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Students working on a semester basis are typically assigned one unit every two weeks. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of The Conquest of Gaul. Jun 15, Jan-Maat added it Shelves: ancient-history , read-in-translation , classical-and-late-antiquity , roman-republic , politics-and-polemic. This is what I was brought to by a childhood of reading Asterix.
Unlike Asterix the injuries aren't restricted to black eyes and broken bones, nor is there a big feast at the end. The warfare is savage, and at the end Caesar tumbles into The Civil War that ends the Roman republic. The fighting is savage on both sides. One of the Gaulish leaders, Vercingetorix, has the ears cut off or an eye gouged out of his own soldiers "even for a minor fault" p , Roman civilians are massacred on occasion wh This is what I was brought to by a childhood of reading Asterix.
One of the Gaulish leaders, Vercingetorix, has the ears cut off or an eye gouged out of his own soldiers "even for a minor fault" p , Roman civilians are massacred on occasion while Caesar in his own account records the extermination of substantial proportions of entire peoples, sells the populations of captured towns in to slavery and in a moment of mercy has a hand of every man captured in one of his last campaigns chopped off to serve as a visual aid to clarify the folly of resisting Rome to the unenlightened.
Though of course he could have been exaggerating to impress the people back home. Part of the reason for the savagery is logistics. Tens of thousands of men roaming round Gaul needed food and fodder. It seems that an ad hoc supply network was created p. Vercingetorix, who led the big campaign against Caesar that involved most of the peoples of Gaul, is reported as realising this and advised that they should carry out a scorched earth defence, abandoning all towns that couldn't be defended against the Romans as well as starting fighting in winter.
What is striking about the Romans is their sheer bloodymindedness. In the face of overwhelming opposition they fight on.
Soldiers ford the Thames and the Loire with water to their shoulders expecting to have to fight on the far bank view spoiler [ the Thames in the past was far wider and shallower than it is today hide spoiler ].
They dig massive siege works - a ten mile ditch and rampart round Alesia and a fourteen mile ditch and rampart round that to defend themselves against any relieving force view spoiler [ this was apparently confirmed by excavations carried out in the reign of Napoleon III, although there has been some controversy if it was the right site or just another Gallic town surrounded by massive Roman siege works - this is also referred in Asterix hide spoiler ].
Build bridges over the Rhine. Construct and repair ships. In short, join the army, it'll make a master builder of you. Suetonius, admittedly writing The Twelve Caesars a good hundred and fifty years after the events wrote that Caesar lost no opportunity of picking quarrels - however flimsy the pretext - with allies as well as hostile and barbarous tribes, and marching against them; the danger of this policy never occurred to him.
Understandably, Caesar's own account makes it all sound a little more reasonable than that, there is a fair attempt made to make it sound like an accidental bit of empire building. You know how it is, one day you are just marching against the Helvetii, the next thing you know ten years have passed and you seem to have inadvertently conquered all of Gaul, invaded Britain and Germany twice and written a set of memoirs putting the best light on your activities and lucky escapes from disaster.
From early on Gallic leaders seems suspicious of the extent of Caesar's ambitions, Ariovistus' a warlord from beyond the Rhine defence pp. Gaul, however, was not big enough for the two of them. Caesar starts out with little campaigns but is drawn in his own words further away from the Roman Province in southern France into greater offensive measures which provoke bigger resistance down to the massive effort of Vercingetorix and his confederates culminating with the defeat of said champion at the town of Alesia.
There, besieged by the Romans he runs out of food, expels the town's population who are then trapped between Vercingetorix's and Caesar's lines with nothing to eat, only to see the relieving army defeated. After this there was another year or so of smaller scale campaigns before all Gaul was conquered. And everybody not dead presumably traumatised and in shock. We get a picture of Gaul on the eve of conquest. A marked division between rich and poor.
Larger states with annually elected officials and leaders in the south. Politics governed by clashes within and between important families for political power.
