Bret Devereaux

As @PenarthKate notes in her book on these campaigns, "the conquest of Gaul was an aggressive war of expansion led by a general who was seeking to advance his career and standing amongst his peers." 13/xx

To do that, Caesar needed a big war, with lots of loot and captives and so he makes sure he has that. There is robust debate about the degree to which Caesar's numbers can be trusted (some are outlandish)... 14/xx

...but certainly by Caesar's own account the quantity of killing and enslavement amounted to genocide. Caesar's claims to have killed or enslaved hundreds of thousands of people out of a region which probably only had a total population of perhaps 5m. 15/xx

Anyway, so Caesar butchers people who weren't even enemies of Rome for political gain for 10 years until 49, when his command is set to be up. Since that would make him liable for prosecution for all of the crimes he did, he decides to overthrow the republic instead. 16/xx

That precipitates a civil war which really doesn't end until almost 14 years after Caesar's death (he dies in 44). It turns out to be an *exceptionally* bad time, for everyone. 17/xx

Almost every Roman prominent at the time of Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in 49 is dead by the end of the conflict in 31, nearly all of them dying violently. While Caesar himself makes a great show of his clemency (he even prints it on coins)...18/xx

...and tends to pardon captured opponents, a lot of his enemies - Gnaeus Pompey, Cato the Younger, Metellus Scipio, etc. are either killed in battle, commit suicide rather than be captured, or (in Pompey's case) are assassinated (in a misguided effort to curry favor). 19/xx

But Caesar makes effectively no plans on how to institutionalize his rule on victory - he instead ends up offending the senate and too openly toys with being king (Seut. Caes. 79; Plut. Caes. 61), which leads to his assassination. 20/xx