Even so, he was proud of what he had achieved in Cyprus – not only for the Republic, but for the provincials themselves. It appeared to him self-evident that the rule of an upstanding Roman administrator was vastly preferable to the squalid anarchy that had prevailed in Cyprus before his arrival. Here was a portentous development: the Senate’s most unbending traditionalist squaring Rome’s ancient virtues with her new world role. Greek intellectuals, of course, had long been pushing for this – as Cato would well have known, for he was a keen scholar of philosophy, which he studied with the seriousness he brought to all he did. It was Posidonius, every Roman’s favourite guru, who had argued that subject peoples should welcome their conquest by the Republic, since it would contribute towards the building of a commonwealth of man. Now the Romans themselves were latching on to the same argument. Assumptions that would have been unthinkable even a few decades previously were becoming commonplace. Enthusiasts for empire argued that Rome had a civilising mission; that because her values and institutions were self-evidently superior to those of barbarians, she had a duty to propagate them; that only once the whole globe had been subjected to her rule could there be a universal peace. Morality had not merely caught up with the brute fact of imperial expansion, but wanted more.
It helped, of course, that the empire brought colour and clamour to Rome, the news of conquests from strange, far-distant lands, the flooding of gold through her streets. Throughout the sixties BC the Romans had associated such pleasures with the name of Pompey. Now, in the fifties, they could enjoy them again, courtesy of Caesar. Even in the dankest reaches of Gaul, the proconsul never forgot his audience back at home. He lavished his attentions on them. He had always taken pleasure in spending money on other people – it was one of the qualities that made him loved – and now, at last, that money was his own. Gallic plunder flowed south. Caesar was generous to everyone: his friends, anyone he thought might prove useful, and the whole of Rome. Preparations began to be made for a huge extension of the Forum, one that could hardly fail to keep his name on everybody’s lips. But if Caesar aimed to woo his fellow citizens with gargantuan complexes of marble, he also wished to entertain them, to have them thrill to the glamour of his exploits. His dispatches were masterpieces of war reporting. No Roman could read them without feeling a rush of excitement and pride. Caesar knew how to make his fellow citizens feel good about themselves. As so often before, he was putting on a show – and as an arena he had the entire, spectacular expanse of Gaul.
Of course, in March 56 BC, had it not been for his quick thinking and diplomatic skills, he might have lost it to Domitius Ahenobarbus. The risk had forced him to move fast. It had been Caesar who had suggested the meetings at Ravenna and Lucca with Crassus and Pompey. He had felt no particular jealousy of the ambitions of his two partners in the triumvirate. As far as he had been concerned, they could have whatever they wanted, just as long as he was allowed another five years as governor of Gaul.
While Caesar saw to the diplomacy at Ravenna and Lucca that would secure this, he knew that he was urgently needed in Britanny. A legion had been stationed there for the winter, and, with food supplies running low, its commander had been forced to send out foraging parties. Straying into the territory of a local tribe, the Venetians, some requisition officers had been kidnapped. The Venetians themselves, who had been forced to hand over hostages to the Romans the previous autumn, had hopefully suggested a swap, but while this was an offer that might have seemed reasonable enough to them, it had betrayed a woeful misunderstanding of their enemy. In their innocence the Venetians had assumed that the Romans were playing by the accepted rules of tribal warfare, in which hit-and-run raids and ambushes, tit-for-tat skirmishes and hostage-taking, were all taken for granted. To the Romans, however, such tactics were terrorism, and punishable as such. Caesar prepared to teach the Venetians a devastating lesson. Because they were a maritime power, he ordered one of his ablest officers, Decimus Brutus, to construct a war fleet. The Venetian ships, taken by surprise, were wiped out. The tribe had no choice but to surrender. Its elders were executed and the rest of the population sold as slaves. Caesar, who normally prided himself on his clemency, had decided on this occasion ‘to make an example of the enemy, so that in future the barbarians would be more careful about respecting the rights of ambassadors’10 – by which, of course, he meant his requisition officers. The double-speak betrayed his real agenda. The Gauls had to be woken up to a new reality: from now on it was Caesar who would be setting the rules. Tribal squabblings and rebellions were things of the past. The country was to be at peace – a peace policed and upheld by Rome.
The brutal punishment of the Venetians had its desired effect. That winter, the mood throughout Gaul was one of sullen submission. Most tribes had still not measured themselves against the Romans, but rumour had done its work, and it was now widely known that the terrifying newcomers had proved themselves invincible wherever they had been met in combat. Only into the dense forests of Germany, it appeared, had the news failed to penetrate. In the spring of 55 BC, two tribes made the mistake of crossing the Rhine into Gaul. Caesar’s patience with fractious natives was by now wearing thin. The invaders were summarily wiped out. Then, in order to deliver the barbarians beyond the Rhine an unmistakable warning, Caesar crossed the river himself. He did this not in a boat – a mode of transport that struck him as ‘beneath his dignity’11 – but over a specially constructed bridge. The engineering brilliance required to build it spoke as loudly of Roman power as did the bristling discipline of the legions who crossed it: the Germans on the far bank took one look at the monstrous wooden structure rising out of the rushing currents and melted into the woods. These, the fabled forests of Germany, were the subject of many tall tales. They were said to be the haunt of strange monsters, and to stretch so interminably that a man could walk for two months and still not leave them behind. Caesar, peering into their murk, had no intention of putting such stories to the test: leaving the Germans to cower in the shadows, he burned their villages and crops, then crossed the Rhine back to Gaul. The bridge, constructed with such skill and effort, he ordered to be pulled down.
Caesar had always had a penchant for spectacular acts of demolition. After all, only a decade previously he had levelled his new villa and thereby made himself the talk of Rome. The iron-bodied general who always snatched his soldier’s rations in the saddle, who was capable of inspiring whole legions with his courage, who shared every rigour and hardship that he imposed upon his men, sleeping on frozen ground wrapped only in his cloak, was still the flamboyant Caesar of old. The tastes he had indulged as a rake, for excitement and grand gestures, now infused his strategy as a proconsul of the Roman people. As ever, he looked to dazzle, to overawe. The building and levelling of a bridge across the Rhine had served only to whet his appetite for even more spectacular exploits. So it was that no sooner had Caesar crossed his men back into Gaul than he was marching them northwards, towards the Channel coast and the encircling Ocean.