SOURCE: “The Literary Form,” “The Purpose and Content of Caesar's Commentaries,” and “Style and Personality,” in Caesar as Man of Letters, Cambridge University Press, 1956, pp. 6-49, 63-76.

[In the following excerpt, Adcock explains how Caesar enlarged the genre of commentarii, examines his motivations for writing, and asserts that his plain and precise writing style accurately reflects his personality.]

The extant continuous writings of Caesar were entitled C. Iuli Caesaris commentarii rerum gestarum. After the researches of F. W. Kelsey,¹ this seems to be beyond doubt, and it has not been seriously doubted. What we possess must have been contained in nine rolls—the first seven books of the Gallic War, covering the years 58-52 b.c. being rolls i-vii; then roll ix—the first two books of the Civil War covering the year 49; and roll x the third book of the Civil War describing the events of 48 b.c. until the narrative breaks off late in that year. Between roll vii and roll ix there lay the eighth book of the Gallic War, written by Hirtius, and the series of commentaries in the Caesarian Corpus was completed by the addition of three rolls containing the Bellum Alexandrinum, the Bellum Africum or Africanum, and Bellum Hispaniense. The whole series thus describes the military achievements of Caesar from the moment he arrived in Gaul in 58 b.c. to his victory over the younger Cn. Pompeius in 45 b.c. and its immediate consequences. Caesar's authorship of rolls i-vii, ix and x was no secret in his own times and it is hard to believe that it was ever concealed. They reveal at first hand the mind of the man whose exploits they describe, and it must have been at once plain that no one else can have written them. The theme of Caesar's commentaries is his res gestae whether in Gaul or in the theatres of war of that part of the Bellum Civile—or, as Caesar called it, the civilis dissensio—of which he himself wrote. By the time of Suetonius a distinction was made between Caesar's account of events in Gaul and his account of the Civil War, but, primarily, the simple description of the theme was res gestae.

A commentarius was a form of composition that already had a long history. The word corresponds in Latin to the Greek word hypomnema, which may be translated aide-mémoire, and the Greek word and its Latin equivalent are used of written matter that serves the purpose of an aide-mémoire. The origin of such writings is, primarily, official or private, and it is found in the times of Alexander the Great and his successors, an inheritance from the practice of Oriental monarchies so far as it was not the natural product of administrative convenience. On the military side, hypomnemata might be the wardiaries of generals, dispatches and reports such as have been found in a papyrus of the reign of Ptolemy VIII. In civil administration they may be memoranda or bureaucratic records. They may be Court journals in the Hellenistic kingdoms and so on. They are not, to begin with, intended for publication. In private life they may be written material for speeches—at least the word ‘commentarius’ is used in Cicero of the notes for a speech—or they may be private papers and memoranda. Thus Caelius² sends to Cicero, then governing Cilicia, a ‘commentarius rerum urbanarum’ which contains a catalogue of events at Rome for Cicero's information. Not all of it, Caelius implies, is worth Cicero's attention: ‘ex quo tu quae digna sunt selige’. So far, it may be said that hypomnemata or commentarii are, in general, statements of facts for their own sake, so far as they are not just helps to memory; though, inevitably, they may contain the facts as they are discerned by their authors. Such are commentarii in their origin. Literary merit is not their concern. They should be precise and clear, or they would defeat their own purpose, and that is all.

In contrast to these there is historia. To the Romans, of Caesar's day and afterwards, historia was, above all, an achievement of literary art. It is to Quintilian ‘proxima poetis et quodammodo carmen solutum’.³ The author of a work of historia was, above all, a stylist: what he regarded as fine writing was his chief aim, and not the discovery of truth. This does not mean that his work should not be credible or sincere—Livy is sincere even when he cannot be judged credible—but the merit of historia and the merit of establishing truth of fact are not one merit but two. The ‘brevitas’ of Sallust, ‘primus Romana Crispus in historia’,⁴ is unlike enough to the ‘lactea ubertas’ of Livy, but what they are both concerned with, above all, is the same thing, a literary achievement.

Between commentarius of the original type and historia there is room for something which is not quite either the one or the other, something more than the first in content and less than the second in style. It is a development of the commentarius, and it is, as has been well observed,⁵ something more Roman than Greek. This intermediate stage had been attained before the time of Caesar. Commentaries of this kind may be the material which the writer of historia can take and transmute by the alchemy of his literary art. This had been realized as will be seen presently, and it finds a place in Lucian's essay Quomodo historia scribenda est.⁶ Such a commentarius of the intermediate stage may have absorbed or digested commentarii of the original type, or worked them together into a narrative which is not yet historia but has attained that synoptic view of events which Polybius claimed to have achieved. It is a natural process, and it is natural that it should be applied by the person most concerned with the events it describes. But it remains a commentarius until the man of letters converts it into historia. Though the author of the commentarius may describe things from his own standpoint, it still purports to be a statement of the facts for their own sake.

