, sending emissaries instead, whom Ariovistus put in chains. This was a just casus belli. In September 58, the two armies fought along the Dubis River. Though outnumbered, the Romans won and the Germans fled, as did Ariovistus. 

“Having, in a single summer, brought two very significant wars to a conclusion, Caesar led the army to winter quarters among the Sequani.” Leaving Labienus in charge, he then returned to Cisalpine Gaul where, as provincial governor, he presided over the judicial hearings—that is, returning to civil life in peacetime and the rule of justice under law, which must be secured before it can be practiced. Such is Roman gravitasi, seriousness.

The First Book of the Gallic War shows why a statesman like de Gaulle rested content with the historical memory of the Roman conquest while bitterly resisting the Germans. In his estimation, from antiquity to the midpoint of the 20th century, Germany never really abandoned its barbaric ethos. Despite its vaunted Kultur, German still remained the home of “sublime and glaucous monsters,” with a military elite that perpetually overreached itself because it lacked mesure. German thinkers often despised mere ‘civilization,’ contrasting it with that Kultur, and that, in de Gaulle’s view, typified the problem. By contrast, the Caesar of the Gallic War embodies a measured, balanced, civilized regime, exhibiting the classical virtues of courage, moderation, justice, and prudence, along with the crowning virtue of magnanimity. Frenc grandeur, as de Gaulle understood it, owed its origin to this Roman greatness, blended with the energy and independence, the passion for self-government, native to the Gauls and later refined by the influence of a Christianity both Roman and rightly ‘imperial’ or ‘catholic.’ 

Neither de Gaulle nor Caesar saw anything unrealistic about these virtues, as Machiavelli famously proclaimed, arguing instead for what he called virtù, which substitutes vulpine shrewdness for classical prudence and leonine rage for classical courage, eschewing justice and moderation, and ignoring magnanimity. Contra Machiavelli, the classical virtues lend themselves to mindfulness of what de Gaulle calls “the realities”: provisioning and organizing troops, forming alliances, seeking knowledge of shifting political and military alliances, knowing how to speak to military officers and soldiers alike. He does not show how to speak to civilians from patricians to plebs, although he indicates that he can do that, too; in this, de Gaulle was far more instructive. But he does show that military virtues can entitle the victors to rule an empire, if those virtues encompass a substantially wider range than a warrior people’s characteristic bravery and cunning. In the Gallic War, Caesar teaches Romanness to his readers, elevating the ambitious souls of those who study it with the most ardor to citizenship in Rome and to civilization in the world.

 

Note

1. The political friendship illustrated here is the friendship between equals. Political friendships or alliances may or may not be between equals; in Latin, the words for equal and unequal friendships are not the same.