It all sounds rather like the Rome of Caesar's own time but with a Gallic flavour. There are some ethnographic snippets, a couple of pages on the Druids possibly the most surviving about them that was written in antiquity , the use of hedges in warfare among the Belgians, that the Germans live off meat and milk despite which when the Romans cross the Rhine they set about gathering in the crops that the Germans grow , that the ancient Britons paint themselves blue shave their bodies apart from their upper lip perhaps this is why there was no British equivalent of Cleopatra and had marriages between many men and one woman.
Since Caesar presumably was too busy conquering to spend time skulking about the huts of natives observing their marital customs I have to wonder if his leg was being pulled here by his informants as it was about the elk, which he tells us is a beast with no knees that can only sleep by leaning against trees and is completely helpless should it fall over.
There's some interesting body language - while the Romans are trying to capture Gergovia the townswomen bare their breasts when appealing to the Romans for mercy but appear with loosened hair when encouraging their menfolk to fight more fiercely. Presumably they would have lost heart completely and instantly surrendered if their wives had their hair in buns or pinned up in elaborate hairstyles. Something which comes to mind is that there are two contrasting narratives going on - one is familiar, the Britons and the Germans are 'other' they have weird clothes and habits, they are not like us, they are frightening enemies therefore Caesar's 'success' in over-coming them is all the greater, however in Gaul the narrative is different - they are like us, well like the Romans and not 'other' they have elected consuls, they have military discipline, they have engineering skills, in short Caesar portrays them as Romanised, however the two narratives converge - both groups are subject to Roman rule and can be subdued by Roman military and political talent.
Rome recognises no limits to its rule, neither the Rhine nor the Ocean shall hold the Roman back. View all 18 comments. Reading Caesar makes me want to go back and learn Latin the Loeb Classics keep seductively singing to me of the benefits of a Latin education.
Anyway, I only meant to start the The Conquest of Gaul today, but the compelling narrative of Caesar's Gallic War the record of his battles against Vercingetorix and the other chieftains was just too damn compelling. It is hard to underestimate the importance of JC no not THAT JC in terms of military strategy, political acumen, propagandistic spin, and his shrewd combination of prudent warfare and bold action. View all 3 comments.
Feb 23, Caroline-not-getting-updates rated it it was amazing Shelves: classical , history. Addition: The library just purchased the newly published Landmark edition, so I requested it to verify that it is as outstanding as the other volumes in the Landmark series. Definitely yes. In short, do not accept any substitutes.
Also an excellent and substantial introduction that provides: a solid biography, the h Addition: The library just purchased the newly published Landmark edition, so I requested it to verify that it is as outstanding as the other volumes in the Landmark series.
Also an excellent and substantial introduction that provides: a solid biography, the historical and political context of each work, a critical analysis of its literary purpose and value, and an assessment of reliability. I plan on saving up for this because I listened originally. Still, I think listening is also a good way to approach the work because it gives you a sense of the literary accomplishment and of the energy and propulsion the man had.
Listening is as if a cultured veteran officer, back from the wars, were telling you how it went. Original review: A classic for many reasons. Caesar is, first of all, a masterful writer.
As so many other reviewers have said, the pace is cracking. He offers an adept mix of strategy and tactics discussions, actual battle scenes, politics within his own command, and both military and ethnographic descriptions of the Gauls. His timing in switching from one to the other is perfect.
Caesar is unbelievably visual in the battle scenes. Just the words paint an easily understood picture of the terrain and the distribution of the troops. But the part I found most interesting in both this book and The Civil War is the multi-tasking, range of skills, and sheer physical work required of the Roman soldier. One knows they had to march double time with heavy packs no high-tech materials back then and then wield very heavy weapons in battle.
But they also spent countless days--months sometimes-- building fortifications and siege machines out of massive beams. They constructed hundreds of ships--twice--to attack Britain. Which brings us to the quantities of soldiers on both sides. I do find the numbers unbelievable. Can it be possible that both sides regularly mustered armies in the hundreds of thousands? The peasants, of course, had to supply the provisions, sometimes paid and often not.
