[mercurial]

Caesar wasn't shy about slaughtering civilians (though it was likely a widespread habit at the time). However, he was a political animal, and behaved in an unusually forgiving way toward his Roman opponents when he made his bid for power (in contrast with the bloody purges of his predecessor Sulla and the triumvirate which succeeded him).

[matco11]

If you actually read the de bello gallico you would have a quite different opinion. Julius Caesar avoided battle and military confrontation as much as he could and usually the armies he had available for his campaigns were a fraction of the size of the armies he was confronting.

Edit: it is also worth adding that Julius Caesar was regularly agreeing to peace agreements with surrounding tribes and populations. Yet, many of his military activities had to be swiftly planned to reject surprise attacks by those same tribes and populations that had been asking for the peace agreements in the first place.

[mercurial]

I did, actually, a long time ago. And you'll find a number of instances of Roman troops cutting civilians to pieces, either after being ordered to, or on their own initiative. Modern estimates of casualties are in hundreds of thousands, which, considering the size of the population at that time, is a significant chunk.

That's not mentioning the ethics of invading a country to pay back your creditors.

This doesn't make Caesar particularly bloodthirsty by the standards of the time. However, someone like Scipio Africanus behaved in a much more humane way.

[Amezarak]

Scipio was also fighting a different war.

Carthage was an empire that fielded armies. The Germanic peoples, as in this case, were often migrating and invading, and had a certain culture and way of life that meant the women and children were much more involved politically and militarily. Children were generally not present in significant numbers in Carthagian armies, they often were in German armies.

Given a few years, it was a virtual guarantee Caesar would be fighting the children of these people (assuming that they were not already fighting as well as they could or trying to prevent the retreat of the men). Carthagian children were, on the other hand, not a threat as long as the political situation remained stable.

[mafribe]

Nice casual justification of genocide Amezarak!

[mercurial]

That's a fair point.

[staunch]

Sadly, humanity hasn't improved at all really. American and British forces weren't shy about intentionally slaughtering over 1,000,000 civilians in WW2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World...

Caesar wrote proudly of the punishment he dealt out to tribes, but he didn't do it out of any particular cruelty. He could rationalize it as saving lives in the end, in a way that most people would agree with, given the same context. The same way most Americans justify dropping nukes, firebombs, and missiles on women and children. The way Trump justifies the idea of killing the families of terrorists.

People can always rationalize killing civilians by claiming it saves more lives in the end. This exactly the argument that Hitler, Caesar, Roosevelt, and Churchill (among others) used.

> Hitler with the idea of poisoning the poisoners suggested: "If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth

[Amezarak]

> He could rationalize it as saving lives in the end, in a way that most people would agree with, given the same context.

These entire peoples were dedicated to their cause, a cause that included looting and killing everyone that got in their way. There's a reason why the women and children were there to be killed: they were traveling with the military and participating in military actions. If you read link at the top of the thread, the survivors were given permission by Caesar to depart, but they chose to remain with him because they were afraid of facing the revenge of the people who they invaded and killed.

In that context, it is difficult to see how they can really be identified as civilians in a meaningful way.

The article is somewhat misleading in that it makes it seem as though these tribes were just peacefully wandering around when they asked Caesar for asylum. They were invading, and after they invaded, they then asked for asylum from the man charged by the Romans to defend the area. Their 'request for asylum', by the way, was something along the lines of "we can be allies, as long as you give us new lands or let us keep the ones we've invaded. Otherwise, just so you know, the only people stronger than us are the Suevi, who drove us from our homes. So watch out." Of course he said no.

[Jtsummers]

...I was going to reply to something in your earlier post, but you stripped it out. It ended up in this post and when I noticed it I clicked to reply, and now you've edited it again.

I guess what I was going to reply with would now come off as a non sequitur, but is there some reason you won't leave your posts alone for 10 minutes?

[staunch]

You could've easily edited your comment to make sense, rather than just complain about my editing.

[Jtsummers]

No. The things I was responding to were gone. Other than questioning 5+ edits in 15 minutes that kept changing the majority of your post my other replies didn't make sense. Now that I'm home from my drive I'll take a look at what you've got and see if I can still make another relevant reply.