As Cicero dragged himself disconsolately from Rome, into an exile that would ultimately see him holed up in Macedon, Caesar headed north. Now that the end-game between the great orator and Clodius appeared to have played itself out, the governor of Gaul could no longer afford to linger on in the outskirts of the capital. Throughout the Alps trouble was threatening. German war bands had begun to flood across the Rhine, and waves from the incursions were already lapping against the Roman frontier.
Caesar, travelling as usual at a furious speed, headed directly for the point of maximum pressure. Eight days after leaving Rome he arrived in Geneva. Just beyond Lake Leman a vast and menacing wagon train was parked on the border. The Helvetians, natives of the Alps, had tired of their mountain home and wished to strike out west. The new governor, recognising a golden opportunity when he saw it, played for time. First, he announced to the tribesmen that he would consider their request to pass through Roman territory – then promptly sealed off the border. Five extra legions, two of them recruited from scratch, were force-marched to man it. The Helvetians, finding the frontier blocked, began to skirt its length, their long wagon train lumbering westwards, 360,000 men, women and children on the march. Caesar shadowed them, passing across the frontier and into free Gaul. Taking the Helvetians by surprise, he ambushed their rearguard and then, when the tribesmen attacked Caesar in turn, defeated them a second time in a ferocious battle. The survivors sued for terms. Caesar ordered them back home.
It had been a stunning victory – and thoroughly illegal. The previous year sweeping new measures had come into effect, specifically designed to regulate abuses by provincial governors and restrain their ambitions. Their author had been none other than Caesar himself. Now, by picking a fight with a tribe not subject to the Republic, on territory not ruled by the Republic, he had flagrantly broken his own law. His enemies back in Rome were quick to point this out. In time, Cato would even propose that Caesar be handed over to the tribes he had assaulted. To many in the Senate, the Gallic adventure appeared both unwarranted and unjust.
Not to most citizens, however. One man’s war criminal was another man’s hero. Barbarian migrations had always been the stuff of Roman nightmares. Whenever wagons began rumbling across the north, the reverberations would echo far away in the Forum. The Republic had no fiercer bogeyman than the pale-skinned, horse-maned, towering Gaul. Hannibal might have ridden up to Rome’s gates and flung his javelin over them, but he had never succeeded in capturing the seat of the Republic. Only the Gauls had managed that. Way back, at the beginning of the fourth century BC, a barbarian horde had burst without warning across the Alps, sent a Roman army fleeing from it in panic, and swept into Rome. The Capitol alone had remained sacrosanct, and even that would have fallen had not the sacred geese of Juno alerted the garrison to a surprise attack. When the Gauls, having slaughtered, looted and burned at will, had withdrawn as suddenly as they had come, they had left behind them a city resolved never again to endure such indignities. This was the steel that had enabled Rome to become the mistress of the world.
Even three centuries later, however, memories of the Gauls remained raw. Every year guard-dogs would be crucified, a posthumous punishment of the dogs who had failed to bark on the Capitol, while Juno’s geese, as an ongoing reward for their ancestors’ admonitory honking, were brought to watch the spectacle on cushions of purple and gold. A more practical measure was the setting aside of an emergency fund, to be used only in the event of a second barbarian invasion. Even now that the Republic was a superpower this was regarded as an eminently sensible precaution. When men lived not as citizens but halfway to beasts there could be no knowing when their savagery might not suddenly erupt. Within living memory a nation of giants, three hundred thousand of them, it was reckoned, had appeared suddenly from the wastelands of the north, destroying everything in their way, subhuman monsters from the icy rim of the world. Their men had eaten raw flesh; their women had attacked legionaries with their bare hands. Had Marius, in two brilliant victories, not managed to annihilate the invaders, then Rome, and the world with her, would surely have come to an end.
