Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (39 page)

In his report to the Senate he sought to justify an attack on Britain by claiming that the natives had come to the help of the rebellious Venetians, and that, anyway, the country was rich in silver and tin. This was not entirely convincing – for if either motive had really been uppermost in Caesar’s mind, then he would have given himself an entire season’s campaigning in the island. As it was, the Roman fleet did not set sail until July. It was indeed to prove a journey back in time. Waiting for the invaders on the Kentish cliffs was a scene straight out of legend: warriors careering up and down in chariots, just as Hector and Achilles had done on the plain of Troy. To add to the exotic nature of it all, the Britons wore peculiar facial hair and were painted blue. So taken aback were the legionaries that they stood cowering in their transport boats until finally a standard-bearer, clutching his eagle to him, plunged into the waves alone and started wading towards the shore. His comrades, shamed into action, piled into the water after him. After some messy fighting a beach-head was established. Some more battles were fought, some villages burned, and some hostages taken. Then, with bad weather closing in, Caesar had his men pack up and sail back to Gaul.

Nothing remotely concrete had been achieved, but in Rome the news that an army of the Republic had crossed both the Rhine and the Ocean caused a sensation. True, a few inveterate spoilsports such as Cato pointed out that Caesar was now exceeding his brief more monstrously than ever and charged him with war crimes.
Most citizens were in no mood to care. Even the lack of plunder did little to dampen the general mood of wild enthusiasm. ‘It’s now definite that there isn’t an ounce of silver in the whole of Britain,’ Cicero reported a few months later, ‘nor any prospect of loot apart from slaves. And even then,’ he added sniffily, ‘it’s hardly as though you’d expect a slave with a decent knowledge of music or literature to emerge from Britain, is it?’
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But his tone of amused hauteur fooled no one. Cicero was as excited as anyone, and in 54, when there was a second summer of campaigning across the Channel, he followed events with a feverish interest. So did everyone else: Rome was agog for news. In their impact on a waiting public Caesar’s expeditions to Britain have been aptly compared to the moon landings: ‘they were an imagination-defying epic, an achievement at once technological and straight out of an adventure story’.
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Few doubted that the entire island would soon be forced to bow to the Republic’s supremacy. Only Cato was immune to the war fever. He shook his head and warned sombrely of the anger of the gods.

And sure enough, Caesar had indeed pushed too far, too fast. As he crossed the Thames in search of the frustratingly elusive Britons, his agents brought him ominous news: the harvest in Gaul had failed; rebellion was threatening; Caesar was needed back in person immediately. There had already been one violent storm in the Channel, and the legionaries lived in terror of a second destroying their fleet and marooning them for the winter. Caesar decided to cut his losses. A face-saving treaty was patched up with a local chieftain. The dream of reaching the ends of the world had to be put on hold. Although he disguised the painful truth as well as he could from his fellow citizens, Caesar had over-reached himself. At stake now was not the conquest of Britain, but the very future of a Roman Gaul.

That winter and the following summer danger came from various tribal uprisings, isolated bushfires of rebellion. The garrison of
one legionary camp was ambushed and wiped out – almost seven thousand men were lost. Another was laid under siege and only rescued by Caesar himself in the nick of time. The proconsul, nervous that the flames of rebellion might spread, was everywhere, crisscrossing the country, stamping out the sparks. Sometimes he would leave the Gauls themselves to do the fire-fighting, handing over the territory of rebellious tribes to their neighbours to plunder as they pleased. Divide and rule – the policy still held good. Summer 53
BC
passed and still there had been no general conflagration. Caesar began to relax. The previous year he had been forced to campaign throughout the winter, but not now. The new year found him in Ravenna planning for the end of his governorship and a glorious return to Rome. To his anxious fellow citizens, he announced – yet again – the pacification of Gaul.

