A long time ago there was a saying "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" That made more sense back when every child in the country went to school five days a week and learned their history from a big room full of books. Of late it can be a mite hard to find a history book that hasn't been burned or rotted through, so it seems like the good folk of the wasteland are doomed to repeat a lot of history's mistakes.
There's a certain man in Nevada who is deliberately repeating history's mistakes. Calls himself Caesar, spoken by his followers as Kaizar. He's not the first to go by either of those names. A good two thousand years ago the first Caesar ruled an empire on the other side of the world - that Caesar probably never even imagined that there was a whole continent over here full of new people to enslave.
Well, this new Caesar of the post-apocalyptic world is out to finish what the first one started. Rather than aiming to restore America to what it was in the days before the Great War, Caesar is forging a new nation, using the Roman Empire as some form of twisted inspiration.
That's a funny idea for someone to get in their head, of course this Caesar had an unconventional upbringing. He was born in 2226 out West in the Boneyard, the ruins of what used to be Los Angeles. He didn't stay there long, his mother took him away when he was just a baby, and raised him with the Followers of the Apocalypse. Despite their name, these "Followers" aren't one of those doomsday cults, they're just a group of do-gooder intellectuals who try to preserve the knowledge of the old world.
They also keep records about the present, so we know all there is to know about who Caesar was before he declared himself Emperor. He used to be a bright young man named Edward Sallow. He was chosen to go on a Followers expedition to study the tribespeople of the wasteland, and perhaps he was a little too intelligent and educated to be sent out among the savages. He viewed them with a mixture of sneering contempt, and misguided pity. He felt it was his duty to civilize them at any cost.
In a stroke of irony it turns out that those uncivilized lands had some books from before the war; books that weren't reduced to a pile of ash. Rare historical records, including an account of the original Caesar's war in Gaul. Sallow could have seen the history of Rome a warning about an empire that was doomed to fall. But, instead, he saw something of himself in Caesar, and decided to follow his example, even if it meant knowingly repeating the mistakes of the past.
The Romans described in those old books were, by the standards of their time, the most civilized group in the known world. So mighty was their Empire, they even had it better than most folks today. Food, fresh water, roads and libraries. The problem is that only some Romans had it that good - their empire was built on conquest and slavery, and the people on the bottom rung of society had it about as bad as a molerat in a Deathclaw den.
Under the new title of Caesar, Edward Sallow forged the tribals of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado into an army patterned after the Legion of Rome. Their entire society was converted to the war effort, and they used merciless strategies to decisively end their conflicts. Eighty six tribes in all, and each one they encountered was either assimilated or annihilated.
The men who survive are forced to become soldiers in the Legion. All traces of their original tribe are eradicated and these slave soldiers have but one option in life: To die in the service of their conquerors. With each new victory the Legion grows in number, leaving behind no one to oppose them. In his own way, Caesar is bringing order to wasteland, one genocide at a time.
The women of conquered tribes are not allowed even the dignity of dying in combat. The Legion's strictly regimented society forbids such equality, no matter how skilled those women may be as warriors. This rigid separation ensures that half of the Legion's forces fight, while the other half breeds the next generation of slaves.
