PC/WI: Julius Caesar goes to Germania instead?

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Considering a timeline on this idea, so I wanted to make that at least the POD stands up.

That being said, what if Julius Caesar, after conquering Gaul simply decides to go east across the Rhine River instead of north?

The goal, like it was in Britannia, is to establish a Roman settlement(s) in Germania, killing local resistance as per necessary.

How plausible is this and what are the potential ramifications for Caesar politically if he is successful?

Off the back, I'm thinking that this ultimately proves to be a blunder for Caesar given the comparative strength of the Germanic tribes in relation to what he faced in Gaul, but I could be wrong.
 
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East of the Elbe? Surely you mean Rhine?
I don`t know if the Germanic people are really to be considered stronger than the Gauls. They`re numerous but disunited still, and their technology is really not up to date.
But, compared to the relatively cleared and infrastructurally prepared Gaul, the farther you go into Magna Germania, the more the woods and swamps turn into an infrastructural nightmare for the Roman armies.
Also, immediately East of the Rhine, Julius Caesar is likely to encounter more Celtic people, not Germanic groups yet, or mixtures of both.
How he could fare against them can be easily deduced from how he did in Belgica, which was said to have had a mixed Germanic-Celtic population already, too.

If you really meant East of the Elbe, that`s just swamps and woods and thinly populated and very far from the rest of the Empire.
 
That's going to be a bit unlikely, to say the least. (Assuming that, by after the conquest of Gaul, you meant as well after the Civil War : there's no way Caesar would go on a wild goose chase in Germania instead).

First, Germania, contrary to Gaul, isn't really known to Romans : politically, they don't have allies there, they don't really know what to expect both as resistance, but as gain. Gaul is indeed a really wealthy region, an important market place for Roman traders and a lot to gain not only as fame but from spoils of war.
Germany...Not so much.

Then, Gaul was quite develloped at this point : not only economically (which mean relatively easy supply) but as well on infrastructures. Caesar's armies never had any big problem on moving thanks to the gallic road network (on which later roman roads in Gaul were based on). Safe in southern Germania, under the Danube, this simply doesn't exist beyond the Rhine.
Giving that Roman bases are litteraly on the other side of Rhine and Rhone, it means really long supply lines, after Gaul went damaged by war as well that southern Germania (due to the economical and structural ruptures, we know Celtic peoples of southern Germania went trough some crisis).

It's really not about the strength of Germania's peoples*, but because Germania is an hard region to get (without even getting on the topic of an Elbe border, which is really arbitrary and not that efficient, at least IMO), especially in the wake of a long war in Gaul, then a civil war.

*Rather than "Germanic peoples", mostly because the ethnic differenciation between Celts and Germans is essentially a by-product of Roman conquest : in fact ethnic separations were mostly blurred and many western and southern Germania's peoples importantly celtized (if not Celts) as Arioviste's Suevi.

Now I think we may disagree with Caesar's ambitions there : he didn't want to conquer Britain and create settlement there, but to make a point and prevent support from closely related peoples to continental Celts (especially in Belgica).

Similarily , his expedition in the other side of the Rhine was to prevent the peoples and tribal confederations to meddle with his conquest of Gaul, and to possibly clientelize them (would it be only to furnish a Germanic cavalry as IOTL).
 
If you want to have Caesar go into a different direction, the most likely option would be Illyria and the Danube. Caesar was governor of Illyria and cisalpine gual, and only won control of transalpine gual after the previous governor died. In fact, it was towards Illyria where he had stationed most of his legions before the approach of the Helvetii. Keep the current governor alive or pod the movement of the Helvetii, and Caesar moves on his original target.
 
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