The development of the commentary to be the material of historia may conveniently be illustrated from a letter written by Lucius Verus to his tutor, Fronto.⁷ The letter was written in a.d. 165, but the practical and psychological processes are near enough to those of the last decades of the Republic. Verus had been the nominal architect of a victory over the Parthians, though the strategical plan had been devised by Marcus Aurelius and had been executed by two able generals, Avidius Cassius and Martius Verus. Lucius Verus, a prince in search of a panegyrist, writes to Fronto to say he is forwarding the dispatches of his subordinates and has directed the two generals to draw up commentarii describing their operations for Fronto's use. He then offers to prepare a commentarius of his own in whatever form his tutor suggests. ‘I am ready’, he says, ‘to fall in with your suggestions, provided my exploits are put by you in a bright light. Of course you will not overlook my orationes to the Senate and adlocutiones to my army.’ Thus Fronto will have material for the speeches that were an adornment of historia. ‘My res gestae’, Verus concludes, ‘whatever their character, are of course no greater than they actually are, but they will appear to be as great as you wish them to appear to be.’ Fronto did not refuse this naïve request, and there have survived some fragmentary specimens of the preamble to the historia, which he probably did not live to complete. The commentarius material placed at Fronto's disposal thus ranges from matter of the original type to the more advanced form. It awaits conversion into the full-dress literary form of the historia, which, to judge from the fragments of the preamble, would have been full-dress indeed.

What Lucius Verus had done, Cicero had done before him, if with less naïveté. In June 60 b.c. he wrote in Greek a commentarius consulatus sui and sent it to Poseidonius, the leading Greek man of letters of the day, with the request that he would treat of these events ‘ornatius’. Poseidonius neatly replied that when he read the commentarius he did not feel bold enough to attempt the theme.⁸ Four years later Cicero tried again. He encouraged the Roman man of letters, L. Lucceius, to write a historia which would include the Catilinarian conspiracy and promised to send the commentarii for it.⁹ Lucceius agreed, the commentarii were sent, but the historia was not written.¹⁰ Cicero's commentarius consulatus sui was, indeed, no ordinary commentarius. He writes thus to Atticus, who also had written a commentarius on the same theme:

On the first of June I met your servant. … He handed to me your letter and a commentarius on my consulship written in Greek. I am very glad that some time ago I gave to L. Cossinius to bring to you the book I had written on the same theme also in Greek, for if I had read yours first you would say I had plagiarized from you. Though yours—while I enjoyed reading it—seemed to me a trifle rough and unkempt (‘horridula atque incompta’), yet its neglect of adornment seemed an adornment in itself, and it was like women who were thought to have the best scent because they used none; whereas my book has used up all the unguents of Isocrates, all the perfumes of his pupils and a trace of Aristotelian cosmetics.

Cicero writes to his friend with a kind of apologetic self-irony. But he could not refrain from fine writing about what appeared to him, more clearly than to others, a fine subject, consulatus suus. And he was not deprived of free will by the convention of a literary form. But the traditional form for a commentarius, however far it had gone on the way to historia, was simple and matter-of-fact.

In 46 b.c. when Cicero wrote his Brutus, having read those at least of Caesar's Commentaries which treated of his exploits in Gaul, he said they were written ‘that others might have material to their hand if they composed a historia’.¹¹ So far he is placing them in the category of commentaries that await transmutation into historia, but he adds a significant phrase ‘so that Caesar may have seemed a benefactor to the foolish who wished to take the curling-tongs to them, but that sensible men were frightened off writing on the basis of them’. Cicero may have remembered the answer of Poseidonius, and have laid a little flattering unction to his soul. So, too, Hirtius, in the preface to the Eighth Book of the Gallic War, says that Caesar's Commentaries have been published ‘that writers might not lack knowledge of these great events’, but he adds ‘and they are so approved by all men's judgement’—‘ut praerepta, non praebita facultas scriptoribus videatur’. Cicero's verdict, echoed, we may suppose, by Hirtius, is that Caesar's writings have a quality which precludes attempts by others to do better what Caesar has done so well. His Commentaries, while they remain commentaries, have a literary eminence in their own right. When Cicero wrote the Brutus he was in a rare mood of hope of Caesar as a statesman, and the all-powerful dictator would read what he had written, but Cicero was an honest critic, a dictator himself in his own field, the field of letters, and it need not be doubted that he said what he thought. To him the Commentaries approach the literary finality appropriate to the finished product of historia. When he praises them—‘nudi enim sunt, recti et venusti, omni ornatu orationis tamquam veste detracta’, he adds ‘nihil est enim in historia pura et inlustri brevitate dulcius’. It would seem that this sensitive and instructed critic of letters believed, if only for a moment, that Caesar's Commentaries challenged historia on its own ground with comparable, if not identical, qualities.

