ANNALES DE DÉMOGRAPHIE HISTORIQUE 1998, p. 215 à 242

HE CAME, HE SAW, WE COUNTED : THE HISTORIOGRAPHY AND DEMOGRAPHY OF CAESAR'S GALLIC NUMBERS

And we have not seen and we have not heard that any king had ever appointed anybody to count the numbers of those killed in any battle, ... unless the number of slain was one thousand or less. As for those killed in the battles of Hulaku, Ghazan, and Timur, the esta¬ blishment of their exact numbers is sheer madness, and whoever believes in these numbers is nothing but a madman1.

par David HENIGE

I

When the youthful Thomas Campbell (Campbell, 1855, 59) wrote in his poem, «The Pleasures of Hope », published in 1799 :

There shall he pause, with horrent brow, to rate What millions died -that Caesar might be great

he was doing more than surrendering himself to normal poetic license ; he was also reporting on the intellectual legacy of his time with respect to the population of the ancient world and the mortality of its warfare2. The present paper deals with strikingly similar attitudes about Caesar's military activities and their conséquences. Although similar to Campbell's expressed views, these are in no way licensed by the canons of poetry. Many of them have endu-red and prospered well into the present3.

II

Caesar's account of his campaigns in Gaul has long been regarded as among the great war reports of ail time. Couched in largely matter-of-fact understatement, refreshingly free of the intrusive «I », and unchallenged by rival accounts, The Gallic Wars has been quarried for everything from Latin grammar to the ethnography of the Gallic tribes. Until fairly recently its testi-mony was seldom seriously challenged. Even when Caesar spoke of impos-