Calling it a 'democracy' is a somewhat of a stretch though (both according to modern and ancient definitions). It was a weird (from a modern perspective) form of a flawed direct democracy (the people's assembly had absolute power in theory but passing any laws was very difficult due to a dozen or so public officials being able to effectively/directly veto any legislation). Mixed with an unambiguously oligarchical executive branch (all the top public official who controlled the army and the treasury were elected by a tiny proportion of the population).
It certainly wasn't democratic in the same sense as Athens and some other Greek cities were (and afterall Greek authors considered it to be a mixed system).
Really was closer to a genocide.
Caesar's goal in Gaul was certainly not the extermination of its people or its culture. He wanted to pacify Gaul and Germany, for his own glory, but also for very legitimate self-defense reasons. And the Romans, as a rule, were famously tolerant of other people's national pride, customs, and religions.
And of course, the Gaul and German tribes were at least as brutal to each other as Caesar was to them. The entire region was filled with constantly warring tribes that would often commit something much closer to actual genocide. Caesar, and the later Romans, did a lot to reduce this internecine warfare.
The reality of these kinds of events is a lot more nuanced than a simple label like "genocide" will allow.
I'm not sure pacify is the right word.
> but also for very legitimate self-defense reasons
Not really. By that point the Celts weren't as much of a threat as they were 50-100+ years ago. If his goals were primarily 'pacification' and 'self-defense' a much more limited and cheaper campaign would've been more than sufficient. In any case the Roman senate didn't really consider the war to be necessary in that sense.
> Caesar, and the later Romans, did a lot to reduce this internecine warfare. > commit something much closer to actual genocide
That's a massive a stretch. Even the Romans themselves understood that e.g. the "They Make a Desert and Call it Peace" quote Tacitus put into into the mouth leaders of one of the tribes subjugated by the Romans. The Roman empire was almost entirely built on slave labor and exhortation of the territories they subjugated.
It might have turned into something else in the later periods (by the 1st and 1nd centuries AD). But the Romans certainly did not really improve the lives of the people the conquered during the Republican period.
> The reality of these kinds of events is a lot more nuanced than a simple label like "genocide" will allow.
Well however you put it it was still an extremely violate imperialist war of conquest. Of course yes, technically it wasn't a genocide in the direct sense subjugating, enslaving and stealing their stuff rather than extermination were their primary goals.
This is a description of virtually every ancient society in this region. The Romans were simply the most dominant. And as a rule, they were fairer and more tolerant than the entities they replaced.
> By that point the Celts weren't as much of a threat as they were 50-100+ years ago.
The argument that the Gauls were no longer a threat merely because it had been 40-something years since the last successful invasion of Roman territory doesn't make much sense.
Nothing fundamental had changed. The Romans were stronger by then but the territories bordering Gaul were still at risk. Vercingetorix himself attempted an invasion of the Roman province as a response Caesar's invasion.
> In any case the Roman senate didn't really consider the war to be necessary in that sense.
This is really accepting ancient propaganda at face value. It's more accurate to say that Caesar's opponents in the senate claimed it was unnecessary as a means of attacking him politically. Most of these same Roman senators used the Roman army in much the same way when serving at governors in the provinces.
Ok, I don't know why do I have to specify this but I meant the slave labor if hundreds of thousands (or millions) of foreigners they have subjugated (this was relatively unique in the Mediterranean).
> The Romans were simply the most dominant. And as a rule, they were fairer and more tolerant than the entities they replaced.
Except this wasn't really true. Certainly not in the Republican period. Extortive taxation, extreme levels of corruption and other issues weren't addressed until the imperial period.
e.g. the cities/states rebelling in Asia minor hated the Romans enough to murder every single Italian they could find in the region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_Vespers
> The argument that the Gauls were no longer a threat merely because it had been 40-something years since the last successful invasion of Roman territory doesn't make much sense.
I don't agree about 40 years.. Well it's tangential anyway and has little to do with Caesar's motivations.
> Most of these same Roman senators used the Roman army in much the same way when serving at governors in the provinces.
Maybe but certainly not to a such degree of course. However yes, the main thing that set him apart from all the other ambitious Roman aristocrats was how exceptionally successful he was.