When Caesar set out for Gaul he was not yet in the first rank of generals, but he was an orator of an acknowledged eminence at a time when oratorical power was one hall-mark of literary distinction. Hortensius, the older rival of Cicero, had lost ground. Now, if Cicero was the first orator of Rome, Caesar was advancing to the second place until he found other things to do than to be an orator. Quintilian, who was fortunate enough to be able to read Caesar's speeches, says of his oratory ‘si foro tantum vacasset, non alius ex nostris contra Ciceronem nominaretur’, and adds, to justify his judgement, ‘tanta in eo vis est, id acumen, ea concitatio, ut illum eodem animo dixisse quo bellavit appareat; exornat tamen haec omnia mira sermonis, cuius proprie studiosus fuit, elegantia’.¹² Caesar's force and vehemence, especially in his younger days, are well attested. For these qualities the manner of a commentarius offered little scope, though, as will be seen, they are at times discernible. But what Cicero praises as his ‘pura et inlustris brevitas’ could be attained by his ‘mira sermonis elegantia’. The simplicity appropriate to the commentarius appealed to Caesar's literary predilections. As between the florid style of the Asianic school and the austere plain style of the Atticists Caesar was inclined to the Atticists, if not slavishly or to excess. His mentor in oratory had been Apollonius Molon of Rhodes, who set himself against the redundant Asianic style. It would be rash to assume that Caesar was not capable of going his own way, but, granted that, Molon's teaching may well have been to his mind.

Another of his teachers was the grammarian Antonius Gnipho, who carried further a systematic purism inspired by the study of language and its forms that the Stoics had inaugurated, and aroused in Caesar an interest in linguistic niceties, especially in the forms of words. In 55 b.c. Cicero in his De Oratore¹³ had taken these doctrines lightly and had claimed for an orator a freedom to follow general use without requiring the justification of what was called analogy which would dictate the forms of words by a kind of orthographical orthodoxy. It is a reasonable conjecture¹⁴ that Caesar was moved to spend some leisure in the winter of 55/54 in writing his two books De Analogia, incidentally refuting Cicero's concessions to popular usage.

Whether or not in his commentaries Caesar insisted upon the orthographical forms of his analogistic theory it is hard to say. The MS. tradition, on the whole, suggests that he did not,¹⁵ but MS. tradition is not a certain guide. He may, however, very well have supposed that a work like his Commentaries was not the place for theoretical niceties. His famous injunction to keep clear of ‘inauditum atque insolens verbum’ was doubtless directed against neologisms, but it may have haunted him when it came to grammatical forms that had only theoretical justification. As Eduard Norden in his Antike Kunstprosa has shown, Latin had been becoming more systematic in structure and, at the same time, less luxuriant in vocabulary. To give Norden's illustration: in the second-century de Bacchanalibus of 186 b.c. four different words are used to mean ‘conspiring together’—‘coniurare, convovere, conspondere, compromittere’. Of these four, only the first ‘coniurare’ remained in use with this meaning in the Ciceronian period. It is well known how Caesar seemed at times to have decided that a particular thing is most properly described by a particular word. For him a river is always ‘flumen’ and never ‘fluvius’ or ‘amnis’. The economy of his style is in the new tradition of Latin—in Newman's phrase, ‘always the right word for the right idea and never a word too much’. The simple brevity appropriate to the commentarius form did not preclude the exercise of Caesar's ‘mira sermonis elegantia, cuius proprie studiosus fuit’.

