A Short History of the World in 50 Lies

by Natasha Tidd

Interestingly, Caesar’s spin was taken as fact, not just by the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire, but by history. Indeed, Commentaries on the Gallic War was actually celebrated as one of the greatest war reports of all time until the mid-twentieth century. What eventually tipped historians off to Caesar’s lies wasn’t his dubious justifications, but his use of numbers. In Commentaries Caesar claims to have conquered huge armies; for example, he declared that the Usipetes and Tencteri had been 430,000 strong and that in their defeat, no Roman soldier had died. Unlikely Roman fatalities aside, when comparing Caesar’s statistics to those found in modern research of the era, it became apparent that the Usipetes and Tencteri having a force of that size was an impossibility for the time and Caesar had inflated the magnitude of his enemy in a calculated effort to boost his reputation. This investigation of military figures opened the floodgates, and soon every aspect of Caesar’s claims was under historical investigation. It took over two thousand years for Julius Caesar’s clever web of lies to be untangled and today Commentaries on the Gallic War is seen not as a piece of historic fact, but as one of the earliest examples of political spin and the dangers that come with it.