Numbers come from somewhere

Yesterday on Substack, a young Orthodox Substacker whose work I usually appreciate, feeling perhaps a bit too eager to pause over and reconsider what felt like an epiphany, shared the following:

Caesar was declared divine for killing a million Gauls and enslaving a million more. In the pagan world, Hitler would have been numbered among the gods.

There are a lot of factual problems (not least that this is not why Caesar was divinized) and dubious assumptions built into this note, which is framed as an even more dubious hypothetical (“would have”) anyway, and it was handled pretty thoroughly by responses like this one.

But what proved unexpectedly helpful to me was its use of the one million figure. I’ve seen this statistic repeated over and over again by people trying to paint Caesar as a war criminal—a category that would have been nonsensical in the ancient world—or guilty of genocide, which is itself a loaded and dubious term. I’ve idly wondered where they’re getting this number, statistics from the ancient world being so totally, notoriously unreliable. This time I decided to look into it.

The claim that Caesar “kill[ed] a million Gauls and enslav[ed] a million more” ultimately comes from three passages in sources that post-date Caesar by a generation or more. Here are all three relevant portions in approximate chronological order:

• Valleius Paterculus (19 BC-AD 31), Roman History, II, 47: “During this period, including the years which immediately followed and those of which mention has already been made, more than four hundred thousand of the enemy were slain by Gaius Caesar and a greater number were taken prisoners.”

• Pliny the Elder (c. AD 23-79), Natural History, VII, 25: “In addition, too, to the victories gained by him in the civil wars, one million one hundred and ninety-two thousand men were slain by him in his battles. For my own part, however, I am not going to set it down as a subject for high renown, what was really an outrage committed upon mankind, even though he may have been acting under the strong influence of necessity; and, indeed, he himself confesses as much, in his omission to state the number of persons who perished by the sword in the civil wars.”

• Plutarch (c. AD 50-c. 120), Parallel Lives: Caesar, 15: “For although it was not full ten years that he waged war in Gaul, he took by storm more than eight hundred cities, subdued three hundred nations, and fought pitched battles at different times with three million men, of whom he slew one million in hand to hand fighting and took as many more prisoners.”

That’s it. Whatever sources these historians used, if any, are long since lost. Of these, the closest to Caesar’s own lifetime gives by far the lowest casualty figure. All of them are approximations, a point made especially clear when they write about prisoners.

I ran these sources down thanks to the bibliography in Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar: Life of a Colossus. After summarizing the statistics we get from the three sources above, Goldsworthy notes that:

It is hard to know the basis for any of these numbers. The figures given for enemy casualties in the Commentaries on the Gallic War do not add up to such a great total, while Caesar’s account of the Civil War often did not mention such things. It is questionable that numbers for losses amongst the Gaulish tribes were known with precision, although it may just have been possible to calculate from records the number of prisoners taken and sold into slavery. Probably these numbers are exaggerated, but still give some indication of the appalling human cost of Caesar’s victories.

Goldsworthy is a careful scholar and an expert military historian—an area often lacking in other classicists—and his Caesar is the book on this subject, as far as I’m concerned. His caution in accepting the one-million figure is warranted and well-explained.

There are other surviving figures that can indicate something of the devastation of the Gallic Wars; Goldsworthy notes in the same passage that the total tax Caesar levied on his entire province in 50 BC was lower than the funds required for a forum he built. But is that because of devastation or disparities in property values and population density? With factors like these unknown, the surviving numbers can only suggest. Absent our sources’ sources, we can only speculate about demographics and statistics, and even that speculation must be based on what the sources do tell us, however little we choose to trust them. (Here is a very skeptical take on the numbers in Caesar’s Commentaries specifically that should give you some sense of the scope of the problem; it’s not just about battle casualties.)

The obvious point of comparison—the one invoked by our Substacker in the first place—is the death toll of the Holocaust. Certain kinds of skeptics operating under ulterior motives will question the standard figure of six million Jews, but for the Holocaust we have mountains of data available—prewar and postwar population figures, logistical documentation, military and industrial reports, and the Nazis’ own plans and records. (Read Nikolaus Wachsmann’s excellent KL for a deep dive.) For Caesar’s Gaulish victims we have this handful of sources.

One might call ancient historians’ stats and figures “vibes-based.” But lest we feel too proud of ourselves, that’s essentially what that Substacker was doing, too. That note was designed as a zinger, not to provide an accurate picture of history. Which is too bad, because the Christianity-shaped chasm separating even secular modern ethics from Caesar’s is important to acknowledge.

Numbers come from somewhere. It is worth finding out where and, even more importantly, the limits of their usefulness—especially when they are consistently deployed as some kind of gotcha.

John Buchan’s Julius Caesar

For last year’s John Buchan June I dipped for the first time into Buchan’s enormous body of non-fiction with his short critical introduction Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Work. This year I’ve read another of his late-career works of history, this time the 1932 biography Julius Caesar.

For those who know Buchan as a writer of adventure novels and do not know about his education in the classics or his extensive work in history and current events, having edited the publisher Thomas Nelson’s multivolume history of the First World War while the war was in progress and eventually writing long biographies of Scott, Montrose, Cromwell, and Augustus, a life of Caesar might seem an oddity. But Caesar as a subject combines all of Buchan’s greatest strengths as a writer—the classicist’s mastery of Greek and Latin literature, the MP’s insight into political rough-and-tumble, the historian’s big-picture view, the propagandist’s PR sensibilities, the novelist’s yearning for adventure. That Buchan is such a good writer, strong, vivid, concise, and therefore powerful, helps as well.

