Caesar's Doomsday War

[PART 1] As the Celts left no written records, our view on them was informed by Roman writers, who portrayed them as noble adversaries in battle, but at the same time as inferior barbarians who needed to be subjugated in order to be civilized. In the present day however, archaeology provides us with growing evidence that suggests they were way less primitive. So much is definitely true for the Gauls, whose conquest was the key achievement of Julius Caesar, according to his own autobiographic-apologetic account "De Bello Gallico". But obviously our only written source about that remorseless military campaign - is utterly biased - as it adheres less to facts than to appreciations of Rome's infamous conqueror. As a matter of fact, in the first part of this documentary, we learn that the Gauls - far from being mindless savages - had already developed an advanced agriculture producing riches in abundance, thus making them a rich and wealthy prey in the eyes of the Roman predators. Even more so given that Brennus, the Gallic war chief of the Senones, had ransacked and occupied Rome as early as in 390 BCE, thereby turning the Gauls into the hereditary arch-enemy of the Romans. Rome already had turned Cisalpine Gaul - i.e. the Po plain - and Narbonnensis - i.e. contemporary South-East France - into early provinces, but the ambitious Caesar used his term as proconsul with free hand and army as his opportunity to amass fortune - in order to pay off huge electoral campaign debts - and fame in his ultimate bid for power back home in Rome. Inventing the classic divide-and-rule tactic, Caesar was able to play the rival Gaul tribes against each other and manipulated the migration of the Helvetic tribes to the Atlantic coast in order to subdue the nearby leading tribes in the heartland, later smashing tribes all around, often in bloodbaths - notably after Ambiorix' Eburones insurrection - who were in turn utterly and terminally wiped from the face of the earth. The major tribe's chief had been executed for attempting kingship against the democratic tradition, but his son Vercingetorix, a Roman hostage - who ended up as a tremendously gifted legionnaire after being trained and educated by Caesar himself - returned home to become the new chief and forge an alliance the likes of which no one had seen before. And it was this daunting alliance that proved itself able to pose a formidable challenge tot Caesar's great army.