17
WHEN the news of Caesar’s successes against the feared and hated Germans reached Rome, there was of course an immediate outcry for a further public thanksgiving to be held in his honor. The enthusiasm of the masses for such festivities could be taken for granted, since they implied a holiday, feasting and entertainment—at whose expense was no concern of theirs. This demand naturally had to be brought before the senate, which in its demoralized state would probably have acceded. Cicero was now trimming his sails to the Caesarian wind, and there would have been no spokesmen of consequence to raise any objection, had Cato not been present.
Cato’s indignation would have done credit to many a modern sensibility, and it seems strange to find it in the Rome that bred Caesar, Clodius and Crassus. He maintained that instead of honoring this criminal leader for his breach of faith they should hand him over to the Germans for punishment, in that way the sins of their general might not be visited upon his soldiers and his city. (Cato clearly had received reports from the front of what had really happened in the Usipetes and Tencteri affair.) In his anger he did, however, forget that there was another side to the argument: the Germans were a very real and constant threat to the Gaul which Caesar was establishing. They had indeed previously threatened Rome itself, and there was a case to be made for the surgical treatment of this infection at source. But Cato’s eloquence, and a certain uneasiness among the senators themselves, meant that the proposal to accord Caesar further honors was not followed up. (After all, even to a Roman of the 1st century BC the extermination of nearly half a million people—if Caesar’s own figures were to be credited—was hardly commonplace.) As soon as he heard of Cato’s speech Caesar replied by letter with an attempted character-assassination of his old enemy, but the fact was that he could not, either at this time in his life or years later when he tried again, find any justification for traducing Cato. The latter’s honesty and stern morality was as evident to his contemporaries as that of his great-grandfather Cato the Censor, who had long served as a model of all the best republican virtues, had been. Nothing more was heard of fresh honors for Caesar, and he was already too occupied with a new development in his German campaign to pursue the issue any further.
According to Dio Cassius, Caesar “wanted an excuse for crossing the river Rhine for he was ambitious to do something that no other Roman general had done before him.” There can be little doubt that this was true, but the matter was not quite so simple. Caesar—as usual, one might be justified in saying—could manage to combine a private ambition with a practical policy of benefit to Rome. Being daily in contact with the moving mass of peoples in this vast extent of “new Europe,” he knew—as Cato did not—that the Germans presented a very real threat not only to the extended Romanized Gaul that he was creating, but ultimately to Rome itself. They were savage and fierce warriors, whereas the Gauls of the Narbonese province and even the others whom he had recently conquered were already softening under the impact of civilization. The Cisalpine Gauls, who had once terrorized Rome but who had now become agriculturalists and lived quietly in northern Italy, were hardly a match for their ancestors—and it was a nightmare to imagine what might happen if the Germans in their tens of thousands, hardy, prolific, and inured to warfare, were to descend on the soft citizens of the capital. Now that the bloodstained tide was so clearly running in his favor, Caesar intended to protect the new provinces of Gaul and Belgium, the old Narbonne Province, and ultimately Italy itself, with a cordon sanitaire that would isolate them from turbulent Germany. Gradually, no doubt, this could be extended, for the horizon of potential conquest seemed limitless.
He was soon provided with an excellent excuse. A detachment of German cavalry who had been away from the main body of the two tribes at the time of the massacre, returned, heard what had happened, and at once made their way across the Rhine to seek shelter with the Sugambri, another tribe on the right bank of the Rhine. They were only a fragment of the defeated enemy, but Caesar immediately sent orders for them to be handed over as “men who had borne arms against him and against Gaul.” The Sugambri proudly, and rightly, replied that the sovereignty of the Roman people did not extend beyond the Rhine, and if he complained that the Germans had no right to come into Gaul, what right had he to come into Germany? Ignoring the logic of this, Caesar now had his pretext for the crossing. He intended to make a demonstration, no more, unless any Germans were so foolish as to attack his troops. He wished to show them that the power of Rome could easily be extended into Germany if need be, and he also wished to demonstrate by the Romans’ superior skills, that the Germans were technically and in all other respects inferior. Although the river could have been crossed comparatively easily by boats, he elected to have a bridge built, across which the legions would march in parade-ground style. For them there was to be no floundering in the shallows, no awkward embarkation and disembarkation. Something that the Germans had never seen before was to be achieved by the Roman engineering skill—a bridge across the turbulent, wide and deep river that symbolized their untamed country. All the available workforce on the left bank was pressed into service, cutting down trees and shaping timbers at the direction of the engineers, while the legionaries—as adept with mattock and agricultural tools as with their arms—now showed they were also bridge-builders. Within no more than ten days a bridge on the trestle-system had been erected, Fifteen hundred feet long and forty feet wide. Across it marched the legions with the eagles, and at their head a balding man in elaborate armor on a white charger—symbols of a power that stretched from the Atlantic to Africa, from Gaul to the Caucasus and Asia Minor.
