Picking a round number of 200MM people in the world at the time [1], this is 0.1% of the entire population killed in a single event, which is staggering.
All the more staggering because back in those times the majority of the world population resided in China and India. At around 0 A.D, there were 100M people in India and 58M people in China[1][2], leaving a few tens of millions in the rest of the world.
By the way, in the 202BC battle of Gaixia, 250,000 people died in a world of 150M people[3].
According to Caesar he made 430000 casualties, while historians now estimate it were about 160000. Among these were women an children. On the Roman side there were zero casualties so it was more a genocide than a battle.
>On the Roman side there were zero casualties so it was more a genocide than a battle.
there was definitely a genocide after the battle. Rome legions excelled at both. Caesar had 8 legions, while here there were only 2 legions against about the same size of force Caesar faced:
Caesar wasn't shy about slaughtering civilians (though it was likely a widespread habit at the time). However, he was a political animal, and behaved in an unusually forgiving way toward his Roman opponents when he made his bid for power (in contrast with the bloody purges of his predecessor Sulla and the triumvirate which succeeded him).
If you actually read the de bello gallico you would have a quite different opinion. Julius Caesar avoided battle and military confrontation as much as he could and usually the armies he had available for his campaigns were a fraction of the size of the armies he was confronting.
Edit: it is also worth adding that Julius Caesar was regularly agreeing to peace agreements with surrounding tribes and populations. Yet, many of his military activities had to be swiftly planned to reject surprise attacks by those same tribes and populations that had been asking for the peace agreements in the first place.
I did, actually, a long time ago. And you'll find a number of instances of Roman troops cutting civilians to pieces, either after being ordered to, or on their own initiative. Modern estimates of casualties are in hundreds of thousands, which, considering the size of the population at that time, is a significant chunk.
That's not mentioning the ethics of invading a country to pay back your creditors.
This doesn't make Caesar particularly bloodthirsty by the standards of the time. However, someone like Scipio Africanus behaved in a much more humane way.
Carthage was an empire that fielded armies. The Germanic peoples, as in this case, were often migrating and invading, and had a certain culture and way of life that meant the women and children were much more involved politically and militarily. Children were generally not present in significant numbers in Carthagian armies, they often were in German armies.
Given a few years, it was a virtual guarantee Caesar would be fighting the children of these people (assuming that they were not already fighting as well as they could or trying to prevent the retreat of the men). Carthagian children were, on the other hand, not a threat as long as the political situation remained stable.
Sadly, humanity hasn't improved at all really. American and British forces weren't shy about intentionally slaughtering
over 1,000,000 civilians in WW2.
Caesar wrote proudly of the punishment he dealt out to tribes, but he didn't do it out of any particular cruelty. He could rationalize it as saving lives in the end, in a way that most people would agree with, given the same context. The same way most Americans justify dropping nukes, firebombs, and missiles on women and children. The way Trump justifies the idea of killing the families of terrorists.
People can always rationalize killing civilians by claiming it saves more lives in the end. This exactly the argument that Hitler, Caesar, Roosevelt, and Churchill (among others) used.
> Hitler with the idea of poisoning the poisoners suggested: "If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain"
> He could rationalize it as saving lives in the end, in a way that most people would agree with, given the same context.
These entire peoples were dedicated to their cause, a cause that included looting and killing everyone that got in their way. There's a reason why the women and children were there to be killed: they were traveling with the military and participating in military actions. If you read link at the top of the thread, the survivors were given permission by Caesar to depart, but they chose to remain with him because they were afraid of facing the revenge of the people who they invaded and killed.
In that context, it is difficult to see how they can really be identified as civilians in a meaningful way.
The article is somewhat misleading in that it makes it seem as though these tribes were just peacefully wandering around when they asked Caesar for asylum. They were invading, and after they invaded, they then asked for asylum from the man charged by the Romans to defend the area. Their 'request for asylum', by the way, was something along the lines of "we can be allies, as long as you give us new lands or let us keep the ones we've invaded. Otherwise, just so you know, the only people stronger than us are the Suevi, who drove us from our homes. So watch out." Of course he said no.
...I was going to reply to something in your earlier post, but you stripped it out. It ended up in this post and when I noticed it I clicked to reply, and now you've edited it again.
I guess what I was going to reply with would now come off as a non sequitur, but is there some reason you won't leave your posts alone for 10 minutes?