Because they didn't do anything substantively different in this regard? Pointing out that the Romans had slaves as if it somehow differentiated them seems misleading.
The number of people living under slavery, or near-slavery, was probably quite similar before and after the Romans took over any given territory. In some cases, less, and other cases more.
"Well it's tangential anyway and has little to do with Caesar's motivations."
We can't read his mind but it seems very believable that he genuinely wanted to eliminate a threat to Rome, among other things. Most big things like this have more than one motivation. He could have chosen to go east to do his conquering, but he chose Gaul.
At one point he refers to the defeat and death of his father-in-law's grandfather, at the hands of the Gallic tribe he was engaged with. There's a good chance he sat at a dinner talking with his father-in-law about this. It wouldn't be surprising if they both agreed that it was time someone do something about the threat they posed.
I'm sorry are you being purposefully obtuse here?
>Because they didn't do anything substantively different in this regard?
Anyway that's tangential and semi-irrelevant to my point. The scale of slavery in Roman Italy was on a completely different level than anywhere else in the Mediterranean or the Hellenic world. As far as we can tell the level of exploitation the Roman aristocracy engaged in didn't really have any parallel in the ancient world (and it didn't benefit anyone but them especially not the lower class Roman citizens in the Italian countryside).
> n some cases, less, and other cases more.
I would assume it was usually less. Sometimes significantly. In part because of depopulation following the extreme atrocities inflicted by the Romans and because most of the newly captured slaves were transported to Italy. You might have a point though for instance the Romans basically slavery in Carthage which was quite and an achievement by ancient standards...
> He could have chosen to go east to do his conquering
I don't think he could've chosen that at all considering the political situation in the Roman empire at the time.
> It wouldn't be surprising if they both agreed that it was time someone do something about the threat they posed.
Everything you're saying is almost purely conjecture. In any case reducing/removing the Gaulic threat to Rome you keep talking about (which again wasn't really an issue on the Italian side of the alps anymore anyway). Anyway the exact justification are hardly relevant when Ceasar's conquest was mainly driven by personal ambition and greed (which doesn't make him special compared to most other Roman, Celtic or Greek warlords he was just extremely effective at it).
You're mixing up the timeline. He chose Gaul when him and two dudes controlled the entire Roman empire. One of those dudes went East and died fighting there.
"Everything you're saying is almost purely conjecture"
Almost all historical analysis like this is conjecture. Some of it is just well reasoned and others is not.
It's a fact that he cited my reason in his commentaries and so is who is father-in-law is. He was related, through his wife, to someone that the Gauls killed in recent history.
Anyway, you're not really adding any information here and you're resorting to personal attacks, so I'm done here. Later!
IIRC that was done in a single instance in order to try to pacify Gaul while Caesar was about to be away invading Britain.
Yes but that was a pretty ordinary occurrence in the ancient world.
I don't think the Celts were that much nicer when they invaded Greece a couple of hundred years earlier (or Rome/Italy itself prior to that).
The Romans supposedly murdered up to half a million people just during the siege of Carthage.
When Ceasar was ~12 the rebelling Greek kingdoms/cities basically exterminated almost all the Italians living in Asia Minor (~100k people). The amount of violence violence committed in Gaul seems to be only unperrendented in the sense that most generals weren't really successful enough to be in a position to murder that many people compared to Caesar.
That's why it is important to rebuke politicians in the mold of Trump. You don't know who will follow him.
It is easier to follow "norms" when they don't involve blowing a lot of money on foreign wars and with limited results to show for it. It says a lot about how people rate the last few decades that figureheads of that generation of political leadership like Hilary Clinton or Joe Biden are struggling mightily to outpoll Donald Trump. My read is almost anyone with a record in office is unelectable. How norms will survive that sort of failure is anyone's guess (as is whether they should survive).
Ironic complaint on a Rome thread :).
Conquest is the history of civilisation. It took the Industrial Revolution to make the “war a lot more destructive (thus lowering returns to successful warfare) while at the same time massively raising returns to capital investment in things like infrastructure, factories and tractors. It suddenly made more sense, if you coveted your neighbors resources, to build more factories and buy those resources than to try to seize them by force” [1]. Instead, “states no longer ask if they can profit through a war of conquest, but rather if they’d spend less managing the disaster that a local failed state is by invading versus trying to manage the problem via aid or controlling refugee flows.” To the extent we engage in foreign wars, it’s in that failed-state management mode. (Iraq, what would have been the geopolitical blunder of the century were it not for Ukraine and Brexit, is the notable exception.)