Scares on this scale were not quickly forgotten. No wonder that most citizens, when they heard the news of the Helvetians’ defeat, cared nothing for the laws that might have been broken to achieve it. After all, what greater duty did a proconsul have than to secure the safety of Rome? Caesar himself scrupulously refuted the charge of glory-hunting. The security of his province, and Italy too, had been at stake. For as long as there were restless tribes beyond the Roman frontier, ignorant of the conventions of civilised behaviour, the danger would persist. By this logic, familiar to generations of Romans, the assault on the Helvetians could be reckoned an act of self-defence. So too Caesar’s ongoing campaign – for having dispatched the Helvetians back to their homeland, to serve as a buffer between the Germans and his province, he had next swung east to attack the Germans themselves. The fact that their king had been given the official title of ‘friend of the Roman people’ cut no ice with Caesar. The Germans were successfully provoked into offering battle, defeated, then driven back across the Rhine. There, in the dark, dripping woods, they were welcome to lurk, but not near Caesar’s province – nor anywhere in Gaul.
Already the two were being elided. 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 defence. 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 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 rumour was borne: the Romans were aiming ‘to pacify all Gaul’.15 As warriors burnished their glittering, jewel-wrought shields, and striplings, eager to prove themselves ready for battle, forded ice-sheeted streams with full armour on their backs, so rival tribes sought to patch up their differences. Free Gaul prepared itself for war.
As did Caesar. He was not the man to tolerate anti-Roman agitation. It made no difference whether a tribe had been defeated or was free, the Republic demanded respect, and honour required that a proconsul instil it. Having provoked the Gauls into defiance, Caesar now felt perfectly justified in smashing it. That winter he recruited two more legions. High-handedly, and without any reference to the Senate, he had already doubled the number of troops originally allocated to his province. When winter thawed to spring and Caesar left camp, he had an army of eight legions, some forty thousand men, by his side.
He would need every last one. Heading due north, Caesar was venturing into territory never before penetrated by Roman forces. It was shadow-haunted, sinister, dank with mud and slaughter. Travellers whispered of strange rites of sacrifice, performed in the dead of oaken glades, or by the side of black-watered, bottomless lakes. Sometimes, it was said, the nights would be lit by vast torches of wickerwork, erected in the forms of giants, their limbs and bellies filled with prisoners writhing in an orgy of death. Even at the feasts for which the Gauls were famous, their customs were barbarous and repulsive. The ubiquitous Posidonius, who had travelled through Gaul in the nineties BC, taking notes wherever he went, observed that duels were common over the best cuts of meat, and that even when warriors did get round to feasting they would not lie down to eat, as civilised men did, but would sit and let their straggling moustaches drip with grease and gravy. Blank-eyed spectators of these scenes of gluttony, and a spectacle even more repellent, were the severed heads of the warriors’ enemies, stuck on poles or in niches. So universally were these used as decorations in Gaulish villages that, Posidonius confessed, he had almost grown used to them by the end of his trip.16
To the legionaries, marching ever further north along pitted, winding tracks, peering nervously through the endless screens of trees, it must have appeared that they were entering a realm of utter darkness. This was why, on their shoulders, they bore stakes as well as spears. The camp they built after every day’s march, always identical, night after night, provided them not only with security against ambushes, but also a reminder of civilisation, of home. In the midst of barbarism, a forum and two straight streets would be laid out. The sentries, peering out into the blackness from behind the palisade, would have the comfort of knowing that behind them, at least, there was a corner of a foreign field that was temporarily Rome.
