Killing Jesus: A History

could be viewed from above, from tall towers erected by Caesar’s engineers, allowing the Roman archers to rain arrows down on the enemy forces. In order to break out of the besieged town, the trapped Gauls would have to find a way through this killing zone.
    When food began running out, the Gauls, under the legendary general Vercingetorix, allowed their women and children to exit the city so that the Romans might feed them. This was an act of dubious kindness, for it likely meant a life of slavery, but it was better than letting them starve to death inside the city. However, Caesar would not allow these innocents to cross over into the Roman lines. As their husbands and fathers looked on from within the city walls, unable to invite them back inside for lack of food, the women and children remained stuck in the no-man’s-land between armies, where they lived on grass and dew until they slowly perished from starvation and thirst. Adding insult, Caesar refused to allow their bodies to be collected for burial.
    But Caesar’s greatest atrocity—and the one for which his enemies in the Roman Senate have now demanded that he stand trial as a war criminal—was committed against the Germanic Usipetes and Tenchtheri tribes in 55 B.C. These hostile invaders had slowly begun moving across the Rhine River into Gaul, and it was believed that they would soon turn their attentions south, toward Italy. From April to June of 55 B.C. , Caesar’s army traveled from its winter base in Normandy to where marauding elements of the Germanic tribes were aligning themselves with Gauls against Rome. These “tribes” were not small nomadic communities but an invading force with a population half the size of Rome’s, numbering almost five hundred thousand soldiers, women, children, and camp followers.
    Hearing of Caesar’s approach, the Germans sent forth ambassadors to broker a peace treaty. Caesar refused, telling them to turn around and go back across the Rhine. The Germans pretended to go along with Caesar’s demands, but a few days later they reneged on their word and launched a surprise attack. As Caesar’s cavalry watered their horses along what is now the Niers River, eight hundred German horsemen galloped directly toward them, with intent to kill. The German tactics were peculiar—and terrifying. Rather than wage battle atop their mounts, they leapt from their horses and used their short spears or battle swords to slit open the bellies of the Roman steeds, killing the animals, and sending the now foot-bound legions fleeing in panic.
    Caesar considered the attack an act of duplicity because it came during a time of truce. “After having sued for peace by way of stratagem and treachery,” he would later write, “they had made war without provocation.” In a dramatic show of force, Caesar launched a counterattack of his own. Placing his disgraced cavalry at the rear of his force, he ordered the legions to trot double-time the eight miles to the German camp. This time it was the Romans who had the element of surprise. Those Germans who stood their ground were slaughtered, while those who tried to run were hunted down by the disgraced Roman cavalry, who were bent on proving their worth once more. Some Germans made it as far as the Rhine but then drowned while trying to swim the hundreds of yards to the other side.
    But Caesar didn’t stop there. His men rounded up all remaining members of the German tribes and butchered them—old men and women, wives, teenagers, children, and toddlers—yielding a killing ratio of eight Germans for each legionary. Generally, the Roman soldiers are educated men. They can recite poetry and enjoy a good witticism. Many have wives and children of their own and could never imagine such barbarous cruelty being visited on those they love. But they are legionaries, trained and disciplined to do as they are told. So they used the steel of their blades and the sharpened tips of their spears to pierce body after body after body, ignoring the screams of terrified children and the wails and pleas for mercy.
    Caesar’s revenge began as an act of war but soon turned into a genocide that killed an estimated 430,000 people. And just to show the Germans living on the other side of the Rhine that his armies could go anywhere and do anything, Caesar ordered his engineers to build a bridge across that previously impregnable river. This they accomplished in just ten short days. Caesar then crossed the Rhine