That January of 52
BC
the snow never stopped falling. In the mountain passes it lay especially thick. Caesar’s legions, stationed in the far north of the country, were cut off from their general. But bad weather was soon to be the least of their problems. Despite the snow, the Gauls were perfectly able to make contact with one another. Across the lowlands of the country war bands were massing. Seemingly against the odds, a great horde of tribes in northern and central Gaul had begun to negotiate a compact, burying their differences in the face of the common foe. The organiser of this alliance, and its undisputed leader, was an imposing nobleman by the name of Vercingetorix. ‘As a commander, he displayed the utmost attention to detail and discipline, for he was determined to whip waverers into shape.’
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These were qualities that even Caesar could respect, as well he might – for they were the qualities of a Roman. Vercingetorix hated the invaders, but he had studied them assiduously, determined to master the secrets of their success. When he ordered every tribe to send him a specified quota of troops, he was emulating the methods of Roman administrators and tax
collectors, the agents of an order that spanned Gaul and far beyond. The world was shrinking. Win or lose, the Gauls could not hope to alter that. Their new unity was bred of both desperation and the global reach of Rome. It was Caesar who had taught the Gauls what it meant to be a nation. Now that achievement threatened to destroy him.

Or so it seemed. In fact, although an alliance of Gallic tribes was precisely what Caesar had spent six years desperately working to avoid, it also offered him a tantalising opportunity – a chance to crush resistance once and for all. As he always preferred to do, he went directly for the jugular. With Vercingetorix’s army massing on the border of the old Roman province, threatening the Republic’s rule over the whole of Gaul beyond the Alps, Caesar sped towards the centre of the revolt. To do this, he had to breast passes covered in two metres of snow, and gallop with only the smallest escort through the wilds of enemy territory. His daring was rewarded. He succeeded in joining with his legions. But now Caesar too was cut off from Italy. The Romans were starving, for Vercingetorix had persuaded his allies to burn their supplies rather than allow the hated enemy to seize them. Desperate for food, Caesar succeeded in storming one city but was repulsed from another, his first defeat in open combat after six years as proconsul. The news encouraged even more tribes to throw in their lots with Vercingetorix. Some of Caesar’s lieutenants began to despair: they advised their general to try to fight his way back to safety, to preserve what he could from the ruin, to abandon Gaul.

Caesar refused. ‘It would have been shameful and humiliating’
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– and therefore unthinkable. Whatever his own doubt and weariness, his outward show of confidence remained as sovereign as ever. In Caesar’s energy there was something demonic and sublime. Touched by boldness, perseverance and a yearning to be the best, it was the spirit of the Republic at its most inspiring and lethal.
No wonder that his men worshipped him, for they too were Roman, and felt privileged to be sharing in their general’s great adventure. Battle-hardened by years of campaigning, they were in no mood to panic now at the peril of their situation. Their faith in Caesar and their own invincibility held good.

When Vercingetorix, presuming otherwise, attempted to finish them off, Caesar’s troops inflicted heavy losses on his cavalry and forced them to withdraw. Deciding to wait for reinforcements, Vercingetorix withdrew to the town of Alesia – a stronghold north of modern-day Dijon, and so impregnable that it had never before been captured. Caesar, rarely one to be impressed by precedent, straight away put it under siege. A huge line of earthworks, almost fifteen miles long, imprisoned Vercingetorix and his men within the town. Alesia had food sufficient for thirty days, but thirty days passed, and still the siege held firm. The Gauls began to starve. Vercingetorix, determined at all costs to maintain the strength of his warriors, settled on the grim expedient of expelling from Alesia anyone unable to fight. Women and children, the old and the sick, all were driven from the town walls. Caesar, however, refused to let them pass, or even, although they begged him, to take them as slaves. Instead, determined to shame Vercingetorix into letting the refugees back into Alesia, he left them huddled in the open, where they ate grass, and slowly died of sickness or the cold.