The proconsul and the legions were only eighteen days on the far bank of the Rhine: long enough to reassure the Ubii, who were friendly to the Romans but who must often have feared what that friendship might lead to among their neighbors. The other tribes fled back into their dark, mysterious woods. They had seen what these people, who had conquered the Gauls and Belgians, could do even to their sacred father-river. But the Germans in their tens of thousands were soon gathering, and Caesar had no intention of hazarding his legions in unknown country against impossible odds. “He returned to Gaul and cut the bridge behind him.” He had, at least, been where no Roman general had ever been before.
Nothing was known of Britain except the white cliffs that could be seen from the Calais area, while Roman and other merchants who had been there had never ventured into the interior. The island was reputed to be rich in cattle and corn, iron, gold, silver and tin, but little was known of its people except that they harbored many refugees from Gaul, and that some of them had even fought with the Veneti against the Romans the previous year. Caesar, if we are to believe the story, was also interested in this remote and strange place because of the high quality of its freshwater pearls, and his passion for pearls was well known. (Certainly there was no legend in this, and the freshwater pearls from the pearl-bearing mussel, although far less common than centuries ago, are still found in some of the country’s rivers.) There were further good reasons for investigating this island at the world’s rim: the availability of the fleet that had defeated the Veneti, and the fact that the trade of the Veneti was now passing into Roman hands. For this to succeed, warehouses would need to be established on the southeast coast of Britain and these in their turn would require protective strongpoints that could be garrisoned—with the ultimate view of extending roads into the country and preparing it for conquest. There was perhaps yet another good reason for this expedition to Britain. Caesar had crossed the Rhine, where no Roman general had been before, but the Rhine was only a river while the Channel was an unknown sea. Nevertheless the Romans were finding out, as have all similar conquering races subsequently, that an ever-expanding conquest poses more problems than it solves—and this was to be emphasized in Britain.
Leaving the harbor of Boulogne, the Seventh and Tenth legions, embarked in eighty ships, set off in the wake of Caesar and his staff officers. The ground had already been prepared by diplomatic negotiations with a number of British tribes. One foretaste of the difficulties inherent in a sea-crossing, however relatively small, was that the cavalry had not been ready as scheduled, so that the legionaries would be without their support in a land known to be furnished with many horsemen and charioteers. There was to be no friendly reception either, for, on reaching the coast off Dover, massed crowds were seen on the heights and their appearance was anything but welcoming.
Dover was clearly no place to land, under the threat of javelins and rocks, so the fleet moved a few miles westward to reach a wide beach, very probably near Deal. Once again the Britons, having followed them along the coast, were waiting, and Caesar realized that his legions would have to land and charge up a sloping beach in the face of the enemy. It was not an attractive proposition and it was made more awkward because the transports, on account of their draft, were unable to get right into the shallows. The legionaries, heavily-burdened with their arms and armor, would have to jump into an indeterminate depth—and this was no pellucid Mediterranean but moving, silt-ridden, tidal waters unfamiliar to Romans. A standard bearer of the Tenth is said to have been the first to jump into the water, and the legionaries, with their usual disciplined resolution and determination not to let one division put another to shame, followed him. The Britons, although they had the commanding position and should by rights have driven the invaders back into the sea, were totally unfamiliar with troops—let alone disciplined ones like these—landing on their native shore. The legionaries, on the other hand, no doubt relieved at being back on dry land and conscious of that superiority which they had found in themselves everywhere else, followed their centurions and drove the natives back. If they had had their cavalry, now would have been the time to rout the defenders and chase them back into the woods beyond the foreshore.
The next day the Britons returned to sue for peace, bringing with them Caesar’s envoy, whom they had bound as a traitor but now apologetically released. They appeared to be cowed, but this was probably no more than a gesture designed to keep the Romans inactive while they called up other tribes from inland. Some of the delegates even offered themselves as hostages, and many more were promised. The legionaries, in any case, immediately began building a camp, probably on the cliffs at Walmer, and establishing themselves in the immediate area. Caesar waited for the arrival of the cavalry, without whom any advance into this unknown land would be impossible. Then, “on the fourth day after his arrival in Britain” as the Commentaries record, “the eagerly expected convoy arrived in the vicinity.” While it was closing the shore a gale from the west sprang up and the transports were forced to run off before it. Many of them were driven back toward the Continent, while others tried to anchor but had to give up the attempt and stand out to sea. That night, “it happened to be full moon, a time at which the Atlantic tides are more than usually high—something unknown to the Romans.”
