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    the

    old home territory.  The other wandered off to start life in a fresh

    new place.  Between them, they established a pecking order of groups.

    The tribe that stayed home had the largest membership and the

    choicest land.  It was clearly on top.  Eventually this favored clan began

    to pick on the troop that had pulled up stakes.  At first, the privileged

    group merely advertised its superiority by harassing the gang on the

    bottom.  Later, the mood of the dominant clan grew ugly.  The top tribe

    wiped its rivals out.  Being on the bottom of this pecking order turned

    out to be suicidal.

    No wonder human groups so often try to move up by

    manipulating ideas or by making war.  The Helvetians in the days of

    Julius Caesar were one of those superorganisms driven by the lure of

    pecking order glory.  As Caesar tells the story in his Conquest of Gaul68,

    the Helvetians lived in a state of considerable size parked roughly

    where Switzerland is today.  But the Helvetians wanted more land.

    They wanted more slaves.  And above all, they wanted more power.

    In fact, they wanted to rule over every tribe in sight.

    The Helvetians did not just grumble about their pecking order

    aspirations, they did something about it.  They laid out a methodical

    plan of conquest.  They planted and harvested for two full years to lay

    in a store of supplies.  They bought up all the oxen and wagons for

    hundreds of miles around.  Then, in the third year of the grand plan,

    they packed all their earthly possessions, got together their wives and

    families, burned their twelve major towns and their four hundred

    villages, and set off on the glorious campaign.  Caesar swears that over

    a quarter of a million Helvetians marched out to seek their fortune.

    There were so many of them that it took 21 days just to get the entire

    group from one side of the river Rhone to the other by boat and raft.

    As the Helvetians marched, they pillaged and plundered,

    enslaving inhabitants of the territories on their route.  They were doing

    just fine until they met the armies of another superorganism with an

    equally blind ambition to climb the pecking order.  That rival social

    cluster was the clump of humanity known as Rome.

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