Senatus Populusque Romanus

Caesar’s Tenth

Book One : The Helvetii

“A nation on the march. A legion in its path.”

Read the opening Join the muster

scroll

The Helvetii, Book One of Caesar’s Tenth. Cover art.

The March

In the spring of 58 BC the Helvetii burned their own towns behind them, so that there could be no turning back, and set out to walk across Gaul and take new country by the strength of their numbers.

A whole people on the move: their wagons, their old folk, their children, a quarter of a million souls with forty thousand spears among them, drifting west toward the one road Rome has sworn to hold. To let them pass is to lose Gaul. To stop them is to fight a nation.

Gaius Julius Caesar, one year a proconsul and badly in need of a war, marches six legions north to meet them. At the sharp end of the foremost walks the Tenth. And in the Tenth, carrying a stylus rather than a sword, walks a man who should never have been there at all.

250,000: souls on the road
40,000: spears among them
58 BC: the year Rome marched
Legio X: the legion sent to stop it

The Opening

There was smoke. Not a column of it. A grey smear laid flat along the whole rim of the world, low and dirty, the kind that came off wet thatch and green wood and no hearth that was meant to be burning.

The road ahead had begun to fill. Carts. People on foot. A whole slow drift of them coming south against the run of the road, and they were not soldiers and not a market crowd, because they were carrying their houses on their backs. A woman went by with a hen under each arm and a child slung to her in a shawl, and she never once looked at the wagon.

Nobody passed a wine wagon without a look. Nobody. She had not even turned her head.

From Chapter One : The Wine Road

III

The Series

Caesar’s Tenth follows Verus, a literate, half-Gaulish recruit whose dead mother’s tongue makes him Caesar’s ear and his instrument, and Carbo, the scarred centurion who makes a soldier of him, across the eight years of the Gallic War. Eight books, one legion, the whole conquest of Gaul told from inside the ranks.

The Helvetii

A quarter of a million people walk onto Rome’s road, and the Tenth is sent to turn them back. Then the German king Ariovistus.

The Broken Line

The Belgae rise to throw Rome back, and at the river Sambre the line very nearly breaks.

III

Sea of Chains

Rome builds a fleet from nothing to break the seafaring Veneti, and sells a whole people into slavery.

The Outer Sea

The Rhine bridged in ten days, and the first crossing to the island at the edge of the world.

The Killing Wood

Ambiorix lures a Roman command into the forest under a false truce, and Rome suffers its worst defeat of the war.

Scorched Earth

Rome takes its revenge, hunting a country to the edge of extinction. Vengeance made policy.

VII

The Last Gaul

All Gaul rises behind Vercingetorix, from the defeat at Gergovia to the great siege of Alesia.

VIII

The Road to the Rubicon

Gaul is subdued at last, and Caesar turns south, toward Rome and the river that means no return.

The Author

David Arrowhead

David Arrowhead writes about the Roman army and the men swallowed up in the making of it. Before the books he served in the British Army, which left him with a soldier’s eye for how war actually works: the boredom and the logistics, the fear, the grim humour, the way a column of frightened men becomes one animal and walks at a wall.

He writes the legions from the inside, at the height of a man in the ranks rather than the general on the hill. Caesar’s Tenth is his Roman series. He lives in England.