Episode 7: Caesar: Rome’s Defensive Expansion

Julius Caesar is famous for describing hugely complicated strategic problems, then adding his famous Veni, vidi, vici: ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’. But what did his strategic genius consist of? And how did he justify extending the Roman Empire right across Western Europe?

Did Rome acquire her empire, not quite in a fit of absent-mindedness, but defensively, or was she ruthlessly expansionist? Gaius Iulius Caesar’s account of his Gallic Wars (58-50 BC) explained his military operations as ‘just’ wars: Rome came to the rescue of allies and quelled lawless rebels. Admittedly, Caesar showed outstanding generalship. Forced marches by Roman infantry, operations - even in winter - caught adversaries by surprise. Complementing kinetic tools of siege craft and battle, Caesar’s diplomacy turned Gallic and Germanic tribes and their leaders against each other, forging alliances and isolating adversaries, just as he had done previously in Roman domestic politics.

Dr Louis Rawlings helps us dissect Caesar as a strategist and as a political animal. Rawlings holds his degrees from University College London, having previously taught there and at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He is now Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at Cardiff University.

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Further Reading

Caesar: (Commentaries on) the Gallic Wars, available at https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/caesar/gallic_war/home.html
also as audio book at 
https://librivox.org/author/2012?primary_key=2012&search_category=author&search_page=1&search_form=get_results

Caesar: (Commentaries on) the Civil Wars, available at 
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_the_Civil_War/Book_1
also as audio book at https://librivox.org/author/2012?primary_key=2012&search_category=author&search_page=1&search_form=get_results

Louis Rawlings, “Ancient Rome: The Monarchy and the Republic (753-27 BCE)”, in Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Beatrice Heuser (eds): The Cambridge History of Strategy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2023), vol. 1.

Adrian Goldsworthy, “Julius Caesar and the General as a State”, in Victor Davis Hanson (ed.): Makers of Ancient Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 206-226.

P.J. Burton, Roman Imperialism (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

Philip Sabin, Hans van Wees and Michael Whitby (eds.): The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare Vol II. Rome from the Late Republic to the Late Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).