The theme of Caesar's Commentaries is his res gestae and this fact brings in another element which is less objective than the older commentarius. It is autobiographical, or, if not that, descriptive of the events in which some eminent man had played a leading part. Great men had begun to write about their own doings in self-justification or to claim the form of immortality which Roman aristocrats prized, the memory of their services to the State. Like the ecclesiastic who set up his epitaph in anticipation of his demise, they thought it well to be their own chroniclers. When Cicero wrote the Brutus he cited two such works. One is that of M. Aemilius Scaurus de vita sua;¹⁶ the other, a book by C. Lutatius Catulus the elder, de consulatu suo et de rebus gestis suis,¹⁷ written ‘molli et Xenophontio genere sermonis’. Aemilius Scaurus had enjoyed more continuous good fortune than good repute, and his work may have been in part an ‘apologia pro vita sua’. Catulus's campaign in north Italy had been the high light of his military career, though it was overshadowed by the exploits of his colleague Marius. He dedicated his book to the poet A. Furius, and it has been plausibly conjectured¹⁸ that he hoped his friend would write an epic on the Cimbrian War in which his merits would be immortalized. Cicero says that the works of Scaurus and Catulus were no longer read in his day, but this is not to be taken au pied de la lettre. The elder Pliny, Tacitus and Valerius Maximus knew of Scaurus's autobiography, and a reference in Frontinus is probably ultimately derived from the same work. Two centuries later Fronto speaks of certain Epistulae of Catulus which are probably his dispatches to the Senate and material for his book. More relevant were Sulla's twenty-two books which, to judge from the ancient references, probably bore the title L. Cornelii Sullae commentarii rerum gestarum. It is plain from Plutarch's Lives of Marius and of Sulla that, as the dictator contemplated his rivals and enemies, he did not write ‘sine ira et studio’ and that when he wrote of himself he wrote con amore. It would be idle to suppose that in such works the author did not give himself the benefit of any doubt, or that when members of the high aristocracy of Rome read Caesar's commentarii rerum gestarum they imagined that their author had a disinterested desire to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This is a matter to be discussed later (pp. 22ff.). It is enough to say at this point that the res gestae element has to be remembered in evaluating the composite literary character of Caesar's writings.

Finally, there is an ingredient in the composition of Caesar's works which affects alike their content and their style, and that is the personality of the author. Granted that Caesar was omnium consensu a skilful man of letters, he was more than that—he was a man endowed with a ‘vivida vis animi’, of singular determination and resource, ruefully admitted to be ‘a portent of terrible vigilance, speed and application’.¹⁹ Whatever the literary form which he employed, and however well he preserved its conventions, it was not possible that his personality should not be at times visible, so that his commentaries are a plain texture shot with genius.

It is often said that Caesar had a purpose in writing his Commentaries and it is sometimes said, and more often implied, that his purpose was political or, at least, directly concerned with his own advancement. In an age in which publicity is the servant of policy and ambition it is natural for us to suppose that this would be so, and that Caesar would not neglect any means that helped found his own interests and the interests of whatever cause he wished to serve. If he has little to say about Roman politics except in self-justification at the outbreak of the Civil War, this may be regarded as the art that conceals art. Mr T. E. Page is credited with the dictum ‘Caesar's Gallic War indeed—a subtle political pamphlet beginning with the words “All Gaul is divided into three parts”’. It is a hard saying, but it is not all the truth. There is in Caesar's writings an element of propaganda, but it is not predominant, and it is not what matters most.

Propaganda does not exist in a vacuum, and it is worth while to consider to whom the propaganda, what there is of it, was addressed. When Mommsen declared that Caesar's Commentaries were the report of the democratic general to the People, he is expressing his view that Caesar was the democratic champion of the People against a blind or unworthy aristocracy. But this view does Caesar less or more than justice. He was ready to invoke the sovereignty of the People at need to overcome opposition if he could not achieve his ends, whether of personal ambition or of statesmanship, otherwise. But the voice of the People was to be an echo of his own. Like most Romans whose position made them stand for Rome, he sought the greatness of Rome against all comers. But he must have been aware that, for most of the time and in most matters, Rome was the Senate first and the People afterwards, if at all. The Senate was guided by consuls and consulars and might be hampered by tribunes. At elections all kinds of influences, reputable and disreputable, played upon the part of the electorate that voted. It was possible for tribunes to bring proposals before the Concilium Plebis, but what one tribune proposed another tribune could veto. And the Senate, by convention, settled many questions, especially the kind of questions that mattered most to a proconsul. The courts which might sit in judgement on his actions when he returned to Rome were manned by members of the upper classes, and from the decision of these courts there was no appeal. In the absence of an adequate police force, the progress of public affairs might at times be hampered or deflected by the riff-raff of the city. But the riff-raff of the city did not read books. The goodwill of the towns of Italy might be of value at elections or when some proposal was strengthened by the manifestation of a wide public opinion in its favour. But here too it was probably the local notables that counted, if they took the trouble to bring themselves and their clients to Rome. But, for most purposes at most times, public opinion was made by what senators said in the Senate or in private or wrote to their friends. Caesar was at pains to conduct a correspondence with men like Cicero, who in turn could influence this public opinion. He had a patronage that could help his friends and the friends of his friends. The wealth of rich men of the senatorial or equestrian order might be used for political ends, for votes in elections or in the courts might be bought. The governor of a province had to take account of financial interests established there so as not to offend rich men whose influence could do him harm. Caesar, in Gaul outside the old Province, had no old financial interests to consider but could help or hinder new ones. There were scattered over Italy men who had served under this general or that, though Caesar had not commanded large armies before he went to Gaul, and most of those who had served under him served with him still.