Buchan begins Julius Caesar with a brief portrait of the Roman Republic in Caesar’s youth, flush with success and grown beyond its founders’ wildest dreams. The accidental empire carved out by the Romans over generations strained its political system, which was created to govern a single city of sober, principled, self-governing men. By Caesar’s day, Rome had grown culturally decadent and its system corrupt. Elections were about choosing between oligarchs bent on enriching themselves and voting boons to the public, policy was not so much decided in debate and voting but through bribery and influence-peddling, and the law itself had grown so sclerotic that the government resorted more and more often to once-rare emergency measure like dictatorships.

This was an all-too-recognizable Rome of empty formalities covering practical lawlessness and decay. Caesar, a sharp young man, discerned this early.

Buchan gives good attention to the great crisis of Caesar’s young adulthood, the civil war between Marius and Sulla that pitted, at least notionally, a party appealing to the masses against a party with elite support. The former favored expedients (and massive public benefits) and the latter favored tradition and order. Both used strong men to get what they wanted. Thousands were murdered in seesaw purges before Marius died and Sulla, on behalf of the Senate, crushed what was left of his popular movement.

This conflict created the world in which Caesar began his career proper. It also made the careers of the slightly older men who rose to prominence before him, like the plutocrat Crassus but especially Pompey, whose rise was fueled by military glory. Cicero came along shortly afterward, an outsider rising to prominence in law. These and other major figures—Clodius the demagogue, Cato the Younger, Milo, Catiline, and, later, Brutus and Cassius—receive good attention despite the brevity of Buchan’s narrative.

Buchan charts Caesar’s rise to prominence through the complicated, corrupted, testy arena of Roman politics elegantly, including his two consulships and what it took to achieve them. Buchan looks especially closely at the roles of political allies, debt, and the mob in making careers and suggests the jockeying and jostling of interests and personalities vividly without bogging down in detail. Likewise his chapter on Caesar’s decade in Gaul, the years that made him a legend to the masses and an enemy to partisans of the Senate, succinctly covers his major campaigns with perhaps the most attention being given to his war against the uprising led by Vercingetorix.

Throughout, Buchan narrates skillfully, with incisive and nuanced explanations of the major problems facing the Republic. His narrative nicely balances broad trends and the long view with the repeated shocks of specific crises. When Herbert Butterfield wrote that the quintessential task of the historian is to find “a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity,” he could have been describing Buchan’s work in Julius Caesar. Though covering one of the busiest and most tumultuous lifetimes in history in a little over one hundred pages, it never feels incomplete or foreshortened.

Crucially for a short biography like this, Buchan also excels at the concise character study. His portraits of Cicero, Pompey, and Clodius are especially sharp and fairly presented. But the book belongs to Caesar, and Buchan evokes both the fundamental personality of his subject—the charm, ambition, pragmatism, and keen intelligence—as well as the way Caesar learned and grew over the course of his career, first developing canny political instincts before becoming alert to possibilities he could never have imagined as a vulnerable, inexperienced young man in the wake of Marius and Sulla’s purges.

It’s in the final chapters covering Caesar’s war against the Senate, his dictatorship, and his assassination, that Buchan ventures his most controversial interpretations. The Republic, Buchan suggests, had it coming. Look at the adjectives I’ve used above: corrupt, decadent, testy, sclerotic, empty. In a community riven by personality-driven faction, mob violence, and corrupt elites, polarized, deadlocked, and myopically focused on the squabbles of its political class, Caesar’s tyranny, Buchan suggests, was a grand act of simplification if not purification. The Republic was no longer worth preserving, and Caesar represented the best possible form of destruction.

Further, Buchan argues in the penultimate chapter, Caesar was prepared as dictator to usher in a new kind of Rome, broadened and strengthened by its subject peoples, who would be Romanized just as they contributed their earnestness and vigor to the decaying original. Not only a skilled politician and military genius, Caesar was a visionary ready to unite the world.

I disagree with this interpretation. Though Buchan pointedly highlights Caesar’s self-serving pragmatism early in the book, he is too charitable in his reading of Caesar’s later actions, especially in arguing that Caesar was right to defy and wage war against the Senate and that Caesar’s mercy toward his enemies was motivated by a deep-seated kindness. Cato, whom Buchan deplores as a simple-minded contrarian, was right to see Caesar’s public forgiveness as a political stunt. And interpreting Caesar as a simplifier sweeping away hopelessly corrupt systems accepts rather too readily the premises of every would-be tyrant since.

The bigger picture of Caesar’s conquests being a tool of broadening and uplift, sharing Rome’s resources and taking in the best that the Empire has to offer, strikes me as a very British (and therefore Christian, modern, and technological) vision that does not reckon with the realities of Roman statecraft, war, and governance. Here I think Buchan’s justifiable admiration of Caesar the political maneuverer and Caesar the general misleads him. Idealism and cynicism can and often do coexist in great personalities—Buchan chooses to believe Caesar was mostly an idealist, and that his ends justified his means.

Reflecting on the future fate of Rome near the end of the book, Buchan includes a Latin tag: de nostro tempore fabula narratur, “About our time the story is told.” True to history, Julius Caesar is also explicitly meant to draw parallels with Buchan’s present. It also works with our own. As I noted above, the contemptible parody of the old Republic, recognizable in the Britain and Europe of 1932, is just as recognizable in 2025. Are we, then, to hope for a Caesar? The old Roman in me, the opponent of the populares and the fan of Cicero, the last of the true believers, shouts No. It was Buchan’s way to be hopeful, but it is far too dangerous to hope for the kind of Caesar he describes here.

While I disagree with much in Buchan’s final estimation of Caesar that does not detract from the enjoyability or value of Julius Caesar. This is a brisk, elegantly crafted short biography based on a command of the original sources and extensive late 19th and early 20th century historical research. Buchan offers us an excellent short character sketch of a great man and the times that made him—before he remade them, and us.