The first triumvirate and the conquest of Gaul
- In full:
- Gaius Julius Caesar
- Born:
- July 12/13, 100? bce, Rome [Italy]
- Died:
- March 15, 44 bce, Rome
- On the Web:
- Heritage History - Julius Caesar (June 11, 2025)
The value of the consulship lay in the lucrative provincial governorship to which it would normally lead. On the eve of the consular elections for 59 bce, the Senate sought to allot to the two future consuls for 59 bce, as their proconsular provinces, the unprofitable supervision of forests and cattle trails in Italy. The Senate also secured by massive bribery the election of an anti-Caesarean, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus. But they failed to prevent Caesar’s election as the other consul.
Caesar now succeeded in organizing an irresistible coalition of political bosses. Pompey had carried out his mission to put the East in order with notable success, but after his return to Italy and his disbandment of his army in 62 bce, the Senate had thwarted him—particularly by preventing him from securing land allotments for his veterans. Caesar, who had assiduously cultivated Pompey’s friendship, now entered into a secret pact with him. Caesar’s master stroke was to persuade Crassus to join the partnership, the so-called first triumvirate. Crassus—like Pompey, a former lieutenant of Sulla—had been one of the most active of Pompey’s obstructors so far. Only Caesar, on good terms with both, was in a position to reconcile them. Early in 59 bce, Pompey sealed his alliance with Caesar by marrying Caesar’s only child, Julia. Caesar married Calpurnia, daughter of Lucius Piso, who became consul in 58 bce.
As consul, Caesar introduced a bill for the allotment of Roman public lands in Italy, on which the first charge was to be a provision for Pompey’s soldiers. The bill was vetoed by three tribunes of the plebs, and Caesar’s colleague Bibulus announced his intention of preventing the transaction of public business by watching the skies for portents whenever the public assembly was convened. Caesar then cowed the opposition by employing some of Pompey’s veterans to make a riot, and the distribution was carried out. Pompey’s settlement of the East was ratified en bloc by an act negotiated by an agent of Caesar, the tribune of the plebs Publius Vatinius. Caesar himself initiated a noncontroversial and much-needed act for punishing misconduct by governors of provinces.
Another act negotiated by Vatinius gave Caesar Cisalpine Gaul (between the Alps, the Apennines, and the Adriatic) and Illyricum. His tenure was to last until February 28, 54 bce. When the governor-designate of Transalpine Gaul suddenly died, this province, also, was assigned to Caesar at Pompey’s instance. Cisalpine Gaul gave Caesar a military recruiting ground; Transalpine Gaul gave him a springboard for conquests beyond Rome’s northwest frontier.
Between 58 and 50 bce, Caesar conquered the rest of Gaul up to the left bank of the Rhine and subjugated it so effectively that it remained passive under Roman rule throughout the Roman civil wars between 49 and 31 bce. This achievement was all the more amazing in light of the fact that the Romans did not possess any great superiority in military equipment over the north European barbarians. Indeed, the Gallic cavalry was probably superior to the Roman, horseman for horseman. Rome’s military superiority lay in its mastery of strategy, tactics, discipline, and military engineering. In Gaul, Rome also had the advantage of being able to deal separately with dozens of relatively small, independent, and uncooperative states. Caesar conquered these piecemeal, and the concerted attempt made by a number of them in 52 bce to shake off the Roman yoke came too late.
Great though this achievement was, its relative importance in Caesar’s career and in Roman history has been overestimated in Western tradition (as have his brief raids on Britain). In Caesar’s mind his conquest of Gaul was probably carried out only as a means to his ultimate end. He was acquiring the military manpower, the plunder, and the prestige that he needed to secure a free hand for the prosecution of the task of reorganizing the Roman state and the rest of the Greco-Roman world. This final achievement of Caesar’s looms much larger than his conquest of Gaul, when it is viewed in the wider setting of world history and not just in the narrower setting of the Greco-Roman civilization’s present daughter civilization in the West.
