The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (9 page)

GALLIC WAR

Death toll:
700,000
¹

Rank:
61

Type:
war of conquest

Broad dividing line:
Romans vs. Gauls, Germans

Time frame:
58–51 BCE

Location:
Gaul (France)

Who usually gets the most blame:
Caesar

Another damn:
Roman conquest

Helvetii

The surest way to please the voters of Rome was to bring back plenty of loot from foreign conquests and distribute it liberally throughout the city. By the time of the late Roman Republic, however, the empire was too big for the two ruling consuls to go rampaging all over the world, racking up wealth and glory in foreign wars during the single year allotted them. Instead, they got their chance as proconsuls, former consuls who were appointed by the Senate as governors of troublesome (but potentially lucrative) frontier provinces. A popular consul would be rewarded with a lush province to squeeze, while an unpopular one might be given a vast stretch of rocky desert full of scruffy, unprofitable nomads. After serving out his extremely popular term as consul, Gaius Julius Caesar was given four legions and the job of governing several peaceful northern Roman provinces, notably southern Gaul (now southern France).

Caesar was itching for an excuse—any excuse—to start conquering and looting, so he was delighted when the Celtic Helvetians asked permission to migrate across the Roman protectorate in Gaul in 58 BCE. Caesar refused the request, the Helvetians went ahead anyway, and Caesar jumped in front of them with six legions.
*
He built a long wall across their path near Lake Geneva and waited. The Helvetians waited too.

When the Helvetians tried to maneuver around Caesar, he caught them crossing a river and smashed their rear guard. Then he pursued them closely, allowing them no rest and killing any stragglers, until he accidentally outreached his supply lines. As he pulled back, the Helvetians turned around and pursued him, until the Romans made a stand on a hill near the major Gallic town of Bibracte in central France. They repulsed the Helvetian attacks, counterattacked, and destroyed them.

According to documents that Caesar found in the abandoned Helvetian camp, 368,000 Helvetians (one-fourth of them warriors) had set out, but now only 110,000 were left. He resettled the survivors back in their old home (now Switzerland) to prevent the Germans from expanding into the empty land.
²

It was already too late for that.

Ariovistus

To the north, two Gallic tribes of the Rhine Valley, the Aedui and the Sequani, were having a war, so the Sequani hired the Suebi, a German tribe under Ariovistus, to come help. After the Aedui were beaten, however, Ariovistus wouldn’t leave. He seized a third of the Sequani territory, where he settled 120,000 of his own people. Then Ariovistus increased his claim to two-thirds of the Sequani territory.

Caesar, however, was not going to let the Germans assemble a powerful new territory so close to the Roman frontier, so in response to pleas from the Aedui, he demanded the Suebi withdraw. When Ariovistus sneered at the request, Caesar took 30,000 men north in September. The two sides parleyed and maneuvered for a while, until the Roman camp at Vosges found itself surrounded by 70,000 screaming Germans. The Romans calmly formed their lines and attacked. They routed the Suebi and chased them fifteen miles in close pursuit. Having lost 25,000 men, the Suebi escaped back across the Rhine, and Ariovistus was soon rumored to be dead, probably killed in disgrace by his own people.

Probing Outward

For the next year, Caesar stayed in the north battling the Belgae, a major coalition of Gallic tribes that was arming itself to block Roman expansion. In June 56 BCE, Caesar built a wooden bridge over the Rhine in ten days, the first ever to span the river. This awe-inspiring feat of engineering intimidated most of the local tribes into giving him hostages as a token of surrender. Caesar had to spend only eighteen days across the river burning the towns of the one tribe that resisted him. He destroyed the bridge upon retreat rather than leave it as an unguarded back door into the empire.

Caesar crossed over to Britain in 55 BCE to see whether it was worth conquering. He took only two legions, either because he planned no more than a reconnoiter or because he arrogantly assumed that two would be enough to subjugate the island. In any case, the British proved more formidable than he had expected. He ran dangerously low on supplies but raided out from his beachhead and destroyed some villages to show he wasn’t going to be bullied into a retreat. Then he retreated to the mainland.