> lion's share of real growth from the last 30 years seems to have been in Asia
In relative terms, yes. In aggregate terms, it’s surprisingly balanced—the U.S. growing at 3% and China at 10% in 1990 roughly maintained their relative economies. And since Xi, China’s relative economic growth has stalled (assuming official data are true) [2].
[1] https://acoup.blog/2023/06/09/fireside-friday-june-9-2023/
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/c10bd71b-e418-48d7-ad89-74c5783c5...
The Romans were primitives. Individually very impressive and for their time the society was incredible. But they didn't have access to the level of knowledge we do these days on how to create wealth and live comfortably. If they'd spent less time on pointless wars and more time on cheap energy, they too would have achieved better results.
Turns out, amazingly, that at no point in history was killing people and breaking stuff the path to long, happy, comfortable and prosperous living. I can see why nobody figured it out before the 1800s, but the fact is we're looking back on the works of Adam Smith and modern US politicians should know better. They do know better, in fact. They persist with the waste, death and destruction despite knowing better. And that is likely a factor in the Trump phenomenon. The norms they've been championing have had terrible consequences. China has humiliated the west, an actual we-should-be-red-faced-with-shame humiliation, by thriving peacefully. Why can't the US manage that, hm? At least the Trump rhetoric is consistent with the idea than the current political norms.
'Turns out, amazingly, that at no point in history was killing people and breaking stuff the path to long, happy, comfortable and prosperous living.'
Surely it can be argued that the USA choosing to enter WW2 when it did and help secure victory for the allies placed the US government in an incredibly powerful position when reconfiguring the global economy (in its favor). The US dollar is still the world's reserve currency and post war generations have lived incredibly prosperously compared to their peers before the war (perhaps this is now reversing).
The US has spent the last 50 years fighting wars. China has not. China has grown by approximately 1 US economy (a bit less accounting for the fact that their figures are bogus). What was the point of the last 50 years of war? Where is the upside from all the US's killing? Because as far as I can see, most of the upside seems to have been in Asia.
Well to be fair for the upper class Romans it was exactly that.
Growth in GDP for a country with a well respected currency is trivial - increase government spending. Of course, in the limit, that destroys your currency's reputation... but then nominal GDP will grow at the inflation rate at constant real GDP.
It has more to do with the calcification of most of the electorate behind one or the other party.
There was far more opportunity for growth in China than in the U.S. Rather, compare the U.S. to Europe, Japan, and South Korea.
The US has created more wealth over the past 10 or 20 years than China has.
US households have added roughly $72 trillion in net wealth over just ten years (and that's just counting households; excluding non-profits and corporations). It's the greatest net wealth creation in human history for one nation, surpassing anything China has done in a ten year span.
Read that one more time. $72 trillion. Ten years.
US household wealth is at an extraordinary level at present and holding despite very high interest rates. Meanwhile China's housing market is a disaster and their stock market hasn't net moved in 16 years (it's still stuck where it was in eg 2007 and 2009).
Yeah but the US middle class is doing horribly and isn't getting a share of that $72 trillion. The US median individual wealth figure is now over $100,000. It's higher than either Germany or Sweden. That's the median, in a nation of 335 million people.
China will continue to wilt under Xi and the US and its allies will continue to redirect their capital investment.
To be fair you did pick some of the poorest "rich" West European countries. A median French person is about 25% richer than an America, a Briton by 40% and a Belgian by about 240%.
Of course all of those wealth metrics come down to home-ownership and inequality. Sweden for instance has one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in the world and even quite a bit higher than the US.
But its all junk, fake wealth [1]. We cant even make artillery shells for f^*^'s sake. Interest rates are high, inflation is being tamed by selling the oil reserves and collapsing demand.
[1] actually its not entirely fake. No matter how pathetic a currency is, it's the metric of wealth. When you pour printed banknotes onto a favored constituent said constituent gets proportionally more money than the rest of society.