In 58 bce Rome’s northwestern frontier, established in 125 bce, ran from the Alps down the left bank of the upper Rhône River to the Pyrenees, skirting the southeastern foot of the Cévennes and including the upper basin of the Garonne River without reaching the Gallic shore of the Atlantic. In 58 bce Caesar intervened beyond this line, first to drive back the Helvetii, who had been migrating westward from their home in what is now central Switzerland. He then crushed Ariovistus, a German soldier of fortune from beyond the Rhine. In 57 bce Caesar subdued the distant and warlike Belgic group of Gallic peoples in the north, while his lieutenant Publius Licinius Crassus subdued what are now the regions of Normandy and Brittany.
In 56 bce the Veneti, in what is now southern Brittany, started a revolt in the northwest that was supported by the still unconquered Morini on the Gallic coast of the Strait of Dover and the Menapii along the south bank of the lower Rhine. Caesar reconquered the Veneti with some difficulty and treated them barbarously. He could not finish off the conquest of the Morini and Menapii before the end of the campaigning season of 56 bce; and in the winter of 56–55 bce the Menapii were temporarily expelled from their home by two immigrant German peoples, the Usipetes and Tencteri. These peoples were exterminated by Caesar in 55 bce. In the same year he bridged the Rhine just below Koblenz to raid Germany on the other side of the river, and then crossed the Channel to raid Britain. In 54 bce he raided Britain again and subdued a serious revolt in northeastern Gaul. In 53 bce he subdued further revolts in Gaul and bridged the Rhine again for a second raid.
The crisis of Caesar’s Gallic war came in 52 bce. The peoples of central Gaul found a national leader in the Arvernian Vercingetorix. They planned to cut off the Roman forces from Caesar, who had been wintering on the other side of the Alps. They even attempted to invade the western end of the old Roman province of Gallia Transalpina. Vercingetorix wanted to avoid pitched battles and sieges and to defeat the Romans by cutting off their supplies—partly by cavalry operations and partly by “scorched earth”—but he could not persuade his countrymen to adopt this painful policy wholeheartedly.
The Bituriges insisted on standing siege in their town Avaricum (Bourges), and Vercingetorix was unable to save it from being taken by storm within one month. Caesar then besieged Vercingetorix in Gergovia near modern Clermont-Ferrand. A Roman attempt to storm Gergovia was repulsed and resulted in heavy Roman losses—the first outright defeat that Caesar had suffered in Gaul. Caesar then defeated an attack on the Roman army on the march and was thus able to besiege Vercingetorix in Alesia, to the northwest of Dijon. Alesia, like Gergovia, was a position of great natural strength, and a large Gallic army came to relieve it; but this army was repulsed and dispersed by Caesar, and Vercingetorix then capitulated.
During the winter of 52–51 bce and the campaigning season of 51 bce, Caesar crushed a number of sporadic further revolts. The most determined of these rebels were the Bellovaci, between the Rivers Seine and Somme, around Beauvais. Another rebel force stood siege in the south in the natural fortress of Uxellodunum (perhaps the Puy d’Issolu on the Dordogne) until its water supply gave out. Caesar had the survivors’ hands cut off. He spent the year 50 bce in organizing the newly conquered territory. After that, he was ready to settle his accounts with his opponents at home.
Antecedents and outcome of the civil war of 49–45 bce
During his conquest of Gaul, Caesar had been equally busy in preserving and improving his position at home. He used part of his growing wealth from Gallic loot to hire political agents in Rome.
Meanwhile the cohesion of the triumvirate had been placed under strain. Pompey had soon become restive toward his alarmingly successful ally Caesar, as had Crassus toward his old enemy Pompey. The alliance was patched up in April 56 bce at a conference at Luca (Lucca), just inside Caesar’s province of Cisalpine Gaul. It was arranged that Pompey and Crassus were to be the consuls for 55 bce and were to get laws promulgated prolonging Caesar’s provincial commands for another five years and giving Crassus a five-year term in Syria and Pompey a five-year term in Spain. These laws were duly passed. Crassus was then eliminated by an annihilating defeat at the Parthians’ hands in 53 bce. The marriage link between Pompey and Caesar had been broken by Julia’s death in 54 bce. After this, Pompey irresolutely veered further and further away from Caesar, until, when the breach finally came, Pompey found himself committed to the nobility’s side, though he and the nobility never trusted each other.
