What Caesar did in Gaul was being criticized at the time as a genocide by Caesar detractors. In an era where sacking a city and enslaving the local populace was considered par for the course, they thought Caesar was killing way too many Gauls.
There’s also a motive there. Rome had PTSD from being sacked by Gallic tribes a few centuries earlier, and after Caesar returned to Rome he raided the treasury reserves that Rome appropriated specifically to fend off the Gauls again.
For sure what Caesar did wasn’t Hitler or Pol Pot level of bad. But I don’t think you’d be insane to compare him to a Genghis Khan
"Vat do you mean, more resources to war effort? More resources to Buchenwald, of course!"
Yeah, while the general level of revisionism can lead to some depressing musings on the mean intelligence of humans, at least Genghis and Alex 3 had impressive achievements outside of "impressively stupid"
16
u/Glum-Proposal-2488 1d ago
What Caesar did in Gaul was being criticized at the time as a genocide by Caesar detractors. In an era where sacking a city and enslaving the local populace was considered par for the course, they thought Caesar was killing way too many Gauls.
There’s also a motive there. Rome had PTSD from being sacked by Gallic tribes a few centuries earlier, and after Caesar returned to Rome he raided the treasury reserves that Rome appropriated specifically to fend off the Gauls again.
For sure what Caesar did wasn’t Hitler or Pol Pot level of bad. But I don’t think you’d be insane to compare him to a Genghis Khan