No. The things I was responding to were gone. Other than questioning 5+ edits in 15 minutes that kept changing the majority of your post my other replies didn't make sense. Now that I'm home from my drive I'll take a look at what you've got and see if I can still make another relevant reply.
> On the Roman side there were zero casualties so it was more a genocide than a battle.
While it's certainly true that it meets the definition of a genocide, it's rather anachronistic to call it that. Ancient peoples did not possess our norms and values.
To the Romans, the Germanic and Celtic peoples represented an existential threat. And they were correct in that analysis. Periodically, for hundreds of years, German tribes the Romans had never even heard of came down into Italy in mass migrations looting and killing everyone in their path. The numbers involved were always absolutely massive, and in many respects the Germans were superior fighters. On several occasions the Romans survived only by the skin of their teeth. For various reasons, the cultural and demographics of the Germanic tribes provided them with a huge birthrate and rapid population growth, which led to pressure that eventually led to huge armed migrations. (Of course, war for pleasure and profit were also common, and later often they fled from even more numerous, warlike tribes, Germanic or otherwise.)
To say, as an aside, that 'among these were women and children' is also a little disingenuous and anachronistic. Not only were women and children not regarded as particularly sacrosanct or immune from the horrors of war, the Germanic and Celtic peoples often included their women in their armies on purpose to prevent the men from retreating, to assist in whatever ways they could, and sometimes to fight. Sometimes the women in the rear merely mocked or pleaded with the men not to retreat. Sometimes they killed them.
I confess I am not intimately familiar with these particular tribes and this particular battle. But from a realpolitik point of view, Caesar was acting sensibly. Letting these tribes survive would be to the eventual detriment of Rome. They would eventually invade. No agreement with the Germanic peoples ever lasted long. Nothing less than genocide ever kept a tribe suppressed for more than decades or centuries.
In general, ancient peoples had a very different mindset than we do. Most of them regarded their ethnicity and culture as an absolutely bedrock part of their identity. For many of them, it was better to die as and for who they were than to live in submission - even peaceful submission - to a foreign people. This was true for both the Romans and many of the Germanic tribes. The Cimbri women, for example, killed their children and themselves rather than submit to the Romans. Indeed, the particularly strong Roman identity is one of the reasons for their early successes. The Romans often suffered devastating losses, both in absolute numbers and relative proportions of the Roman people, and refused to surrender or stop fighting where many other peoples did. We could probably, anachronistically, call the Romans and the Germans genocidal racists. But the only reason the Romans survived to become an empire and provide future generations with all their advancements and civilizations was because they were genocidal racists.
Of course, as time went on, and Rome became an empire, 'Roman' became more of a national identity and less of an ethnic or cultural identity. This was correlated with what Roman conservatives thought of as mass decadence: for example, the importation of foreign values, dress, and behaviors. The conservative outrage against homosexuals and transgendered people almost reads like something from the modern day. And the truly 'Roman' part of the population became less of a factor due to lower birth rates (Romans had birth control and abortion, and probably also due to the increasingly large role of women in society). Perhaps consequently, Romans began seeing the military as less of a duty and more of a burden, particularly in conjunction with ever-ongoing wars, and the Roman military essentially became a mercenary army.
As time went on, German pressure on Roman borders became intolerable. Rome constantly meddled with the tribes to play them off against each other, but Germanic peoples remained a perpetual problem for the empire. Since Germans were incredibly effective fighters - born to military life, and often bigger and stronger than Romans, particularly as the empire became more 'decadent' and commercial and academic activity became more common than warfare for the average citizen, Romans began to incorporate Germans into the military, both as auxiliaries and as actual members.
Then as Roman internal politics became increasingly complicated due to the changes in the governance structure, the economy, and interminable civil wars, the Roman military became less effective and the Romans often turned a mostly blind (and helpless) eye to Germanic migrations/invasions and sometimes encouraged them. Then, after several more crises, the Romans allowed a contingent of Germanic refugees fleeing from the Huns into the empire. Ultimately these Germans (the Goths) turned against the Romans (perhaps justifiably) and that was one of the primary proximate causes of the end of the western Roman empire.