The issue was whether there should or should not be an interval between the date at which Caesar was to resign his provincial governorships and, therewith, the command over his armies and the date at which he would enter his proposed second consulship. If there were to be an interval, Caesar would be a private person during that time, vulnerable to attack by his enemies; if prosecuted and convicted, he would be ruined politically and might possibly lose his life. Caesar had to make sure that, until his entry on his second consulship, he should continue to hold at least one province with the military force to guarantee his security.
This issue had already been the object of a series of political manoeuvres and countermanoeuvres at Rome. The dates on which the issue turned are all in doubt. As had been agreed at Luca in 56 bce, Caesar’s commands had been prolonged for five years, apparently until February 28, 49 bce, but this is not certain. In 52 bce, a year in which Pompey was elected sole consul and given a five-year provincial command in Spain, Caesar was allowed by a law sponsored by all 10 tribunes to stand for the consulship in absentia. If he were to stand in 49 bce for the consulship for 48 bce, he would be out of office, and therefore in danger, during the last 10 months of 49 bce. As a safeguard for Caesar against this, there seems to have been an understanding—possibly a private one at Luca in 56 bce between him and Pompey—that the question of a successor to Caesar in his commands should not be raised in the Senate before March 1, 50 bce. This manoeuvre would have ensured that Caesar would retain his commands until the end of 49 bce. However, the question of replacing Caesar was actually raised in the Senate a number of times from 51 bce onward; each time Caesar had the dangerous proposals vetoed by tribunes of the plebs who were his agents—particularly Gaius Scribonius Curio in 50 bce and Mark Antony in 49 bce.
The issue was brought to a head by one of the consuls for 50 bce, Gaius Claudius Marcellus. He obtained resolutions from the Senate that Caesar should lay down his command (presumably at its terminal date) but that Pompey should not lay down his command simultaneously. Curio then obtained on December 1, 50 bce, a resolution (by 370 votes to 22) that both men should lay down their commands simultaneously. Next day Marcellus (without authorization from the Senate) offered the command over all troops in Italy to Pompey, together with the power to raise more; and Pompey accepted. On January 1, 49 bce, the Senate received from Caesar a proposal that he and Pompey should lay down their commands simultaneously. Caesar’s message was peremptory, and the Senate resolved that Caesar should be treated as a public enemy if he did not lay down his command “by a date to be fixed.”
On January 10–11, 49 bce, Caesar led his troops across the little river Rubicon, the boundary between his province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper. He thus committed the first act of war. This was not, however, the heart of the matter. The actual question of substance was whether the misgovernment of the Greco-Roman world by the Roman nobility should be allowed to continue or whether it should be replaced by an autocratic regime. Either alternative would result in a disastrous civil war. The subsequent partial recuperation of the Greco-Roman world under the principate suggests, however, that Caesarism was the lesser evil.
The civil war was a tragedy, for war was not wanted either by Caesar or by Pompey or even by a considerable part of the nobility, while the bulk of the Roman citizen body ardently hoped for the preservation of peace. By this time, however, the three parties that counted politically were all entrapped. Caesar’s success in building up his political power had made the champions of the old regime so implacably hostile to him that he was now faced with a choice between putting himself at his enemies’ mercy or seizing the monopoly of power at which he was accused of aiming. He found that he could not extricate himself from this dilemma by reducing his demands, as he eventually did, to the absolute minimum required for his security. As for Pompey, his growing jealousy of Caesar had led him so far toward the nobility that he could not come to terms with Caesar again without loss of face.
The first bout of the civil war moved swiftly. In 49 bce Caesar drove his opponents out of Italy to the eastern side of the Straits of Otranto. He then crushed Pompey’s army in Spain. Toward the end of 49 bce, he followed Pompey across the Adriatic Sea and retrieved a reverse at Dyrrachium by winning a decisive victory at Pharsalus on August 9, 48 bce. Caesar pursued Pompey from Thessaly to Egypt, where Pompey was murdered by an officer of King Ptolemy. Caesar wintered in Alexandria, fighting with the populace and dallying with Queen Cleopatra. In 47 bce he fought a brief local war in northeastern Anatolia with Pharnaces, king of the Cimmerian Bosporus, who was trying to regain Pontus, the kingdom of his father, Mithradates. Caesar’s famous words, Veni, vidi, vici (“I came, I saw, I conquered”), are his own account of this campaign.
