Wars by Era
3 major conflicts, 35 battles, and an estimated 1,515,000 dead.
Julius Caesar's eight-year conquest of Gaul transformed a politically indebted Roman general into the most powerful man in the Republic. From the Pyrenees to the Rhine, Caesar fought dozens of peoples with sustained aggression, caused mass death, enslavement, and displacement on a scale that cannot be measured securely, and built the veteran army he would ultimately lead into civil war. Ancient literary claims of roughly a million killed and another million enslaved should be treated as source-dependent estimates rather than audited totals.
12 battles · 1,000,000 dead
When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in January 49 BC, he launched eighteen years of civil war that destroyed the five-hundred-year-old Roman Republic and replaced it with one-man rule. From Pharsalus to Philippi to Actium, the greatest Roman generals of the age destroyed each other. The last man standing — Octavian, Caesar's heir — became Augustus: the first emperor of Rome.
12 battles · 460,000 dead
Augustus's attempt to establish lasting Roman control toward the Elbe suffered a catastrophic reversal when three legions were destroyed in the Teutoburg Forest. Rome later abandoned the project of conquering northern Germania, although armies repeatedly crossed the Rhine and the empire subsequently held territory east of its upper reaches in the Agri Decumates. Arminius's coalition therefore changed Roman strategy without creating a simple, permanently sealed civilizational boundary.
11 battles · 55,000 dead