When all these things are borne in mind, and when it is remembered how small and slow would be the circulation of an ancient book, even granted that secondary circulation that comes from the diffusion of opinion by speech or private correspondence, Caesar must have known that, both for his present interests and his future reputation, he must write, primarily, for men of his own class and, above all, for the aristocracy of Rome which rated military skill and success more highly than anything else. Within his own army his influence, so far as it was not secured by the high military tradition and discipline of the legions, rested on success and the effect of his personality on his officers, from the legati downwards to the centurions in their hierarchical precedence of rank, and then on the legionaries themselves. The men of the Tenth Legion did not need to await the publication of a commentarius to know what Caesar thought of them and trusted them to achieve.

The moment when the most widespread effect was most needed was before an election to high office, and so the publication of the Commentaries may have preceded by several months the earliest moment at which Caesar may have contemplated becoming a candidate for his second consulship. But apart from any possible choice of the moment for publication, the writing of the Commentaries, if the view that this proceeded year by year is accepted, would have, in the main, the purpose of describing what happened as Caesar saw it, in part to satisfy a kind of intellectual appreciation of his own doings and that of others, in part to satisfy an interest in military technique which he shared with most men of his own class, the technique including a mastery over men as well as over things, and, finally, the promotion of his own dignitas, which is the acceptance of his claim to high office and public consideration and honours, to the opportunity to guide policy and be master of the event, and to the recognition of what he, and those who fought with him, had done to serve the greatness of Rome. He did not deny to the enemies of Rome the right to fight against her, and he did not seek to belittle or condemn them, if only because he would have done the same in their place. But he had inherited a tradition that taught him to maintain and extend the power of Rome, and he was ready to be judged by the extent to which he fulfilled that purpose. He did not need to convince himself of his own greatness; he sought to make it impossible for others to deny it, to underrate it or leave it unrewarded. This is, in a sense, propaganda, but to call Caesar's writings nothing else is to underrate alike their purpose and their quality.

It is to be remembered that, quite apart from any ulterior purpose that Caesar may have had, his Commentaries were bound to be subjective in the sense that they reveal events as Caesar saw them. The literary form, the content, the arrangement, the tradition of the Commentaries, cannot prevent their being so. Had Labienus written Commentaries on the Gallic War or Pompey Commentaries on the Civil War, they would have been different from Caesar's writings in emphasis and interpretation. No man, however sincere, however content to let the facts speak for themselves, can describe great events in which he took a leading part with perfect objectivity. They become part of himself and are seen as he sees himself in his mirror, not as others may see them or as they may see him in action. And when a great man judges the action of his helpers or his antagonists he is bound to measure them by his own standards and to see them in relation to his own fortunes and purposes. Clear-sighted as Caesar was, in order to see things as they are, it is plain that they must be seen, as it were, de haut en bas from his self-confident intellectual eminence. The acts of other men, the way things turned out, are bound to be the raw material of his res gestae.

Caesar was above ‘peacock tail-spreading vanity’ as he was above ‘hissing gander-like pride’, but he had no doubt of his own greatness, and of his inborn right to it. He is not only adroit but wholly sincere when he writes to Cicero of himself and of his enemies: ‘I desire nothing more than that I should be like myself—and they like themselves.’ This does not mean that Caesar might not be high-handed with the factual truth, which was to him a good servant but a bad master. In the justification of his acts, to himself as to others, he may give himself the benefit of the doubt, and he was not scrupulous to his own hurt. If, for example, he sent a dispatch to the Senate which would make it hard for his enemies to cavil at his actions or condemn his purposes, what he aimed at writing then need not be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And in his Commentaries he was not concerned to refute his dispatches.

