Caesar's Legion/History

Caesar’s Legion is an imperialist organization, led by the charismatic, cunning, and powerful Caesar. The legionaries are a well-organized, jingoistic fighting force that mainly operates east of the Grand Canyon and in Arizona. The Legion is composed mostly of reconditioned tribals and their young offspring.

Origins
The history of the Legion is inextricably linked to its founder and leader, Caesar. Born in 2226 near the Boneyard as Edward Sallow, he was once a citizen of the New California Republic. Following the death of his father at the hands of raiders in 2228, his mother sought the protection of the Followers of the Apocalypse. While she worked for the Followers, cooking and cleaning in their library, the young Edward learned how to read and started taking courses, provided by the organization free of charge. Taught to "bring the torch of knowledge to the wastes", Sallow was a student of uneven quality. Though he was highly intelligent, his success in scientific pursuits was only proportional to his interest in the given subject nor was he particularly popular among his peers, due to his bad temper. For Sallow, the Followers were never an inspiring example, their devotion to scholarship too stifling, and their mission of enlightenment too naive.

In 2246, the 20 old Sallow was an anthropologist and linguist. To benefit from his talents, the Followers sent him east towards the Grand Canyon, on his first expedition. Accompanied by a physician named Bill Calhoun, he was tasked with learning the dialects of the tribes inhabiting the region. On the way to the canyon, he and his companion happened upon a cache of historical books, including The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the Commentarii by Gaius Julius Caesar. Sallow studied the books rigorously for two weeks, not yet aware of their coming significance.Fallout: New Vegas Official Game Guide Collector's Edition p. 459: "Rebirth of the Son of Mars The adolescence and young adulthood of the man who calls himself Caesar were spent as a scribe of the Followers of the Apocalypse. While this boy had a quick mind, he made for a scribe of uneven ability, for his success in academics was equal to his interest in the subject assigned. Nor was he a favorite among his fellows. Though athletic, handsome, and petulance held him back. He never felt that he belonged among the Followers, and blamed them for it. Their rigorous devotion to scholarship was stifling, their mission to ensure that humanity would never repeat the mistakes of the Great War was ridiculously naive. The boy longed for something more. ''When the time came for the boy to leave the Boneyard and trek the wastes as part of a nine-person expedition, wanderlust soon curdled into disappointment. The primitive conditions of the tribes the expedition encountered disgusted him. Inferior people all, wretched in their squalor. Still, he seemed to discern, amid the chaos of their petty struggles and everyday atrocities, the true order of the wastes-and it was one of anonymous, amoral liberty. The wastes called to the boy as a blank slate upon which a man of will could write his own destiny.'' ''During the same period of the time that the boy was coming to these insights, the expedition uncovered a cache of well-preserved historical texts. Among with adventure fiction and comic books, history had always been his favorite subject, and so the task of cataloguing [sic] and studying the texts fell to him. Though the boy had long been aware of basic facts concerning many ancient empires, these new texts filled in many previously obscure details. Reading The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire rendered him a veritable hermit for two weeks. But even that could not have prepared him for the Commentarii, the account of the military campaigns of Gaius Julius Caesar, written by the man himself. Reading Commentarii changed the boy's life. Unfortunately, it was destined to change the lives of thousands more, and for the worse.'' ''In Gaius Julius Caesar the boy found a man who seamed [sic] to have fulfilled the full measure of potential greatness allotted to him by fate, a man whose career spanned political accomplishment and military achievement in equal measure. Such adventure! And intrigue! And cool uniforms! The boy's frustrations with his lot in life gained sharp focus. In reading about Caesar, he was like an ant scurrying about the feet of a regal statue. He resolved that he would go to any lengths necessary to change the course of his life. The Commentarii would be his blueprint. In an illiterate, benighted world, who would ever know that Caesar was not his original creation?'' ''That night, Caesar offered a different sort of assistance to a tribe his expedition had contacted recently: weapons, medical supplies, and tactical expertise. He led several tribal accomplices back to the expedition's camp and through its defenses, and there oversaw the murder of his eight fellows. Within a week he was leading the tribe on ever more ambitious raids against neighboring bands of raiders and tribals."'' (Behind the Bright Lights & Big City) Prior to their arrival in the Grand Canyon, they met with a Mormon missionary, Joshua Graham. Already an accomplished scholar of dialects, Graham was supposed to teach Sallow about the local languages, but before that could happen, the Blackfoot tribe captured the three scholars for ransom.

