Julius Caesar (16 page)

The boats of the Veneti were built for the Atlantic and the Channel, heavily-timbered, the oak iron-fastened; even their cables were of iron chain (something unknown before), and their sails were of leather, designed to withstand storms such as the southern seamen hardly knew. Quite apart from that, the Veneti were completely familiar with their own rock-bound coasts and with the high and relentless tides—a phenomenon again unfamiliar to the Romans. Their high stems and sterns, built to withstand the roaring seas, overtopped the turrets erected aboard the Roman ships, while the projectiles hurled from them could clear the Roman decks. The latter, indeed, had only one advantage over their enemy and that was the speed which their lean lines and their trained oarsmen gave them. Once again the ingenuity and superior thinking of the Romans, which in an earlier century had defeated the Carthaginian marines, gave them the mastery. They had studied the ships of the Veneti and observed that they were totally dependent upon their sails. Once without them they would be floundering in the ocean swell, while the superiority of the Roman soldiers would soon show itself in a land battle fought afloat.

They had therefore prepared sickles fastened to the end of long poles, somewhat like the grappling hooks used in sieges, and when the day came for the major action they knew what they had to do. The culminating sea battle took place in Quiberon Bay, with Caesar and the army gathered as spectators on the shore. As the galleys closed with the great ships of the Veneti, they grasped the halyards of their leather sails, and then the men at the oars pulled hard away. As the strain came on the halyards and the sickles began to cut, yards and sails came thundering down and ship after ship was disabled. To add to the distress of the Veneti a calm descended, and those who had not yet lost their sails also swayed immobilized upon the heaving sea. The Romans ran alongside with the agility of dogs attacking a bear and the soldiers swept aboard to overpower men more used to the tactics of the sea than the land. The whole engagement lasted throughout the day, from ten in the morning until sunset, and at the end of it all the proud fleet of the Vened was either taken or sunk.

Deprived of their ships, with many of their best men killed, the Veneti surrendered. Caesar, who was usually disposed to clemency toward a brave enemy, was determined on this occasion to make an object lesson. They had laid hands upon Roman officers and citizens (the phrasing suggests peaceful ambassadors rather than avaricious merchants, requisitioning officers, and civilians calculating tax), and this “treachery” must be denounced and paid for. Accordingly all the Gallic leaders were executed, and the rest of the tribe was sold into slavery. Like the Nervii, who were spared, they had been brave but, like the Atuatuci, the Veneti were considered to have broken a trust.

The year which had opened so threateningly ended peacefully enough. Labienus had kept everything quiet among the Belgae, young Crassus had gained a great victory in Aquitania, and the rebels in Normandy had been defeated by another of Caesar’s handpicked subordinates. Caesar himself had projected a further minor campaign against two tribes living in Flanders, who had as yet refused to submit to the Romans. These tribes, however, refused to give battle in the usual fashion but, living as they did in an area thick with forests and marshland, merely withdrew before the advancing legionaries and allowed the weather of their native land and coast to work for them. Soon even Caesar had to confess himself beaten by the torrential rain and by the earth which turned into so soft a mud that not even tents would stay erect. He had been anxious to secure a base for an expedition to Britain the following year and to investigate the coastline opposite the island, but was finally forced to call a halt and withdrew. Having once again quartered his legions in the conquered lands, he made his way back to Italy.

In the electoral struggle for the new consulships, Crassus and Pompey would almost certainly have failed if it had not been for Caesar. Despite all the bribery and corruption that had been used, it was neither Pompey’s reputation nor Crassus’ money which gained them their places but a thousand or more legionaries. Released in batches under the command of young Crassus (eager to see his father elected because of the benefits it might confer on himself), their entry into Rome produced the desired result. Pompey and Crassus, once elected, saw that the bill was pushed through which would in due course secure the province each had asked for at the Luca meeting, and shortly afterward they fulfilled their obligation to Caesar, prolonging his powers for a further four years. None of this took place without great opposition, but the climate of violence triumphed. Four were killed and many wounded in affrays, Crassus himself even stabbing a senator.