Not only had the long-awaited transports disappeared into the night and the storm, but their own ships, which were beached or riding at anchor (thoughtlessly as if in the Mediterranean) were cast up by the tide. Some of the vessels, with insufficient lengths of cable out, were either constrained by the tide until they began to dip their bows and fill, or broke from their cables and headed out to sea. “This state of affairs,” writes Caesar with some understatement, “moved the whole army very deeply.” They had no cavalry, they had come with only limited provisions, baggage and shelter, and it now seemed as if they were marooned on a hostile shore. The natives who had watched the events began discreetly to disappear; no promised hostages arrived, and it soon became clear that the earlier protestations of friendship might be forgotten.
In the days that followed, the Tenth Legion, turning to boatbuilding from work on the camp, began to resurrect the ships that were left, while the Seventh scattered over the nearby countryside in search of grain and other food. It was not surprising that the natives took advantage of these men foraging more or less independently through the land to launch a surprise attack upon them—an attack that would have succeeded if Caesar had not realized by dust-clouds rising over the fields what was happening and gone to their rescue. In their usual fashion, the Britons on encountering organized opposition took to their heels and faded away into their omnipresent forests. While the boats were being completed, some that were seaworthy being sent to Boulogne for further materials, more attacks were made on the embattled beachhead and camp.
It became clear to Caesar that this island, whose size and geography remained unknown, would not yield except to a carefully-planned invasion with all the logistical preparations that this entailed. At the first sign of fair weather, he, his staff, and the legions set off across the Channel, leaving the Britons with the comfort of seeing them go, but also with the uneasy awareness that their isolation at the end of the world was drawing to a close.
Caesar’s interest in this potential new conquest, coupled with his concern about affairs in Gaul, led him for the first time since he had become proconsul to forgo his annual visit to northern Italy during the winter of 55-54. There had been trouble among some of the Gauls in his absence, the Morini in their marshy districts refusing to accept the dominance of Rome, while there were signs elsewhere that at the slightest slackening of the rein things could get out of hand. In Britain the expeditionary force had suffered some casualties, but he had been lucky to get away without more, or without being forced to attempt to winter in that inhospitable land. Furthermore, the promised hostages had failed to appear before his departure. Preparations for the invasion of Britain were carried on over the winter and every port from Spain to Belgic Gaul was put to work on the assembly of an invasion fleet, while conquered towns on navigable rivers were also given their quota to fill.
It was a difficult year to justify in dispatches, and the senate, quite apart from Cato, was becoming concerned about the way in which Caesar seemed to be constantly involving the state in new wars—entirely on his own account and without reference to Rome. First Gaul, then Belgium, then Germany, and now this island, Britain, somewhere at the end of the earth. The old Optimates must have snarled disapprovingly. Cato took the moral stance of the stoic that he was, and indicted Caesar for treachery and unwarranted massacre. Then there were those who sneered; even Pompey was later to maintain that the Channel was no more than a mudflat.
That was on one side, but on the other the populace was excited by these reports of new countries and peoples, rivers, mountains and forests, and—now—of a great unconquered island in the Ocean. Petitions pursued Caesar from men with suitable—and unsuitable—recommendations, all looking for a job and hoping for plunder in these newfound lands. Even Cicero, who was now inclined in his favor by the way in which Caesar had included him in his correspondence, was moved to seek posts for people whom he knew. Caesar’s voluminous correspondence with his friends and agents in Rome was balanced by their reports to him on every aspect of life in the capital. From the writings of poets such as Catullus who traduced him (but whom he later forgave because he recognized his talent), and from men like Oppius and his friend Balbus, who more or less ran a news-service for him, he knew the climate of the distant city. Above all, unlike the Optimates, he knew the feelings of the people, and he knew that to them these foreign conquests and discoveries were exciting, a promise of an ever-expanding Rome with more and more wealth for distribution.
The report that was sent off to Rome detailing that year’s campaigns has long been lost, but it is probable that the gist of it can be discerned in Caesar’s Commentaries. Caesar was adept at propaganda and he knew that almost anything can be so arranged to create a favorable impression. The massacre of a German tribe, following the arrest of their ambassadors and leaders? It was in return for a treacherous attack on his own troops, and it had led to a glorious victory which had saved Gaul from invaders. The crossing of the Rhine? An important advance into hitherto unknown territory and a valuable display of strength—“Showing the Eagles.” The crossing to Britain and the landing on this remote island? It was but an earnest of things to come. Another conquest lay ahead.