The tribe was a sorry sight for the future Caesar, weak and insignificant. Worse for the hostages, they were at war with seven other tribes, outnumbered and bound to lose. Unwilling to sink with them, Sallow decided to take certain steps. Objections from Calhoun went unheard. Sallow taught the tribe how to properly maintain their firearms, properly shoot targets, and reload ammunition, after which he began teaching them how to make explosives and drilling in small unit tactics, all of which was based on old books Caesar had read as a Follower of the Apocalypse. Once they were ready, Sallow led them against the Ridgers, their weakest enemy. When the tribe refused to surrender, he ordered every man, woman, and child killed. No exceptions were made. The Blackfoot moved on under Caesar's lead, surrounding the Kaibabs tribe. Upon their refusal to surrender, Sallow took their envoy to the ruins of the Ridgers' village. The piles of corpses were a shocking sight to a tribesman who only knew tribal strife, with the occasional raid, raping, and pillaging, but what Sallow had led was total warfare.

Rise to Power
The Kaibabs surrendered. Then the Fredonians. Then all the remaining Grand Canyon tribes. Caesar was acutely aware that the root cause of all the problems was tribal identities, leading to internecine conflict and preventing any substantial recovery. He knew what had to be done. He had to erase all traces of tribal identities and substitute a single, monolithic culture in their place. Each tribe Caesar fought against and assimilated were primitive even by the standards of the post-nuclear world, with nothing even remotely comparable to what existed out west: No towns, no roads, no meaningful industry. They fell to the superior forces marshaled by Sallow and Graham.J.E. Sawyer (source): "Edward Sallow created Caesar's Legion as an imitation of the Roman Legion, but without any of the Roman society that supported the Roman Legion. I've written this before, but there are no optimates, no populares, no plebes, no equestrians, no patricians, no senate, no Rome. There's no right to private property (within the Legion itself). There's no civil law. There aren't even the ceremonial trappings of Roman society. Legates don't receive triumphs following a victory. No one in the Legion retires to a villa in Sedona.

''It's essentially a Roman legion with only the very top commander having any connection to the "source" culture, the rest being indoctrinated conscripts from cultures that were honestly less well-developed than anything in Gaul. Gauls are pretty sophisticated compared to the 80+ tribes. Gauls could read the Latin or Greek alphabets (Gallic language, obviously), had extensive permanent settlements, roads, calendars, mines, and a whole load of poo poo that groups like the Blackfoots never had.''

''What Caesar gave to those tribes was order, discipline, an end to internecine tribal violence (eventually), common language, and a common culture that was not rooted in any of their parent cultures. The price was extreme brutality, an enormous loss of life and individual culture, the complete dissolution of anything resembling a traditional family, and the indoctrination of fascist values.''

''Caesar's Legion isn't the Roman Empire or the Roman Republic. It isn't even the Roman Legion. It's a slave army with trappings of foreign-conscripted Roman legionaries during the late empire. All military, no civilian, and with none of the supporting civilian culture."''

Its legionaries have predominately reconditioned the tribals into slave soldiers, forming a well-organized, culturally insular fighting force that, as of 2281, mainly operates east of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon in the former states of Arizona and New Mexico with small portions of Utah and Colorado. Caesar's ultimate goal is to conquer the New California Republic and merge its civilian culture and infrastructure with the military strength of the Legion, creating a new totalitarian empire.