By now, Caesar had picked up two new legions for a total of eight. In the winter of 54–53 BCE, King Ambiorix of the Germanic Eburones tricked the local Roman forces into accepting safe passage across
his territory, but then he ambushed them. Most of a Roman legion was wiped out, losing its eagle—the visible symbol of the legion and a powerful talisman. The survivors fled back to their camp and committed suicide rather than become prisoners of the Germans.

Caesar arrived and retaliated by destroying every village and farm in the territory of the Eburones. Although most of the people fled and hid from direct Roman vengeance, they now starved in the winter. Caesar also gave the neighboring tribes permission to do whatever they wanted to to the Eburones. Although we don’t know exactly what these tribes did, it was certainly awful. History never mentions the Eburones again.

By 53 BCE, Caesar had ten legions. From the north, he turned around and swept through Gaul again, making sure all of the tribes knew who was in charge. He crushed a string of stubborn Gallic tribes one by one, selling women and children to the slavers who followed his army everywhere it went. Plutarch reports that a million Gauls were taken captive during Caesar’s campaigns. The flood of cheap slaves into Italy eventually impoverished the Roman working class, which in turn undermined the democratic foundations of the republic.

The campaign complete, Caesar was able to declare the whole region to be Roman territory. Although every Gallic army that had stood up to the Romans had been beaten, the Gauls decided to take one last shot at driving away the invaders. A large coalition of previously pacified tribes rose in revolt under Vercingetorix, chieftain of the Arverni tribe. To starve the Romans, the Gauls destroyed any supplies they couldn’t remove or defend, and the subsequent siege of the Gallic capital at Avaricum was almost as punishing for the Romans outside as for the Gauls inside. Through twenty-seven days of heavy rain, the Romans tried to assemble wheeled siege towers to take the town, while Gallic raiders tried to disrupt their building. Finally, the siege engines were ready, and a Roman assault overran the walls. The conquerors killed everyone inside. Caesar reported no survivors: “Neither old men nor women nor children. Of the whole population—about forty thousand—a bare eight hundred who rushed out of the town at the first alarm got safely through to Vercingetorix.”

Vercingetorix had remained at large during the siege of Avaricum, winning several small battles before Caesar cornered him in the stronghold at Alesia. Once again the Romans camped in a ring around the enemy fortress and began building siege engines. After the Romans fought off an atte
mpt by Gauls outside the perimeter to break the siege, Vercingetorix gave up. He threw himself on Caesar’s mercy, and although Caesar had a reputation for forgiving his enemies, this time Caesar held firm. Vercingetorix was stashed in jail for a few years until the festive day of Caesar’s triumphal procession, when he was dragged out, paraded through the streets of Rome, and ritually strangled at the end.

Legacy

The stubborn and incorruptible Marcus Porcius Cato, one of the last senators in Rome to believe in the republic, vigorously opposed Caesar’s war. He felt that Caesar had launched it under false pretenses and that he should be turned over to the Germans for punishment. Other powerful men in Rome also opposed Caesar, but mostly because his ambition to become dictator conflicted with their own ambition to do the same.

Not only had the war covered Caesar with wealth and glory, but also it had left him with a veteran army of unrivaled size, fully bribed in his favor with the loot from Gaul. Even though no one in Rome could stop him from becoming dictator of the republic, it still took a few years of civil war before all of the doubters were convinced. However, just as Caesar settled in to enjoy the fruits of his victory, he was assassinated. His lieutenants fought each other for a few more years, but eventually the last man standing, Caesar’s nephew Octavianus, inherited the Caesarian mantle under the title Augustus, and Rome became a proper empire.