Caesar turned back to the west earlier than usual in the year 55. He had news of a further migration of Germanic tribes across the Rhine. Immense numbers of Germans from two major tribes, the Usipetes and Tencteri, themselves squeezed out of their land by the Suebi whom Caesar had crushed, were now moving toward the lower Moselle at the invitation of Celts and Belgians planning to use them to free themselves from Roman domination. Caesar, having summoned up his Celtic cavalry, moved in the direction of Coblenz where the bulk of the invading Germans were encamped. Here events took much the same course as they had with the Suebi, the chiefs coming forward to say that they had no wish to make war against the Roman people: they just wanted somewhere to live, and asked Caesar to grant them an area where they could settle in peace. Caesar reiterated that there was no place for them anywhere in Gaul but that, if they went back across the Rhine, they could find living room among a tribe there who had already asked him for protection from the Suebi. He aimed, in fact, to make use of these migrant German tribes as a kind of buffer-state, hoping that they and the remaining Suebi would Fight it out and leave Gaul alone. Unfortunately a cavalry clash ensued in which his Gallic horsemen were ignominiously routed. The Germans, again making it clear that they had no wish to engage the Romans in war, sent a deputation of all their chiefs and leading men to apologize for the incident and to ask for a further armistice. Caesar ordered their immediate arrest and then, having deprived the body of its head, pressed on with the legions in the direction of the German camp.

In the absence of their leaders, and taken totally by surprise, the Germans turned in confusion and flight when the disciplined legions and the Gallic cavalry—anxious to wipe out the stain on their reputation from their previous defeat—fell upon them without warning. Like the Helvetii before them the Usipetes and Tencteri were whole tribes migrating, impeded by civilians, noncombatants and baggage-carts. As Michael Grant rightly says, Caesar’s account of what ensued is “one of the most chilling passages in ancient literature”:

When they reached the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine, they realized that they could flee no farther. A large number was killed, and the rest plunged into the water and perished, overcome by the force of the current in their terror-stricken and exhausted state. The Romans returned to camp without a single casualty, and with only a few wounded, although a grim struggle had been anticipated against an enemy four hundred and thirty thousand strong.

This massacre, for which no excuses can be adduced since the leaders of the tribes had been taken prisoner when on a mission of peace, was quickly promoted by Caesar’s propagandists in Rome as a magnificent victory. “Four hundred and thirty thousand barbarians killed in a single battle!” was a headline that none could ignore. There was nothing comparable in history! Caesar was surpassing Alexander….

17

From Germany to Britain

WHEN the news of Caesar’s successes against the feared and hated Germans reached Rome, there was of course an immediate outcry for a further public thanksgiving to be held in his honor. The enthusiasm of the masses for such festivities could be taken for granted, since they implied a holiday, feasting and entertainment—at whose expense was no concern of theirs. This demand naturally had to be brought before the senate, which in its demoralized state would probably have acceded. Cicero was now trimming his sails to the Caesarian wind, and there would have been no spokesmen of consequence to raise any objection, had Cato not been present.

Cato’s indignation would have done credit to many a modern sensibility, and it seems strange to find it in the Rome that bred Caesar, Clodius and Crassus. He maintained that instead of honoring this criminal leader for his breach of faith they should hand him over to the Germans for punishment, in that way the sins of their general might not be visited upon his soldiers and his city. (Cato clearly had received reports from the front of what had really happened in the Usipetes and Tencteri affair.) In his anger he did, however, forget that there was another side to the argument: the Germans were a very real and constant threat to the Gaul which Caesar was establishing. They had indeed previously threatened Rome itself, and there was a case to be made for the surgical treatment of this infection at source. But Cato’s eloquence, and a certain uneasiness among the senators themselves, meant that the proposal to accord Caesar further honors was not followed up. (After all, even to a Roman of the 1st century BC the extermination of nearly half a million people—if Caesar’s own figures were to be credited—was hardly commonplace.) As soon as he heard of Cato’s speech Caesar replied by letter with an attempted character-assassination of his old enemy, but the fact was that he could not, either at this time in his life or years later when he tried again, find any justification for traducing Cato. The latter’s honesty and stern morality was as evident to his contemporaries as that of his great-grandfather Cato the Censor, who had long served as a model of all the best republican virtues, had been. Nothing more was heard of fresh honors for Caesar, and he was already too occupied with a new development in his German campaign to pursue the issue any further.

