“Caesar was not like the tyrants of the twenty-first century. “There was no genocide in the Gallic War.”

The Three Realms deals with the conquest of Gaul, a major episode in Caesar’s life. What were you most interested in exploring about this military campaign?

– Yes, it is true that it was a vital episode. In previous novels I talked about Julius Caesar’s youth and his political rise in Rome, and now I talk about his military rise and one of the important moments in the life of the West. Gaul included not only part of France, but also the territories of Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium and southern Britain. Everything south of the Rhine was Celtic Gaul. He wanted to Romanize that entire area. Caesar, from 58 to 52 BC, makes a transformation that would change the future of the world. He was fully aware that this annexation was a very complicated matter that would alter the security of Rome, which had always had important enemies such as the Gauls to the north. It was a very fragmented region and that was the difficulty of occupying it.

-The novel shows an increasingly dark and uncompromising Caesar. How did you manage to achieve this balance between admiring the strategist and criticizing the historical figure?

– He is a dark character, but this is not a direct criticism of him. We all suffer in life because we suffer from personal crises. We lose part of the naivety of our childhood and youth, and this is what happens to Cesar. I tried to find a balance between the character’s public and private lives. There is an effort on my part to narrate Cesare’s private life, that is, the relationship he had with his mother, wife, and daughter. In his texts, he did not write anything about his private life, but rather about his general election campaigns. To move on to his private life, we must go to Suetonius, Plutarch, and Nicholas Damascus. His enemies, such as Cicero, also tell things about Caesar’s private life. Cicero did not always agree with Caesar, but he was grateful that his brother Quintus Cicero received his help in the Gallic War. Quintus was surrounded by enemies and Caesar came to his rescue because he was a Roman citizen, he did not take into consideration that he was a brother of his enemy.

—It has been said that Caesar had the morals of a dictator, but you are describing this view. How do you think his character has been simplified throughout history?

– It has been simplified because we live in a time of massive simplification. When Twitter started, everything was reduced to 120 characters. The lives of such complex personalities cannot be summed up in slogans. I will tell his life in 6000 pages. A dictator from the time of Rome is not the same as a 21st century dictator who kills and imprisons his oppressors. Caesar does not slaughter or imprison his oppressors after the civil war. Those who killed Caesar were the people he forgave. In his political performance there were lights and shadows, but without that black legend that distinguished Caesar, we see that the lights were more numerous. You can’t put a brand on a character by 21st century standards. This is a very common mistake. The length I have in historical novels allows me to provide some descriptions of characters in context so that it is clear how they moved or thought. Caesar was not committing genocide in the Gallic Wars because he did not slaughter the population. The Turks did it to the Armenians, or the Nazis did it to the Jews. The Gauls were very cruel to the Romans and took no prisoners. Once he conquered the Gauls, he did not seek to commit a massacre and tried to integrate them into the Roman world. There were actually Gallic senators in the Roman Senate.

—The presence of Cleopatra, still young, is very striking. What does the inclusion of the future queen mean at this early stage of her life and what are the similarities between Egypt’s policy and Rome’s policy?

Both Rome and Egypt are currently experiencing a political crisis. In Rome, Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey fight for power against their enemies, the faction of senators who called themselves the optima, meaning the best: Cicero and Cato. Ptolemy XII is banished by his daughter Berenice IV and in exile is accompanied by her daughter Cleopatra, who was very young at the time. This is a part of Cleopatra’s life that never appears in novels and films, because it is told from the moment she met Caesar in 48 BC.

– What is the biggest challenge in recreating the reality of war without falling into excess or censorship?

– I didn’t want to dwell on how terrible the war was, but I didn’t tell the war as if it were an epic world. I am interested in the struggle of strategies between competitors. Caesar always had a very clever strategy, as did enemies like the German king Ariovistus. Sometimes I describe the sea of ​​corpses left behind by these confrontations. The suffering was not only for the competitors, but also for the civilian population. War is never good.

– Caesar controlled psychological warfare. What strategic manipulation techniques or episodes surprised you the most while documenting?

– I was struck by the fact that Caesar, when the Germans crossed the Rhine to attack him in southern Gaul, showed them that he also knew how to cross the northeast. Instead of using boats, he built a wooden bridge over the Rhine River in ten days. This engineering feat surprised the Germans because it had a significant psychological impact. They thought that if he built a bridge in ten days, what would he do in open combat. Caesar had the support of Vitruvius, from whom we receive his work The Ten Books on Architecture. The wooden structure is easier than the stone structure, but it still raises eyebrows.

He is the most widely read author of historical novels in the Spanish language. How do you feel the responsibility of writing for such a broad and demanding audience?

– Of course responsibility is a good word. I live it as a responsibility on the one hand because I know that what I write will be read by millions of people. I work on documentation and narrative technique, but I also live from motivation, because what you do interests a lot of people. The key is that the Roman era interests us, but the important thing is how things are told. You have to associate interesting events in which you are looking for entertainment. I want readers to learn history, but I tell everything audio-visually and cinematically. The novels are translated into Danish, English, Czech, Polish, Arabic, Russian, Ukrainian and other languages. Oddly enough, it translates to the two enemies who are now at full war.

-Finally, what can you reveal – without spoilers – about the fourth novel in the saga?

-For the fourth novel we have the entire rebellion of Vercingetorix. Caesar believed he controlled Gaul, but there were still those difficult years from 51 to 50 marked by Senate conflicts that led to civil war.