Yet what appeared impossibly barbarous to the legionaries had already been synthesised and fed through Caesar’s intelligence machine. Their general knew precisely where he was heading – and it was not into the unknown. Caesar may have been the first to lead the legions beyond the frontier, but there had been Italians roaming through the wilds of Gaul for decades. In the second century BC, with the establishment of permanent Roman garrisons in the south of the country, the natives of the province had begun to develop a taste for their conquerors’ vices. One, in particular, had gone straight to their heads: wine. The Gauls, who had never come across the drink before, had not the slightest idea how to handle it. Rather than diluting it with water, as the Romans did, they preferred to down it neat, wallowing in drunken binges, and ‘ending up so inebriated that they either fall asleep or go mad’.17 Merchants, who found this style of consumption highly lucrative, had begun to foster it as widely as they could, travelling far beyond the limits of the Roman province, until soon enough the whole of Gaul had grown sodden with liquor. Naturally, with a market of alcoholics to exploit, the merchants had begun to inflate their prices. Since their ability to do this depended on the natives not cultivating their own vineyards, the Senate, ever savvy when it came to fleecing foreigners, had made it illegal to sell vines to ‘the tribes beyond the Alps’.18 By Caesar’s time the exchange rate had stabilised at a jar of wine for one slave, which, at least as far as the Italians were concerned, made for a fabulously profitable import–export business. The slaves could be sold on for a huge mark-up, and the extra manpower available to Roman viticulturists enabled ever more gallons of wine to be produced. It was a virtuous circle that kept everyone – apart from the slaves, of course – happy. The Gauls stayed sozzled, and the merchants grew rich.
Caesar, in daring to imagine that he could impose himself upon a country as vast, warlike and independent as Gaul, was perfectly aware how much he owed to Italian exporters. It was not only that they provided him with spies. The Germans, having witnessed the effect of wine on the Gauls, had gone so far as to ‘ban it from being imported into their own country, because they think it makes men soft’.19 Quarrelsome too. Wine was more precious to Gallic chieftains than gold. Tribes were endlessly raiding each other for slaves, depopulating the countryside with their razzias, breeding bestial, debilitating rivalries – all of which made them easy prey for a man such as Caesar. Even when his spies reported that a confederation numbering 240,000 had been formed against him, he was unperturbed. This was despite the fact that the tribes in his way belonged to the Belgae, the people who, because ‘they were furthest removed from the civilisation and luxury of the Roman province, and were least often visited by merchants importing the kind of goods which lead to effeminacy’,20 were reckoned the bravest in Gaul. Caesar struck against them hard, with all the steel-armoured efficiency he could bring to bear. The further north he advanced, the more the Belgic alliance fragmented. Tribes who submitted were treated with ostentatious generosity. Those who resisted were wiped out. Caesar’s eagles were duly planted on the coast of the North Sea. At the same time messengers came to him from Publius Crassus, the dashing young son of the triumvir, with news that the legion under his command had received the submission of all the tribes in the west. ‘Peace’, Caesar wrote in triumph, ‘had been brought to the whole of Gaul.’21
The news was received ecstatically back in Rome. In 63 Pompey had been granted ten days of public thanksgiving. Now, in 57, Caesar was awarded fifteen. Not even his bitterest enemies could deny the stunning nature of his achievements. After all, nothing that enhanced the prestige of the Republic could be reckoned a crime, and Caesar, by teaching the Gauls to honour its name, had brought into the orbit of Rome people previously lost in the darkness of barbarism. As one of his old opponents gushed in the Senate, ‘regions and nations unreported to us in books, or in first-hand accounts, or even by rumours, have now been penetrated by our general, our army, and the arms of the Roman people’.22 Rejoice indeed!
Yet, for Caesar, there could be no relaxing. Deep and devastating though his incursion had been, a single raid had hardly been sufficient to reduce Gaul to the status of a province. For now, the country was prepared to acknowledge Caesar’s prestige, but supremacy, among a people as inveterately competitive and quarrelsome as the Gauls, was founded on treacherous sands. And so it was too, of course, in Rome. This was why Caesar, even in the damp forests of the north, still had to keep one eye firmly fixed on the political battlefield in the capital. Events in Rome did not stand still just because he was absent. Much had already changed. Nothing better illustrated this than the identity of the man who had stood up in the Senate to propose the thanksgiving for Caesar’s achievements in Gaul. After a bitter exile of eighteen months Cicero had returned to Rome.