ANCIENT INNUMERACY

J
UST HOW RELIABLE ARE OLD ATROCITY STATISTICS? “NOT VERY” IS THE TRADITIONAL
answer. Some modern historians dismiss ancient atrocity statistics as a matter of course, simply because the supporting evidence (if there ever was any) is now lost. They explain that these statistics come from innumerate and largely illiterate societies lacking the modern ability to count large numbers of people and keep accurate records. Conquerors liked to brag about their exploits, and the vast hordes of the enemy army grew with each retelling. Body counts for individual battles are suspiciously lopsided, with huge piles of enemy dead produced at a cost of a few scratches to the winning side. Civilization before the Enlightenment was rather flexible when it came to historic accuracy, and ancient historians never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

As historian Catherine Rubincam puts it, “Ancient historians were not like modern historians, especially in their handling of numbers.”
¹

Unfortunately the contrast is not always so clear-cut. In later sections of this book, we will see that modern numbers often aren’t much better. For example, it’s quite common to run across estimates of 100,000 Iraqi soldiers killed in the 1991 Gulf War, even though the Americans found only 577 dead bodies and captured only 800 wounded among their 37,000 prisoners.
²
For the most recent Iraq War, estimates of the number killed in the five years or so following the 2003 invasion run anywhere from 85,000
³
to 1.2 million.
⁴
Compared to that range of guesses, the question of whether 25,000 or 50,000 Romans were killed at Cannae doesn’t look so bad.

I tend to give ancient records the benefit of the doubt. Our ancestors knew how to count sheep, cattle, and money, so why would they suddenly forget when it came to counting people? Ancient people were literate enough to have left behind extensive graffiti as one of their most common relics. We usually accept the word of ancient historians when they list a chronology of events or itemize a kingdom’s budget, so why are we more skeptical when they count bodies?

Let’s put this on a scale of 1 to 10. Most modern scholars assume that ancient body counts have a reliability score of 2 (the ancients just plugged in any old number that sounded impressive), compared with modern estimates, which are presumed to have a reliability score of 9 (meticulously counted and cross-referenced against official records). This would easily justify ignoring the numbers in ancient histories.

On the other hand, I suspect that the reliability of ancient numbers might score closer to 4 (subpar, but estimated by people who at least knew how to keep accounting records and co
unt into the thousands without smoke pouring from their ears). More to the point, I might assign a reliability score of 7 for most modern estimates (a score based on scattered records, and a lot of fudging to fill in the gaps). This makes it a lot harder to draw a line of plausibility between them. If we believe the questionable death tolls from Hiroshima, Stalin’s Russia, or the Korean War, then we shouldn’t get too skeptical about Alexander the Great.

My rule of thumb is that if at least one modern historian treats an ancient body count as credible, then I won’t dismiss it out of hand. We don’t have to accept every number the ancients throw at us, but doubting an ancient death toll just because it sounds fishy isn’t enough.

For comparison, consider the Holocaust. Right now, everybody knows the Holocaust happened. If we have any doubts, we can pick up the phone and call someone who was there. At some point, however, there won’t be any eyewitnesses left to ask. We will have to rely on archives as proof. But in 2037, a budget cut will shut down one of the major American archives, which will go into a warehouse and crumble. Then a big war in the Middle East will destroy the Holocaust archives in Israel, and twenty years later a new anti-Semitic dictator in Russia will purge his country’s archives. And let’s not forget the Great Computer Crash of 2022, which will wipe out all of the documents that had been meticulously digitized.

Eventually, the proof will have eroded so much that we can only take some historian’s word for it that all those people were killed, which is exactly the same problem we face with ancient atrocities. Future skeptics will openly question how Hitler could have possibly killed 6 million Jews with such primitive weapons: Why, that’s more people than lived in any city on the planet at the time, all packed into these half-dozen little camps? Impossible! Six million Jews could have fought back and beaten the Nazis with their bare hands. . . .

There is a tendency to dismiss a lot of uncomfortable history as hearsay, but when you get down to it, all history is hea
rsay. We owe it to the victims to not doubt too readily.