1. THE FIRST BOOK OF THE GALLIC WAR

With this in mind, we may turn to the Commentaries to see what they contain which assists an understanding of how things looked to Caesar, and how, with his help, they look to others, and to ourselves. The effect of the commentarius form is perhaps most clearly to be discerned in the First Book of the Gallic War. The traditional form of the commentarius was concerned with events in isolation, each event being recorded, as it were, for its own sake. The more nearly a narrative approaches this traditional form the more it is a statement of acts and the less it is concerned with the interrelation of acts. Herein there may lie an economy of the truth, conscious or unconscious. The main theme of the First Book of the Gallic War is twofold: first the operations of Caesar against the Helvetii, which lead to their defeat, second the operations of Caesar against the German Ariovistus, which lead to his defeat. Each of these is a war in its own right, in each of these Caesar is the prime agent, and thus the res gestae or autobiographical element in the Commentaries finds expression. The story of each series of operations is told with matter-of-fact brevity, with an unadorned precision of phrasing that suited Caesar's literary predilections, as it suited the traditional manner of a commentarius.

Many scholars have been critical of the First Book as a witness of truth. They have no other comparable ancient account to use as a control; Cicero's letters give no help. The military events were known to Caesar's officers, and must have been, if only briefly, reported to the Senate in accordance with the standard practice of proconsuls. There was, it is true, a tradition which declared that the defeat of the Tigurini, who were caught on the wrong side of the river Arar, was the exploit not of Caesar but of Labienus.²⁰ This tradition, however, appears to go back to Labienus himself, who is not an impartial witness. It is not difficult to suppose that Labienus, who often led the cavalry, began the attack on Caesar's instructions, and that Caesar with three legions came up and finished it. He may have omitted to mention Labienus's share in what he represents as, in fact, a kind of family revenge for the killing by the Tigurini of his father-in-law's grandfather, L. Piso, half a century before.²¹ Caesar does not fail to give due credit to his legati where they are acting as independent commanders, and the incident does not make his account of military events suspect. Like most generals, Caesar, consciously or not, exaggerated the numbers of the enemy or their losses; he may have concealed mistakes, but he does not conceal the fact that the final battle with the Helvetii might well have gone the other way—‘ita ancipiti proelio diu atque acriter pugnatum est’²²—or that the battle against Ariovistus was restored by the timely action of the young P. Crassus.²³ He does not allege that when he turned away from following the Helvetii he hoped that they would be induced to give him the opportunity of fighting them on favourable ground, as they did.

There is no doubt that Caesar took considerable risks and that he could have protected the Roman province without attacking the Helvetii, and that the immediate interests of Rome did not require Caesar to take so strong a line with Ariovistus. The commentarius form makes it natural to keep Caesar's dealings with the Helvetii and Ariovistus separate and, as res gestae, they are just two successive exploits. But is that, or need that be, all the truth? For example, when Caesar had denied to the Helvetii a passage through the province, could he not have arranged with Ariovistus, whom he had caused to be recognized as the Friend of the Roman People, that the Sequani should be told not to open to the emigrants the pass through their territory, which Caesar says was easily defensible? The Sequani would not have dared to disobey. The Helvetii might have abandoned their project, or if they took, as they might, a more northerly route, they would pass through territory towards which Rome had no obligations. The Gauls, reinforced by the immigration of the Helvetii and their allies, might perhaps make head against the Germans, and Roman interests would, for the present at least, be secure without any exertions on Rome's part. That would be a quite traditional process of Roman statecraft. In any event, an alliance between Gauls and Germans might seem highly improbable. There are, in fact, various policies which Caesar might have adopted if his object had been limited to preserving existing Roman interests and showing some consideration for the friends and allies of Rome including ‘their brothers, the Aedui’.

How far Caesar was conscious of these possibilities it is hard to say: the commentarius form does not at least bring them to the notice of his readers. It suits Caesar's drastic methods to act as he did. Another proconsul might have acted otherwise, though when there had been an alarm at Rome in March 60 b.c. and the consul Metellus Celer had been marked out to be the next proconsul in Transalpine Gaul, Cicero says that he was disappointed when the alarm came to nothing, for he was dreaming of a triumph.²⁴ It may be that war with the Helvetii was certain because it was the first war in Gaul which Caesar could find ready to his hand. Caesar does not need to say this, if we may assume it to be true. What he does say is that Rome did not allow barbarians to cross one of their provinces. He reminds his future readers of the last immigration, with the dangers it brought, fifty years before, and he says: ‘Caesar non exspectandum sibi statuit, dum omnibus fortunis sociorum consumptis in Santonos Helvetii pervenirent.’²⁵ He passed beyond the province and attacked. In the end he defeats the Helvetii and compels (and allows) the major part of them and their allies to return to their homes so as not to produce a vacuum into which Germans might be drawn and so come dangerously near to the Roman province.