In 2247, when his confederation was large enough, Sallow crowned himself as Caesar, leader of the Great Tribe: the Legion. He deliberately patterned it after imperial Rome. One of the reasons was that this ancient European culture was completely foreign, alien to the ignorant tribals he was subjugating. Second, he considered Rome's highly militarized autocracy adept at integrating conquered cultures the perfect template for a society that could adapt to the challenges of the post-apocalyptic world and thrive, establishing prosperity and peace: a new Pax Romana. The Legion would be a nationalist, imperialist, totalitarian, completely homogenous culture that would focus on long-term stability at all costs.

He soon began putting his words into practice. Calhoun was sent back west to warn that Caesar should not be interfered with, while Graham stayed with Caesar, becoming the Legion's first legate. In the decades that followed, the Legion conquered minor holdings in Utah and Colorado, while the entirety of Arizona and a sizeable portion of New Mexico were brought under its control. Tribes were forcibly assimilated into the Legion, while cities and their inhabitants lived on as subjects of the Legion.Joshua Sawyer on Formspring May 12, 2012: "Even in ancient Rome's slave-based economy the majority of people weren't slaves. Is that the case with the Legion and is that what you wanted to show with additional Legion locations? The additional Legion locations would have had more traveling non-Legion residents of Legion territories. The Fort and Cottonwood Cove made sense as heavy military outposts where the vast majority of the population consisted of soldiers and slaves. The other locations would have had more "civilians". It's not accurate to think of them as citizens of the Legion (the Legion is purely military), but as non-tribal people who live in areas under Legion control. ''While Caesar intentionally enslaves NCR and Mojave residents in the war zone, most of the enslavement that happens in the east happens to tribals. As Raul indicates, there are non-tribal communities that came under Legion control a long time ago. The additional locations would have shown what life is like for those people.'' ''The general tone would have been what you would expect from life under a stable military dictatorship facing no internal resistance: the majority of people enjoy safe and productive lives (more than they had prior to the Legion's arrival) but have no freedoms, rights, or say in what happens in their communities. Water and power flow consistently, food is adequate, travel is safe, and occasionally someone steps afoul of a legionary and gets his or her head cut off. If the Legion tells someone to do something, they only ask once -- even if that means an entire community has to pick up and move fifty miles away. Corruption within the Legion is rare and Caesar deals with it harshly (even by Legion standards).'' ''In short, residents of Legion territories aren't really citizens and they aren't slaves, but they're also not free. People who keep their mouths shut, go about their business, and nod at the rare requests the Legion makes of them -- they can live very well. Many of them don't care at all that they don't have a say in what happens around them (mostly because they felt they never had a say in it before the Legion came, anyway)."'' Since 2250, Caesar styled himself as the Son of Mars, divinely ordained to subjugate the world to his will.

War with the NCR
Conflict with the Republic was inevitable. For Caesar, this isn't just petty ambition. He likens himself to Caesar returning from his conquest of Gaul and the NCR as the corrupt Roman Senate. It's a textbook example of Hegelian dialectics, where the thesis and antithesis conflict, creating a synthesis when the conflict is resolved. When the Legion conquers the NCR, it will be transformed from a republic plagued by bureaucracy, corruption, and internecine political strife into a highly efficient military dictatorship, while the Legion will become a standing army protecting all the citizens of the new empire and the absolute power of its dictator. Fallout: New Vegas Official Game Guide Collector's Edition p.460-461: "True to Caesar" "Many years have passed, and by post-apocalyptic standards, Caesar's accomplishments have been prodigious. But the man's hunger for greatness has never been sated. Having assembled a loose nation of slavers and slaves, having won countless "wars" against inferior peoples, secretly he still feels like an upstart, an amateur-a barbaric King of the Gauls, instead of a lofty emperor of Rome. ''To advance, he needs two things: a Carthage and a Rome. In the NCR he has at last found a great adversary, against which he can wage a military campaign worthy of history books. (Indeed, worth teaching his subordinates how to read and write, so that future generations can read his own Commentarii.) And in Vegas, powered and watered by its great dam, he has found a capital worthy of, well, a Caesar. Contrary to the old saw, Rome will be built in a day. With that out of the way, the next step will be to proclaim his apotheosis. All good Roman emperors became gods, although that was usually done posthumously...'' ''Besides a (highly unlikely) military defeat, Caesar fears one thing only: exposure. The denizens of the wastes are too ignorant to realize that his entire empire is a grand act of plagiarism, but the Followers of the Apocalypse know exactly who he is and what he has done. Should his tribe discover that he cribbed the entire culture from books about ancient Rome, rather than having its customs dictates dictated to him by Mars...well, it's very unlikely that could happen. And he won't let it happen. That is why his forces have a standing order to kill all Followers of the Apocalypse on sight, and to brutalize all "civilized" or learned captives and haul them before Caesar's interrogators. Those who make the mistake of saying, "Hey, you guys, it's like you're emulating the ancient Roman empire," end up as severed heads on poles."'' (Behind the Bright Lights & Big City)

