24 Holiday specials The Economist December 18th 2021
julius caesarHE CAME,
HE SAW,
HE LIED
H
emingway, orwell,Joyce, Turgenev: many great
foreign writers have found inspiration in France.
But for lasting influence, one scribe stands above them
all. He travelled around France for nine years, observ
ing the local customs and recounting what he saw in
lean and muscular prose. He also killed, by his own es
timate, a million of the natives, conquered their terri
tory and imposed on it a civilisation that has lasted, in
one form or another, more than 2,000 years.
He was, of course, Julius Caesar. His “Commentar
ies on the Gallic Wars” is a fine work of literature. Cic
ero likened his prose to “nude figures, upright and
beautiful, stripped of all ornament of style”. The “Gal
lic Wars” is also the only firsthand account of an an
cient campaign written by a general of such stature. It
is a priceless source for historians, yet also a slippery
piece of propaganda. A quip apocryphally attributed to
Winston Churchill could as easily have been Caesar’s:
“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”
A copy of the “Gallic Wars” in hand (on a nonstone
tablet), The Economistretraced some of Caesar’s steps,
using fast French trains rather than oxcarts on Gaulish
roads that had not yet had the benefit of Roman en
gineering. The aim was not merely to retell Caesar’s
bloody, dramatic tale, but to look at how modern his
torians have questioned it. And also to ask what we can
learn from the most consequential writersoldier
statesman in European history. We, too, live in a world
where men with armies misbehave, where politicians
twist the truth, and where it is not clear which culture
will be dominant in the decades to come. Studying
Caesar may help us understand our own age better.
An observant reader swiftly spots that Caesar ped
dled fake news worthy of any modern demagogue. In
one battle he claims to have routed an army of 430,000
Germans without losing a single legionary. Since he
had no atom bombs, this seems doubtful.
Caesar was not trying to write objective history. His
aim was to increase his power. In 58bc, when the ac
tion began, he was not yet the master of Rome. He was
one of a triumvirate of strongmen, along with Pompey
(a general) and Crassus (a plutocrat). Having lavished
sums on the Romans to buy popularity, Caesar was
deeply in debt. He also faced possible prosecution forA LESIA, GERGOVIA AND LUTETIA
Retracing the steps of the most influential
writer ever to visit Franceoffences committed as consul the previous year, such
as using troops to intimidate his political opponents.
A military campaign was a chance to pay off those
debts, from plunder. And his dispatches from Gaul
burnished his reputation as a brilliant military leader.
Like Charles Dickens, he probably published his work
in instalments. Each year he sent another chapter to
the Senate and had it circulated in Rome.
Unlike some other Roman authors, he was interest
ed in nonRomans. He offers insights into cultures
that left no written accounts of their own. “Gallic fu
nerals are splendid and costly, for a comparatively
poor country,” he observes. “Husbands have power of
life and death over their wives and children.”
He notes that the Germans shunned agriculture,
preferring to live on milk, cheese and meat; that Ger
man men strove to remain celibate as long as possible,
believing it would make them stronger, and that Ger
man tribes “regard it as their greatest glory to lay waste
as much as possible of the land around them and to
keep it uninhabited” to remove “any fear of sudden in
vasion”. Yet they were hospitable towards guests.
Caesar makes outrageous generalisations. “Anger
and impetuosity”, he writes, are “the most striking
characteristic of the Gallic race.” The Gauls are quick to
take up arms, but “have not the strength of character to
stand up against reverses”. Some of his claims drew on
earlier writers or hearsay. Did the Druids really burn
wicker men full of human sacrificial victims? There is
no archaeological evidence for this calumny. It is
widely believed today only because Caesar wrote it. As
for his belief that unicorns lived in Germany...
He did not spend long enough in Britain to observe
much about its people, other than that they were nim
ble charioteers who, “without provocation”, attacked
the army that was invading them.
He said the Belgians were the bravest of the Gaulish
peoples. He thought this was because they were the
“least often visited by merchants with enervating lux
uries for sale”. He may have been referring to Roman
wine, which was so popular with other Gauls that an
amphora of it might be bartered for a slave. This was a
staggering price, implying that to a rich Gaul a good
drink was worth a lifetime of someone else’s labour.