According to Dio Cassius, Caesar “wanted an excuse for crossing the river Rhine for he was ambitious to do something that no other Roman general had done before him.” There can be little doubt that this was true, but the matter was not quite so simple. Caesar—as usual, one might be justified in saying—could manage to combine a private ambition with a practical policy of benefit to Rome. Being daily in contact with the moving mass of peoples in this vast extent of “new Europe,” he knew—as Cato did not—that the Germans presented a very real threat not only to the extended Romanized Gaul that he was creating, but ultimately to Rome itself. They were savage and fierce warriors, whereas the Gauls of the Narbonese province and even the others whom he had recently conquered were already softening under the impact of civilization. The Cisalpine Gauls, who had once terrorized Rome but who had now become agriculturalists and lived quietly in northern Italy, were hardly a match for their ancestors—and it was a nightmare to imagine what might happen if the Germans in their tens of thousands, hardy, prolific, and inured to warfare, were to descend on the soft citizens of the capital. Now that the bloodstained tide was so clearly running in his favor, Caesar intended to protect the new provinces of Gaul and Belgium, the old Narbonne Province, and ultimately Italy itself, with a
cordon sanitaire
that would isolate them from turbulent Germany. Gradually, no doubt, this could be extended, for the horizon of potential conquest seemed limitless.

He was soon provided with an excellent excuse. A detachment of German cavalry who had been away from the main body of the two tribes at the time of the massacre, returned, heard what had happened, and at once made their way across the Rhine to seek shelter with the Sugambri, another tribe on the right bank of the Rhine. They were only a fragment of the defeated enemy, but Caesar immediately sent orders for them to be handed over as “men who had borne arms against him and against Gaul.” The Sugambri proudly, and rightly, replied that the sovereignty of the Roman people did not extend beyond the Rhine, and if he complained that the Germans had no right to come into Gaul, what right had he to come into Germany? Ignoring the logic of this, Caesar now had his pretext for the crossing. He intended to make a demonstration, no more, unless any Germans were so foolish as to attack his troops. He wished to show them that the power of Rome could easily be extended into Germany if need be, and he also wished to demonstrate by the Romans’ superior skills, that the Germans were technically and in all other respects inferior. Although the river could have been crossed comparatively easily by boats, he elected to have a bridge built, across which the legions would march in parade-ground style. For them there was to be no floundering in the shallows, no awkward embarkation and disembarkation. Something that the Germans had never seen before was to be achieved by the Roman engineering skill—a bridge across the turbulent, wide and deep river that symbolized their untamed country. All the available workforce on the left bank was pressed into service, cutting down trees and shaping timbers at the direction of the engineers, while the legionaries—as adept with mattock and agricultural tools as with their arms—now showed they were also bridge-builders. Within no more than ten days a bridge on the trestle-system had been erected, Fifteen hundred feet long and forty feet wide. Across it marched the legions with the eagles, and at their head a balding man in elaborate armor on a white charger—symbols of a power that stretched from the Atlantic to Africa, from Gaul to the Caucasus and Asia Minor.

The proconsul and the legions were only eighteen days on the far bank of the Rhine: long enough to reassure the Ubii, who were friendly to the Romans but who must often have feared what that friendship might lead to among their neighbors. The other tribes fled back into their dark, mysterious woods. They had seen what these people, who had conquered the Gauls and Belgians, could do even to their sacred father-river. But the Germans in their tens of thousands were soon gathering, and Caesar had no intention of hazarding his legions in unknown country against impossible odds. “He returned to Gaul and cut the bridge behind him.” He had, at least, been where no Roman general had ever been before.