Hello and welcome to this episode of Epox where I shall be continuing once again my narrative of the decline fall of the Roman Republic,

carrying on with the military career of Julius Caesar and his time in Gaul, his many years in Gaul, a big chunk of his whole life, he spent fighting in Gaul and conquering Gaul.

If you remember last time, Caesar had put down the German warmaster,

Ariavistus, and he had left his army wintering right in the centre of France, essentially,

but he himself had popped back to Italy for various administrative reasons over that winter.

Now, it seems that something happened,

of some sort of shift in public opinion,

if you can say such a thing even existed in the first century BC.

Public opinion had changed, it seems, over the course of that winter.

It seems that a lot of the remaining Gallic tribes

that hadn't already been subdued by the

Romans had decided or realised that Rome was now their first existential threat and that they

should really band together to try and do something about it, particularly the Belgian

tribes, the Belgae.

So in the next section, I'm going to talk all about is the

following year now 57 BC. We're now 57 BC and Caesar spends this whole year just fighting

the Belgay, which are up in more northern France, up near Holland and Belgium, along the Rhine there.

So first thing to say is that the word Belga, there's not just one tribe, one people called the Belga. It's a coalition of lots and lots of different people. In fact, they get some Germans to fight alongside them as well. But we'll get into all that detail. So let's just start with a paragraph here from Caesar who says this.

Quote,

While Caesar was in Italy and the legions in their winter quarters, repeated rumours reached him,

alleging what was confirmed by dispatches by Labienus, one of his generals he'd left in in France,

that all the Gallic tribes whose territory, as said above, comprises a third of Gaul,

...