camp there was a census, written in Greek on tablets, which would have indicated 263,000 Helvetii and 105,000 allies, of whom exactly one quarter (92,000) were combatants. But Henige points out that such a census would have been difficult to achieve by the Gauls, that it would make no sense to be written in Greek by non-Greek tribes, and that carrying such a large quantity of stone or wood tablets on their migration would have been a monumental feat. Henige finds it oddly convenient that exactly one quarter were combatants, suggesting that the numbers were more likely ginned up by Caesar than outright counted by census. Even contemporary authors estimated that the population of the Helvetii and their allies were lower, Livy surmised that there were 157,000 overall. But Henige still believes this number inaccurate. During the campaign against the Usipetes and the Tenceri, Caesar makes the incredible claim that the Romans faced an army of 430,000 Gauls, that the Roman victory was overwhelming, that the Romans lost not a single soldier, and that upon their loss the Gauls committed mass suicide. Henige finds this entire story impossible, as did Ferdinand Lot, writing in 1947. Lot was one of the first modern authors who directly questioned the validity of Caesar's numbers, finding a fighting force of 430,000 to have been unbelievable for the time. Not all contemporaries of Caesar believed the account to have been accurate. Gaius Asinius Pollio, who served under Caesar, noted that the account had been put together without much care or regard for the truth. Still, Pollio attributed this to mistakes by Caesar's lieutenants, or even that Caesar intended to rewrite the text more accurately. Up until the 20th century authors tended to follow Pollio's thinking, attributing mistakes not to Caesar but to the process, such as errors in translation and transcription throughout time. Ernest Desjardins, writing in 1876, suggested (in what Henige considers to be very charitable on Desjardins part) that the error in numbers in the Usipetes campaign was the result of a mis-transcription of "CCCCXXX" instead of "XXXXIII", which would mean that the real size of the Gaulic force was actually just 43,000. But even Henige suggests that it is possible the numbers have not always been accurately written down, and that the earliest surviving manuscripts are only from the ninth to twelfth centuries. Part of the dispute over the historiography of the