[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.