Caesar refused. ‘It would have been shameful and humiliating’15 – and therefore unthinkable. Whatever his own doubt and weariness, his outward show of confidence remained as sovereign as ever. In Caesar’s energy there was something demonic and sublime. Touched by boldness, perseverance and a yearning to be the best, it was the spirit of the Republic at its most inspiring and lethal. No wonder that his men worshipped him, for they too were Roman, and felt privileged to be sharing in their general’s great adventure. Battle-hardened by years of campaigning, they were in no mood to panic now at the peril of their situation. Their faith in Caesar and their own invincibility held good.
When Vercingetorix, presuming otherwise, attempted to finish them off, Caesar’s troops inflicted heavy losses on his cavalry and forced them to withdraw. Deciding to wait for reinforcements, Vercingetorix withdrew to the town of Alesia – a stronghold north of modern-day Dijon, and so impregnable that it had never before been captured. Caesar, rarely one to be impressed by precedent, straight away put it under siege. A huge line of earthworks, almost fifteen miles long, imprisoned Vercingetorix and his men within the town. Alesia had food sufficient for thirty days, but thirty days passed, and still the siege held firm. The Gauls began to starve. Vercingetorix, determined at all costs to maintain the strength of his warriors, settled on the grim expedient of expelling from Alesia anyone unable to fight. Women and children, the old and the sick, all were driven from the town walls. Caesar, however, refused to let them pass, or even, although they begged him, to take them as slaves. Instead, determined to shame Vercingetorix into letting the refugees back into Alesia, he left them huddled in the open, where they ate grass, and slowly died of sickness or the cold.
Then at last came the news for which Caesar had been bracing himself. Two hundred thousand Gauls were hurrying to their leader’s rescue. Immediately, Caesar ordered a second line of fortifications to be built, this time facing outwards. Wave after wave of screaming, sword-slashing warriors broke against the defences. All day, the Roman ramparts held. Dusk brought a respite – but not the end of the ordeal. The Gauls had been testing the Roman blockade, searching out its weakest point – and they had found it. To the north of the town, where two legions had established their camp, a hill directly overlooked the fortifications, and it was from here, at dawn, that the war bands pressed their attack. Filling in the trenches, they swarmed over the palisades, while ahead of them, in the Romans’ rear, came the answering war-cries of Vercingetorix’s men. The legionaries, trapped between this pincer, fought back with desperate ferocity. Both sides knew that the decisive moment was at hand. The Romans – just – managed to hold their lines. Even as the Gauls, seeking to pull down the palisade with hooks, heaved and cheered at the splintering of watchtowers, so, from the legionaries manning the gaps, there rose an answering cheer. In the distance, at the top of the hill overlooking their position, they had caught a flash of scarlet: their general’s cloak. Caesar, who had spent all the day galloping along the line of fortifications, yelling encouragements to his men and following the rhythms of the desperate struggle, had finally decided to commit his last reserves. Having slipped out unnoticed from the fortifications, and taking the Gauls utterly by surprise, the Roman cavalry charged down the hill. The legionaries, swords stabbing, advanced from the ramparts to meet them. Now it was the turn of the Gauls to be caught in a pincer movement. The slaughter was terrible, the Roman triumph total. Vercingetorix’s men, hearing the death-screams of their countrymen, withdrew back into Alesia. Outnumbered by the army he was besieging, and vastly outnumbered by the army that had been besieging him in turn, Caesar had defeated both. It was the greatest, the most astonishing, victory of his career.
The next morning Vercingetorix rode out from Alesia in glittering armour and knelt at his conqueror’s feet. Caesar, in no mood to be merciful, had him loaded with chains and thrown into prison. The war was not yet over, but it was already won. The victory had come at a terrible cost. Between the walls of Alesia and the Roman palisade lay the emaciated corpses of women and children. Above them were the bodies of warriors cut down by the legions, and beyond them, piled around the outer fortifications, stretching away from Alesia for miles, were innumerable corpses, the limbs of horses and humans horribly tangled, their bellies swollen, their blood fertilising the muddy fields, the slaughter-ground of Gallic liberty. And yet Alesia had been only a single battle. In all, the conquest of Gaul had cost a million dead, a million more enslaved, eight hundred cities taken by storm – or so the ancients claimed.16
These are near-genocidal figures. Whatever their accuracy – and there are historians prepared to accept them as plausible17 – they reflected a perception among Caesar’s contemporaries that his war against the Gauls had been something exceptional, at once terrible and splendid beyond compare. To the Romans, no truer measure of a man could be found than his capacity to withstand grim ordeals of exhaustion and blood. By such a reckoning, Caesar had proved himself the foremost man in the Republic. He had held firm to the sternest duty of a citizen: never to surrender, never to back down. If the cost of doing so had been warfare on a scale and of a terror rarely before experienced, then so much more the honour, for both himself and Rome. In 51 BC, the year after Alesia, when Caesar resolved to make an example of another rebellious city by chopping off the hands of everyone who had borne arms against him, he could take it for granted that ‘his clemency was so well known that no one would mistake such a severe measure for wanton cruelty’.18 He was right. Caesar was indeed famous – among the Romans – for his clemency. But he was even more famous for his love of glory – and in such a cause the whole of Gaul and beyond had been made to bleed.
Ultimately, however, the great task was done and there was peace. The Republic owed Caesar much. Surely, with his term of office now drawing to its finish, there would be magnificent honours waiting for him in Rome. The acclamation of his grateful fellow citizens, a splendid triumph, high office once again? After all, who could justly refuse any of these to Caesar, the conqueror of Gaul?
After almost a decade away he was ready to head for home.
Weeping for Elephants
In Rome, of course, there remained one man of greater renown and wealth than even Caesar. Pompey the Great lived in no one’s shadow. Certainly not that of Caesar, a man whom Pompey had always regarded as his protégé. Naturally, in the condescending manner that befitted Rome’s premier general, he took pride in his father-in-law’s achievements – but nothing more. The idea that Caesar might rival him, let alone surpass him, never crossed the great man’s mind.
Some tried desperately to open his eyes. Back in 55 BC, while Crassus was preparing for his expedition to the East and Caesar, far away in Gaul, was turning his thoughts to Britain, an unexpected visitor had come knocking on Pompey’s door. Cato had just been through a bruising few months. In January, attempting to block the second consulship of Pompey and Crassus, he had been badly beaten up by Pompey’s heavies. Since then, he had campaigned tirelessly and courageously against the granting of five-year commands to the two consuls, but again to no avail. Now Pompey wanted Caesar to have an identical command. Cato, swallowing his pride, had come to beg his adversary to reconsider. Could he not see that he was raising up a monster on his shoulders? The time would come when he would no longer have the strength to throw off Caesar, or to bear his weight. When that happened both men would totter, locked in a death-clinch, and collapse. And the Republic? Beneath the weight of two such colossi, the Republic would surely be flattened into dust.