Julius Caesar | John H. Collins (essay date 1959)
John H. Collins (essay date 1959)
SOURCE: “On the Date and Interpretation of the Bellum Civile,” in American Journal of Philology, Vol. LXXX, No. 2, April, 1959, pp. 113-32.
[In the following essay, Collins argues that Caesar was a moderate rather than a revolutionary, and that most of his writings should be accepted as truth, not propaganda.]
I.
In a fundamental article in Rheinisches Museum nearly fifty years ago, A. Klotz,1 summing up the evidence and earlier discussion and adding solid arguments of his own, showed with great probability that the Bellum Civile was not published in the lifetime of Caesar, nor from any finally revised copy, but was superficially edited and published shortly after his death by Aulus Hirtius, who had as his text the unfinished and unpolished manuscript from Caesar's literary remains. The view thus nailed down by Klotz, though attacked in the following decades by...
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