...I suppose I went on a little there, but I like the subject and I recently finished Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. :)
Regarding your comments on tribe and ethnicity being an absolute bedrock of the people's identities, much of the middle east is the exact same way. I made the mistake of calling my turkish translator an Iraqi, even though he was born and raised in Iraq, as was his family. It took the better part of 20 minutes to calm him down and make sure he understand I meant no insult by calling him an Iraqi. The western concept of nationalism is very foreign to much of the current middle east even today... in 2015 :/
And since when is that a credible work of historical scholarship, rather than a (not very subtle) apology of British imperialism (England the new Rome)?
> And since when is that a credible work of historical scholarship, rather than a (not very subtle) apology of British imperialism (England the new Rome)?
Since always. I'm not sure where you're going with this since it's received innumerable accolades and been considered an exemplary classic for hundreds of years. You must be aware that criticism such as you just gave is a minority view, but you didn't present it as such.
D&F is very well sourced, cited, and footnoted from primary and secondary Roman sources. There are criticisms to be made of it, and there are a few things that modern discoveries have shed more light on, but by-and-large reading Decline and Fall gets you a decent grounding.
I'm afraid I did not read at all an apology of British imperialism; if anything, a criticism of it, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that either. Historians still recommend reading Decline and Fall.
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a massive six volume beast that covers ~1400 years. The prose is very readable and narratively engaging, but the information is pretty dense, and it's easy to get sidetracked following a citation for the full version of a particular story or anecdote. It took me eight months to read, and I am a pretty quick reader. For the breadth and depth, I don't think there's a whole lot out there that can compare.
That said, you can very seldom go wrong with the classics. There's a lot of modern works out there, and textbook-type treatments, of course, but I personally find contemporary texts the most interesting and engaging. You get a firsthand account of how people long ago lived and thought.
Caesar, as referenced upthread with The Gallic Wars, wrote a lot about his campaigns. My personal favorites have been Plutarch's Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans, which is nominally about comparing the characters of selected pairs of Greeks and Romans, but gives you windows into the historical times they lived in as well, and though not Roman, Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War.
For a lighter treatment, I listened to and would recommend Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast series after seeing it mentioned on Hacker News several times. There's two great series about Rome, Punic Nightmares and Death Throes of the Republic. Carlin does a good job of really bringing to the fore that same kind of thing, I think, that gives a real sense of how the people at the time were thinking and feeling, and he's clearly passionate about history.
What really stands out to me is how little has changed. We really are just another chapter or two. Technology has advanced, but people and culture has really changed very slowly and so clearly builds on what came before. The West in general is still very much a blend of Roman culture syncretized with the Germanic tribes. It's really fascinating to me how incredibly similar people were thousands of years ago. They had very different belief systems and values, but otherwise it's staggering how you have all these thousands of years of very, very smart people doing different things for different reasons, and seeing how that led to our times, and how we're doing the very similar things right now and laying out the future for those who will come after us and one day, hopefully, read about us.
(Little things that struck me and I thought of while writing those posts: the class warfare in Rome with e.g. the Gracchi brothers, compared to our economic problems in the past ~150 years; the political environment in Athens surrounding the Sicilian Expedition, compared to that of our Iraq War; and the incredible courage it must have taken for people to stand in an orderly line and watch people run towards them screaming with swords in hand.)
Thanks a lot for the recommendations - I like both classical antiquity and the subject, therefore all recommendations are welcome. By the way, good remarks; I wish I had more knowledge to continue the discussion! ;)
Humans lose their moral virtue when they are at war.
I got news for you -- women and children routinely get killed in warfare. I can immediately give you a half dozen examples of slaughter of noncombatants by societies otherwise very civilized.
> Tacitus relates a rumour that 80,000 Britons fell for the loss of only 400 Romans.[12] However the figures quoted for the campaign in the ancient sources are regarded by modern historians as extravagant.[21][22]
Related: For curated list of the 100 largest atrocities, ranked by largest loss of life, check out Matthew White's The Great Big Book of Horrible Things [0]
It grew out of his website, Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century, and while he is not an historian by profession (I believe he's a librarian), the book is very well researched (lots of footnotes, citations, etc.) and IMO, "fun" to read. (Only because of his style of writing, obviously not about the content)
Each event is a relatively short read, with decent background provided, though the book is quite long overall.
Spoiler: One of the items on the list is Caesar's Gallic Wars, and there are many dedicated to various events that transpired the Roman {Republic, Empire}
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates