the Iron and Debt: Rome, Gaul, Revolt of Sacrovir

In AD 21, two Roman citizens with Gallic names led the most serious provincial rebellion that Gaul had seen since Julius Caesar's conquest. Julius Sacrovir of the Aedui and Julius Florus of the Treveri were not unconquered tribesmen resisting a foreign civilization. They were men formed by Roman schools, bound by Roman law, carrying the Roman name their ancestors had earned through loyal service to Caesar himself. They organized their rebellion using Roman administrative networks, armed their fighters with Roman-pattern weapons, and died by the Roman custom of suicide rather than submit to Roman justice.The Iron and the Debt tells the full story of how this happened - how the Roman fiscal system, amplified by the catastrophic military demands of the Teutoburg disaster, drove the most thoroughly Romanized members of Gallic society into organized revolt against the civilization that had made them. It traces the conspiracy from secret villa meetings to the iron-clad gladiators of the battle of Augustodunum, and follows the political wreckage all the way to the Senate trials that destroyed the general who suppressed it.This is narrative history at its most compelling: a story about empire, debt, identity, and the strange paradox that a civilization's greatest challenge can come from the people it has most completely transformed.