Gay Pride and the Conquest of Gaul

Julius Caesar was quite a man. He was determined to make his way politically in Rome, and he decided to bring the fractious barbarian tribes of Gaul within the imperial system—along with their territories, of course. It took him less than a decade and roughly a million Gallic lives to achieve his ambitions.

Caesar’s own description of his steady elimination of rivals in the Gallic wars—which I just read for the first time—is hair-raising and yet somewhat bloodless. The wars and campaigns are related in terms of strategies, negotiations, alliances, battles, sieges of cities, and the technology of weapons and war-making.

But you never get a sense of axes cleaving shoulders, javelins piercing sides, or swords cutting into flesh and bone. Bodies pile up; prisoners are marched off; women and children sold into slavery—all as a matter of course. The overall logic is that superior force is its own end, that one’s group must triumph because it is one’s group. This underlying raison de guerre is so obvious to the author (and by implication to his audience) that it is never stated.

Caesar implies that living under Roman rule—he calls it civilization—is good for the subjugated tribes although he recognizes that they chafe at conquest. In all fairness, warfare and atrocity certainly didn’t arrive with the Romans, and the impression of the life of the Gauls prior to their Romanization looks just as nasty, brutish and short as it was afterward.

Of course, if Vercingetorix, the last defeated Gallic chieftain, had had some of Caesar’s literary skill, we’d undoubtedly have quite a different perspective on the first century BCE. But he didn’t, and we don’t.

Biped society hasn’t evolved much since then as evidenced by our attitudes toward warfare today, and the eagerness of men to prove themselves as soldiers. Last week’s hilarious Drag March from Tompkins Square Park over to New York’s West Village and the gay-historic Stonewall Inn was a reminder of just how anxious a lot of men still are, even in hip, free-wheeling New York City, at the idea of abandoning their assigned gender role. I thought I could read in their nervously amazed faces the question, How could a man in a dress defend his fortress and slaughter the enemy?

We assume the mechanization and professionalization of warfare has precluded us from needing the barbarian virtues of endurance, pride, honor, sacrifice and the thirst for blood. But hearing accounts of our ongoing wars of conquest and the unquestioning acceptance that American troops should be pacifying the countryside and laying waste to Afghan fields (of opium) sound eerily familiar after finishing The Conquest of Gaul.

On the airplane I just took from Mississippi, the crew nearly forced us to applaud the presence of uniformed soldiers on the flight for their heroic sacrifices ‘defending our freedom’. Both Caesar and the Gauls would have understood completely.