Oh
by Luis E. Íñigo Fernández
«It was the year 390 BC. C. The city of Rome was in the hands of the Senones, a Gallic people who had invaded Latium from the north. It had been razed mercilessly and its inhabitants, in panic, had abandoned it or perished defending it. Only a few resisted entrenched on Capitol Hill, but, overcome by hunger, they agreed to pay for their freedom with a ransom of a thousand pounds in gold. Having gathered such an enormous amount with effort, while the precious metal was weighed on a large scale, the Romans observed that the weights were falsified and, furious at the deception, they protested to the Gauls. Dismissive, Brennus, the leader of the invaders, simply dropped his sword on a plate of the scales and, in the words of Livy, proclaimed: Vae victis! (Woe to the defeated!).
It may or may not be a legend, but its teaching is evident: in war, the defeated cannot expect justice from the victors. They are the ones who impose their conditions and, almost always, who narrate their victory in a way that makes it seem fair in the eyes of future generations. Precisely for this reason the historian, especially the specialist in military history, must approach the testimony of the victors with distrust, complete it with that of the defeated and reconstruct from both a balanced and truthful account of the events.
This book aims to vindicate the defeated; the civilizations, the peoples, the nations or, simply, the armies that, at each decisive crossroads in humanity’s past, were separated from the main current of their historical future, which continued forward without them.
Luis E. Íñigo Fernández. Graduate and doctor in History, official of the Secondary Education teaching body since 1990 and of the Education Inspectorate Corps since 2006, he has dedicated more than fifteen years to teaching his discipline in Secondary Education Institutes, without neglecting at the same time his growing interest in research. The result of the latter has been numerous articles on the Second Spanish Republic, such as the monographs Melquíades Álvarez: a liberal in the Second Republic and The liberal right in the Second Spanish Republic. In the last two decades, his work has focused on high dissemination, to which he has dedicated nearly twenty works on the history of Spain and Europe, universal history and military history. A dilettante writer, he has also published several novels (Liber Hiperbóreas and The Watchers of Atlantis) and a book of children’s stories (Stories for Lunchtime).
Source: https://algunoslibrosbuenos.com/vae-victis
