Two Walls — Caesar III: The Ides of March

Twenty-three blows. That is how many times the dagger will strike a man who never lost a war. But before it comes to that, this man must win everything. We begin with a siege that nearly buried him.

The year 52 BC, central Gaul. Caesar is forty-eight and has spent six years conquering a land that, not long ago, he barely knew. You already know how it began: with a gallop to the Rhône. Then it snowballed. The Germans of Ariovistus. The Belgae. The Nervii, who nearly wiped out his army. A bridge over the Rhine built in ten days. Two expeditions to Britain, to the edge of the known world.

Plutarch tallies these years wholesale: more than eight hundred cities taken, three hundred peoples subdued, three million enemies met in battle, a million killed. Such figures were repeated in Rome with admiration, and they are surely exaggerated. The gold from Gaul, however, is real. It flows to Rome and buys men: tribunes, consuls, even the building of a basilica in the Forum. Plutarch sums it up in one sentence: Caesar beat his enemies with the hands of citizens, and bought the citizens with the money of his enemies.

In 52 BC it all starts to fall apart. The Gauls, who until now had quarreled among themselves, choose a single leader, Vercingetorix of the Arverni tribe. Plutarch adds a telling detail: his father had been killed by his own countrymen, who judged that he was aiming at tyranny. Caesar strikes in the dead of winter, along roads that seemed impassable. Not everything goes his way. Suetonius admits that at Gergovia one of his legions was shattered. And the Arverni hang up in a temple a short sword which, they say, they took from Caesar. When Caesar saw it years later, he smiled and would not let it be taken down, because he regarded it as sacred.

Now Vercingetorix withdraws to Alesia, a hill town in the heart of Gaul. According to Plutarch, a hundred and seventy thousand of his warriors take refuge there. Caesar lays siege to the hill. And then comes what Plutarch calls a danger that cannot be described: from all over Gaul a relief army marches in, three hundred thousand men. The numbers are Plutarch’s, and ancient authors liked round thousands. What matters is something else. In front of Caesar stands a town full of warriors, behind him a second army, and his legionaries are caught in between.

At Alesia, Caesar is besieger and besieged at once. Two walls, two fronts, one commander. For Plutarch this is a celebrated episode: no other battle of Caesar’s gave so many proofs of intelligence and courage. What astonishes him most, however, is something else. Caesar routed tens of thousands of men from the relief army without either the people in the town or even the Romans guarding the wall on the town side knowing about it.

They learned of the victory only from the wailing of the women and men in Alesia. They saw Roman soldiers carrying gilded and silver shields, bloodstained breastplates, cups and Gallic tents into the camp. The great army, Plutarch writes, melted away like a phantom or a dream.

Velleius Paterculus, who wrote some eighty years later, puts it more briefly: what he did at Alesia an ordinary man would hardly have dared to attempt, and perhaps only a god could have accomplished.

He sat like that until he was led off to prison. Caesar kept him for his triumph. That is the end of the war in Gaul. Not the end of its consequences. After these years Caesar is a man who cannot be sent home: he has an army loyal only to him, he has gold and he has fame. In Rome one man is left who could match him. And that man is just beginning to be afraid.