The communities of Central Gaul were impressed by Caesar's victory. They had suffered, or they feared to suffer, from Ariovistus with his growing power reinforced by relays of Germans from across the Rhine. There is no reason to doubt that the proRoman leader of the Aedui, Diviciacus, who had sought the help of the Senate two years before, now sought the help of Caesar. The formulation of his hopes—Caesarem vel auctoritate sua atque exercitus [vel] recenti victoria vel nomine populi Romani deterrere posse ne maior multitudo Germanorum Rhenum traducatur, Galliamque omnem ab Ariovisti iniuria posse defendere’²⁶—may been have prearranged. It was the springboard for Caesar's next leap. Caesar assured the Gallic notables ‘magnam se habere spem, et beneficio suo et auctoritate adductum Ariovistum finem iniuriis facturum’.²⁷ He then sets out a series of considerations which, he says, moved him ‘ad eam rem cogitandam et suscipiendam’. They are in terms suited to Roman interests, pride and fears, the old fears that had haunted Rome since the days of the Cimbri and Teutoni and even longer—‘quibus rebus quam maturrime occurrendum putabat’. They may, indeed, reflect the kind of thing Caesar wrote when he reported to the Senate the inception of this enterprise after it had succeeded. He adds the revealing sentence: ‘Ipse autem Ariovistus tantos sibi spiritus, tantam adrogantiam sumpserat, ut ferendus non videretur.’ This reflects his belief that, in fact, the only settlement would be by war. He believed he knew his Ariovistus and he was sure he knew himself. With a firm hand he guided the negotiations that followed to their destined end.

At this point, as in his account of the incipient mutiny at Vesontio and his handling of it, his personality becomes dominant. He appears to believe that Ariovistus may come to a peaceful settlement, though he has good grounds for confidence if he does not. ‘Denique hos esse eosdem quibuscum saepe numero Helvetii congressi non solum in suis sed etiam in illorum finibus plerumque superarint, qui tamen pares esse nostro exercitui non potuerint.’²⁸ So Napoleon, in a Caesarian moment: ‘ces mêmes Prussiens qui sont aujourd'hui si vantards étaient à 3 contre 1 à Jéna et à 9 contre 1 à Montmirail’. In what follows Caesar displays his eminent understanding of the art of being a soldier's general, an art that never deserted him. There is no reason to doubt the essential truth of his report of his speech,²⁹ least of all of its famous close: ‘Quod si praeterea nemo sequatur, tamen se cum sola decima legione iturum, de qua non dubitet, sibique eam praetoriam cohortem futuram.’ All this shows how in Caesar's hands the commentarius form could be made to convey the revelation of his own personality in the easy mastery of men. There is no rhetoric, and the note is not forced. Caesar was speaking to his aristocratic officers, and all his centurions, not only those seniors who normally attended his consilium, and to a larger audience, those Romans who had an ingrained instinct for war and an ingrained respect for those who understood the lessons of that hard teacher. And he knew what the men of the Tenth Legion would say when their centurions passed the word round. His army fought well when it came to fighting, and Ariovistus was decisively defeated. A remnant of his forces escaped across the Rhine, and the Suebi who had gathered on the river began to return to their homes.

Much has been made of the fact that the same Caesar who as consul had caused Ariovistus to be declared the Friend of the Roman People, as proconsul marched against him. It is not known when in his consulship the title was conferred, whether before or after Caesar had Transalpine Gaul added to his provincia as proconsul. If it was before, and perhaps even if it was after, that event, Caesar may have been bribed, and that was all. He needed money and Rome needed friends—for so long as it needed them. If Ariovistus was not a subservient friend he was no friend at all: amicus was as amicus did. Orators existed to cloak this fact by fine words. Had Caesar been defeated by Ariovistus he might have been prosecuted for a blunder transmuted into a crime. What mattered was success. Success meant innocence, unless he was arraigned before a court to whom guilt or innocence was of no moment. Or the naming of Ariovistus as amicus was an indication of policy—to put him on an equality with the Aedui, the long-established ‘brothers’ of Rome, to be on with the new love before being off with the old. Whichever was the reason, the amicitia of Ariovistus was a debating point in debate (as Caesar made it)³⁰ and to the Romans a standard of conduct for Ariovistus: to Ariovistus a standard of conduct for Rome, but Caesar had not to satisfy Ariovistus but Rome, and late Republican Rome judged Romans by success, if it judged by any standard at all. How greatly the Senate was concerned about the German peril is a matter of conjecture, but its elimination, if only temporary, meant one complication the less in a world that had been becoming inconveniently more complicated for more than a generation. Whenever Caesar wrote his account of the year 58, the events of that year, taken by themselves, were an asset and not a liability in his balance sheet as it stood when that year closed—‘una aestate duobus maximis bellis confectis.’³¹