Caesar then returned to Rome, but a few months later, now with the title of dictator, he left for Africa, where his opponents had rallied. In 46 he crushed their army at Thapsus and returned to Rome, only to leave in November for Farther Spain to deal with a fresh outbreak of resistance, which he crushed on March 17, 45 bce, at Munda. He then returned to Rome to start putting the Greco-Roman world in order. He had less than a year’s grace for this huge task of reconstruction before his assassination in 44 bce in the Senate House at Rome on March 15 (the Ides of March).
Caesar’s death was partly due to his clemency and impatience, which, in combination, were dangerous for his personal security. Caesar had not hesitated to commit atrocities against “barbarians” when it had suited him, but he was almost consistently magnanimous in his treatment of his defeated Roman opponents. Thus clemency was probably not just a matter of policy. Caesar’s earliest experience in his political career had been Sulla’s implacable persecution of his defeated domestic opponents. Caesar amnestied his opponents wholesale and gave a number of them responsible positions in his new regime. Gaius Cassius Longinus, who was the moving spirit in the plot to murder him, and Marcus Junius Brutus, the symbolic embodiment of Roman republicanism, were both former enemies. “Et tu, Brute” (“You too, Brutus”) was Caesar’s expression of his particular anguish at being stabbed by a man whom he had forgiven, trusted, and loved.
There were, however, also a number of ex-Caesareans among the 60 conspirators. They had been goaded into this volte-face by the increasingly monarchical trend of Caesar’s regime and, perhaps at least as much, by the aristocratic disdain that inhibited Caesar from taking any trouble to sugar the bitter pill. Some stood to lose, rather than to gain, personally by the removal of the autocrat who had made their political fortunes. But even if they were acting on principle, they were blind to the truth that the reign of the Roman nobility was broken beyond recall and that even Caesar might not have been able to overthrow the old regime if its destruction had not been long overdue. They also failed to recognize that by making Caesar a martyr they were creating his posthumous political fortune.
If Caesar had not been murdered in 44 bce, he might have lived on for 15 or 20 years. His physical constitution was unusually tough, though in his last years he had several epileptic seizures. What would he have done with this time? The answer can only be guessed from what he did do in the few months available. He found time in the year 46 bce to reform the Roman calendar. In 45 bce he enacted a law laying down a standard pattern for the constitutions of the municipia, which were by this time the units of local self-government in most of the territory inhabited by Roman citizens. In 59 bce Caesar had already resurrected the city of Capua, which the republican Roman regime more than 150 years earlier had deprived of its juridical corporate personality; he now resurrected the other two great cities, Carthage and Corinth, that his predecessors had destroyed. This was only a part of what he did to resettle his discharged soldiers and the urban proletariat of Rome. He was also generous in granting Roman citizenship to aliens. (He had given it to all of Cisalpine Gaul, north of the Po, in 49 bce.) He increased the size of the Senate and made its personnel more representative of the whole Roman citizenry.
At his death, Caesar was on the point of starting out on a new military campaign to avenge and retrieve Crassus’s disastrous defeat in 53 bce by the Parthians. Would Caesar have succeeded in recapturing for the Greco-Roman world the extinct Seleucid monarchy’s lost dominions east of the Euphrates, particularly Babylonia? The fate of Crassus’s army had shown that the terrain in northern Mesopotamia favoured Parthian cavalry against Roman infantry. Would Caesar’s military genius have outweighed this handicap? And would Rome’s hitherto inexhaustible reservoir of military manpower have sufficed for this additional call upon it? Only guesses are possible, for Caesar’s assassination condemned the Romans to another 13 years of civil war, and Rome would never again possess sufficient manpower to conquer and hold Babylonia.