Then at last came the news for which Caesar had been bracing himself. Two hundred thousand Gauls were hurrying to their leader’s rescue. Immediately, Caesar ordered a second line of fortifications to be built, this time facing outwards. Wave after wave of screaming, sword-slashing warriors broke against the defences. All day, the Roman ramparts held. Dusk brought a respite – but not the end of the ordeal. The Gauls had been testing the Roman blockade, searching out its weakest point – and they had found it. To the north of the town, where two legions had established their camp, a
hill directly overlooked the fortifications, and it was from here, at dawn, that the war bands pressed their attack. Filling in the trenches, they swarmed over the palisades, while ahead of them, in the Romans’ rear, came the answering war-cries of Vercingetorix’s men. The legionaries, trapped between this pincer, fought back with desperate ferocity. Both sides knew that the decisive moment was at hand. The Romans – just – managed to hold their lines. Even as the Gauls, seeking to pull down the palisade with hooks, heaved and cheered at the splintering of watchtowers, so, from the legionaries manning the gaps, there rose an answering cheer. In the distance, at the top of the hill overlooking their position, they had caught a flash of scarlet: their general’s cloak. Caesar, who had spent all the day galloping along the line of fortifications, yelling encouragements to his men and following the rhythms of the desperate struggle, had finally decided to commit his last reserves. Having slipped out unnoticed from the fortifications, and taking the Gauls utterly by surprise, the Roman cavalry charged down the hill. The legionaries, swords stabbing, advanced from the ramparts to meet them. Now it was the turn of the Gauls to be caught in a pincer movement. The slaughter was terrible, the Roman triumph total. Vercingetorix’s men, hearing the death-screams of their countrymen, withdrew back into Alesia. Outnumbered by the army he was besieging, and vastly outnumbered by the army that had been besieging him in turn, Caesar had defeated both. It was the greatest, the most astonishing, victory of his career.

The next morning Vercingetorix rode out from Alesia in glittering armour and knelt at his conqueror’s feet. Caesar, in no mood to be merciful, had him loaded with chains and thrown into prison. The war was not yet over, but it was already won. The victory had come at a terrible cost. Between the walls of Alesia and the Roman palisade lay the emaciated corpses of women and children. Above them were the bodies of warriors cut down by the legions, and
beyond them, piled around the outer fortifications, stretching away from Alesia for miles, were innumerable corpses, the limbs of horses and humans horribly tangled, their bellies swollen, their blood fertilising the muddy fields, the slaughter-ground of Gallic liberty. And yet Alesia had been only a single battle. In all, the conquest of Gaul had cost a million dead, a million more enslaved, eight hundred cities taken by storm – or so the ancients claimed.
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These are near-genocidal figures. Whatever their accuracy – and there are historians prepared to accept them as plausible
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– they reflected a perception among Caesar’s contemporaries that his war against the Gauls had been something exceptional, at once terrible and splendid beyond compare. To the Romans, no truer measure of a man could be found than his capacity to withstand grim ordeals of exhaustion and blood. By such a reckoning, Caesar had proved himself the foremost man in the Republic. He had held firm to the sternest duty of a citizen: never to surrender, never to back down. If the cost of doing so had been warfare on a scale and of a terror rarely before experienced, then so much more the honour, for both himself and Rome. In 51
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, the year after Alesia, when Caesar resolved to make an example of another rebellious city by chopping off the hands of everyone who had borne arms against him, he could take it for granted that ‘his clemency was so well known that no one would mistake such a severe measure for wanton cruelty’.
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He was right. Caesar was indeed famous – among the Romans – for his clemency. But he was even more famous for his love of glory – and in such a cause the whole of Gaul and beyond had been made to bleed.

Ultimately, however, the great task was done and there was peace. The Republic owed Caesar much. Surely, with his term of office now drawing to its finish, there would be magnificent honours waiting for him in Rome. The acclamation of his grateful fellow citizens, a splendid triumph, high office once again? After all,
who could justly refuse any of these to Caesar, the conqueror of Gaul?

After almost a decade away he was ready to head for home.

In Rome, of course, there remained one man of greater renown and wealth than even Caesar. Pompey the Great lived in no one’s shadow. Certainly not that of Caesar, a man whom Pompey had always regarded as his protégé. Naturally, in the condescending manner that befitted Rome’s premier general, he took pride in his father-in-law’s achievements – but nothing more. The idea that Caesar might rival him, let alone surpass him, never crossed the great man’s mind.