Words&Dirt

“The beauty of science lies for me not merely in its ability to produce fantastic new technologies that transform and can improve the human condition. It is rather in its ability to open our eyes to the endless wonder of the real universe, which continues to surprise us every time we open a new window upon it, even when that window is a literary one. If we ever stop imagining the myriad possibilities of existence, or stop exploring ways to determine whether reality encompasses them, then the human drama will no longer be worth writing about, either in fiction or nonfiction.”

––Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future, “Foreward,” by Lawrence M. Krauss, pg. xi-xii

“The war was not yet over, but it was already won. The victory had come at a terrible cost. Between the walls of Alesia and the Roman palisade lay the emaciated corpses of women and children. Above them were the bodies of warriors cut down by the legions, and beyond them, piled around the outer fortifications, stretching away from Alesia for miles, were innumerable corpses, the limbs of horses and humans horribly tangled, their bellies swollen, their blood fertilizing the muddy fields, the slaughter ground of Gallic liberty. And yet Alesia had been only a single battle. In all, the conquest of Gaul had cost a million dead, a million more enslaved, eight hundred cities taken by storm––or so the ancients claimed.

These are near-genocidal figures. Whatever their accuracy––and there are historians prepared to accept them as plausible––they reflected a perception among Caesar’s contemporaries that his war against the Gauls had been something exceptional, at once terrible and splendid beyond compare. To the Romans, no truer measure of a man could be found than his capacity to withstand grim ordeals of exhaustion and blood. By such a reckoning, Caesar had proved himself the foremost man in the Republic. He had held firm to the sternest duty of a citizen: never to surrender, never to back down. If the cost of doing so had been warfare on a scale and of a terror rarely before experienced, then so much more the honor, for both himself and Rome. In 51 B.C., the year after Alesia, when Caesar resolved to make an example of another rebellious city by chopping off the hands of everyone who had borne arms against him, he could take it for granted that ‘his clemency was so well known that no one would mistake such a severe measure for wanton cruelty.’ He was right. Caesar was indeed famous––among the Romans––for his clemency. But he was even more famous for his love of glory––and in such a cause the whole of Gaul and beyond had been made to bleed.

Ultimately, however, the great task was done and there was peace. The Republic owed Caesar much. Surely, with his term of office now drawing to its finish, there would be magnificent honors waiting for him in Rome. The acclamation of his grateful fellow citizens, a splendid triumph, high office once again? After all, who could justly refuse any of these to Caesar, the conqueror of Gaul?

After almost a decade away he was ready to head for home.”

––Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland, loc. 4213-33