The role that provisions and water play in strategy and battle plans is omnipresent. Also, the different mobility of different parts of the army: cavalry, infantry, supplies. This looks to be one of those books that requires me to read another book to understand more about it; in this case, a history of the Roman military. This is also an excellent read on leadership. But even allowing for a great deal of fiction, the rhetoric of the speeches is very effective and great reading.
With regard to the brutality and the massive scale of destruction that apparently leads other reviewers to downgrade the rating for this book.
The rating is for the writing, not the person. Next up: The Thirty Years War. Men are frequently mass murderers. They probably always will be. Yes, Caesar ordered his soldiers to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
At least tens of thousands of his soldiers were killed. View all 5 comments. Sep 11, Aurelia rated it it was amazing. Furthermore, he invaded Britain on two separate occasions. This is his account of those events which was dispatched to Rome, a sort of political propaganda to justify his motives to have gone this far. Those motives are a combination of defending Roman frontiers, subjugating barbarian peoples to Roman hegemony, amassing wealth by plunder and finally personal political ambition and military prestige.
The text offers a precious description of the peoples on those parts of the world at that time. Although they all lived in tribes, they had different political constitutions, costumes and religions. The development of agriculture and commerce varied from quit advanced in Gaulle, because of exchange with the neighboring Roman provinces; to nonexistent such as it is the case with the Germans. One thing they all shared was their warlike nature. By the first century BCE they already had a long history of hostility with the Romans.
Even among each other, Peace seeking was not their greatest virtue. The presence and growing influence of Rome further complicated the matter, as many Gallic tribes were already in alliance with Rome and counted on its help to advance their power over fellow tribes. Although considered as barbarians by the Romans, they had a developed conscience of national unity and a sense of liberty from any foreign subjugation.
They put up a fierce resistance with massive rebellions. On many occasions, even exchanging hostages and having Roman forces garrisoned in their territories was not enough to deter them from plotting an uprising. Another very fascinating part of this text is the details on one of the most efficient and advanced war machines that ever existed: the Roman Army. In this situation, the Romans are usually outnumbered, fighting in dense forests which were very alien to them, facing ambushes by the natives and constantly preoccupied with logistical challenges of supplies without which they will be starved to death.
But they had the advantage of ingenuity and hard work to their side. They had far more advanced technology and experience in siege craft like towers and terraces, trenches several miles long, not mentioning bridge construction twice to cross the Rhine, and Shipbuilding twice to cross the Channel. Discipline is also important, movements were organized, decision making was brilliant, and orders were carefully executed. A great sense of cohesion unites the army; Caesar seems to be very attentive to the state of his troops, and stops here and there to praise their bravery and sense of duty, not only officers or military tribunes, but even centurions and ordinary soldiers.
The Gallic wars are written in a very simple language, but unexpected gems keep coming out of them. Contrary to this image we hold of Caesar being in total control of the situation, he takes his time to talk about how luck is crucial in warfare.
And when we think of Romans soldiers being these fearless people who willingly choose a life of extreme violence, he suddenly starts to describe how they may get panic stricken and superstitious, easily driven by hopes of victory and demoralized by the most trivial setback.
It makes Caesar and his army more human to us. View all 10 comments. Dec 10, J. Keely rated it it was amazing Shelves: non-fiction , history , reviewed , autobiographical , favorites , rome. Nothing better represents Caesar's understanding of how to play upon the hopes and joys of man than the fact that he was able to turn a few hundred pages of troop movements into a thoughtful, engrossing narrative.
We read not only Caesar's thoughts and intentions in the work, but also gain an invaluable view of Roman politics. Gardner Translated by S. Handford Revised by Jane P. Gardner Best Seller. Feb 24, ISBN Add to Cart. Buy from Other Retailers:. Paperback —. Also by Julius Caesar.
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