Obviously, the New California Republic was not willing to roll over and surrender. Following a series of skirmishes and smaller battles, most notably the destruction of Fort Aradesh, the Legion forced a confrontation. In 2277, the Legion faced the NCR at Hoover Dam, in what became known as the First Battle of Hoover Dam. Discovered by Ulysses, a frumentarius, the dam was a symbolic Rubicon. Caesar's 68 reformed tribes attacked the dam under the lead of Joshua Graham, following a series of deep raids on NCR territory by small groups of skirmishers and sabotage actions by the Frumentarii. However, Graham's elite troops were drawn into a trap laid by Chief Hanlon of the New California Republic Rangers. As General Lee Oliver's soldiers held the line, Rangers and Army sharpshooters targeted their commanders, sowing chaos in Legion ranks. When the Legate ordered his elite forces to punch through and pursue Rangers decimating his officers and sowing chaos in the ranks, the Rangers and 1st Recon sharpshooters retreated into Boulder City. Elements of the Army and Rangers kept the Legion engaged long enough to allow the most experienced legionaries to enter the city. When they did, the Republic's forces pulled out of the city. Once most of them were safe (soldiers and Rangers trapped behind Legion lines had to be abandoned, they triggered explosives packed into the buildings in advance. Chief Hanlon's plan went off without a hitch: The exploding buildings acted as giant fragmentation bombs, killing and maiming most of the legionaries and leaving the rest in a state of shock. The Army and Rangers followed the detonation with a counter-attack, destroying the Legion on the western side of the Colorado River and forcing the Malpais Legate to retreat from the dam. Flanking attacks at Camp Golf and other camps in the Mojave were similarly repulsed. The Malpais Legate returned to Caesar in shame. To demonstrate that failure is not tolerated, even at the highest of ranks, Caesar ordered Graham to be burned alive. The former Legate was covered in pitch, lit on fire, and thrown into the Grand Canyon. This was the worst defeat in Legion's history.

Graham was replaced by Legate Lanius, who embarked on a campaign of expansion eastward to subjugate further tribes for the Legion and gather forces for another confrontation with the Republic. Over the next four years, Caesar rebuilt his army, creating the finest possible blade with which to cleave through the Republic. The Legion's return to and rise beyond its former glory was accompanied by a noticeable decline in Caesar's health. Once healthy, his face became sunken and sickly, his nature more reclusive. But the worst were the headaches, increasing in strength and frequency, affecting his ability to lead. Caesar denied these problems, lashing out at any queries. Although they remained silent, the decline was visible to his officers, leading some to question their leader.

By 2281, Caesar returned to Fortification Hill, poised to take the dam with what remained of the 87 reformed tribes that his Legion had conquered, 14 tribes to be exact, and claim New Vegas as his Rome. He is emboldened by Legion victories at the Battle of Willow Beach and the Battle of Arizona Spillway, but is playing his cards more cautiously this time, and will not give the order for Lanius to attack the dam until he can unearth the contents of the vault sealed beneath his base in the Mojave. Caesar also needs to neutralize the ruler of New Vegas, Robert House, assassinate NCR President Kimball, attempt to forge an alliance with the Boomers, Great Khans, and White Glove Society, destroy the Brotherhood of Steel, and, perhaps most importantly, deal with his brain tumor.