tions
of its thought. Exactly for this reason it is particularly important
to explain how such an outcome was brought about, and by what historic
forces. From the propensity to consider every great historical
event as wholly a masterpiece of human genius, many historians have
attributed also this accomplishment to a prodigious, well-nigh divine
wisdom on the part of the Romans, and Julius Caesar is regarded as
a demigod who had fixed his gaze upon the far, far distant future.
However, it is not difficult, studying the ancient documents with
critical spirit, to persuade oneself that even if Caesar was a man of
genius, he was not a god; that from beginning to end, the real story
of the conquest of Gaul is very different from the commonly accepted
version.

I hope to demonstrate that Caesar threw himself into the midst of
Gallic affairs, impelled by slight incidents of internal politics,
not only without giving any thought whatever to the future destiny
of Gaul, but without even knowing well the conditions existing there.
Gaul was then for all Romans a barbarous region, poor, gloomy, full
of swamps and forests in which there would be much fighting and little
booty: no one was thinking then of having Roman territory cross the
Alps; everyone was infatuated by the story of Alexander the Great,
dreaming only of conquering like him all the rich and civilised
Orient; everyone, even Caesar. Only a sequence of political accidents
pushed him in spite of himself into Gaul.

In 62 B.C., Pompey had returned from the Orient, where he had finished
the conquest of Pontus, begun by Lucullus, and annexed Syria. On his
return, the conservative party, irritated against him because he had
gone over to the opposite side, and having been given something to
think of by the prestige that the policy of expansion was winning
for the popular party, had succeeded by many intrigues in keeping
the Senate from ratifying what he had done in the East. This internal
struggle closed the Orient for several years to the adventurous
initiatives of the political imperialists; for as long as the
administration of Pompey remained unapproved, it was impossible to
think of undertaking new enterprises or conquests in Asia and Africa;
and therefore, of necessity, Roman politics, burning for conquest and
adventure, had to turn to another part of Europe.

The letters of Cicero prove to us that Caesar was not the first to
think that Rome, having its hands tied for t