2. THE SECOND BOOK

Even before the autumn of 58 b.c. had ended, Caesar put his legions into winter quarters in the territory of the Sequani, most probably in and around the place d'armes of Vesontio (Besançon). He retired to his other province of Cisalpine Gaul, to the peaceful jurisdiction of a Roman governor. What reasons he gave to the Senate, if he gave any, for stationing his army outside his own province, he does not reveal. The effect was to produce a hostile reaction among the great confederacy of the Belgae, whom he had described as the most warlike people of Gaul.³² The news of this was sent to him, and he raised two more legions this side the Alps and returned to his army when the season was far enough advanced to ease his supplies of food and the Belgae had time to prepare to take the field. The disunions that afflicted the national movement brought to the side of Rome the Remi, ‘qui dicerent se suaque omnia in fidem atque potestatem populi Romani permittere neque se cum Belgis reliquis consensisse neque contra populum Romanum coniurasse’.³³ All was in order: there was a coniuratio of enemies of Rome; Germans this side the Rhine had joined the Belgae; and there were new subjects to protect. By wariness alternating with vigour Caesar caused the enemy concentration to break up and attacked the tribes piecemeal. For a time all went according to plan, but he was surprised by the Nervii and only just won one of the hardest battles of his career. ‘That day he overcame the Nervii.’ His account will be analysed in a later chapter (pp. 69f.). He claimed the almost complete destruction of the Nervii, and went on to deal with the Atuatuci, whose chief town was taken after they had broken the terms of a capitulation. More than fifty thousand inhabitants were sold into slavery. The campaign was a typically Roman combination of diplomatic reasonableness and military ruthlessness, which to Romans justified itself by its success. Caesar had sent the young Publius Crassus with a legion to south-west Gaul and news came that the tribes of the Atlantic seaboard had submitted to Roman power. The report proved, in the end, optimistic, but it served Caesar's purpose. Tribes beyond the Rhine, so he says, sent envoys promising to give hostages and to obey his commands, and he bade them send again at the beginning of the next summer, as he was in a hurry to go to northern Italy and Illyricum.³⁴ He sent a dispatch to the Senate whereupon ‘a public thanks-giving of fifteen days was decreed for his achievements—a greater honour than had previously been granted to anyone’.³⁵

3. THE THIRD BOOK

So ends the Second Book with a fanfare of triumph. Events were to show that Caesar was making a large overdraft on his military credit. He may have included in his letter to the Senate that he was sending Servius Galba with a legion and some cavalry to open up the route across the Alps, wintering in the mountains if he thought it needful. Galba failed to achieve this object, and after a hard-won defensive battle withdrew to the Roman province.³⁶

How far Caesar may have deceived himself about the position in Gaul it is hard to say. It was perhaps reasonable for him to suppose, as he says, that Gaul was pacified, at least in the sense that it contained no people who were in arms against Rome, so that the Roman province beyond the Alps was secure. He was responsible for Illyricum, and set out to acquaint himself with that region when news came that the Roman peace was broken. The maritime Veneti on the west coast of Gaul had started a strong reaction, and had taken Roman officers to exchange against the hostages they had given to Publius Crassus. Whatever Caesar may have thought before, he realized that the Gauls feared to be reduced to subjection: ‘they were easily provoked to war, and all men naturally love freedom and hate servitude’.³⁷ The Veneti were ringed round with armies, and Caesar himself marched against them. A fleet was built, and a victory at sea ended the hopes of the Veneti, who surrendered at discretion. They had loved freedom beyond their means. Their councillors were executed and the rest of the population were sold as slaves. Even so, not all Gaul was ‘pacified’, for the coastal tribes of the Morini and Menapii between the Somme and the Rhine remained in arms. There was only enough summer left for a short campaign, and Caesar was not able to solve the military problems presented by the forests and marshes into which the enemy could retire and take refuge.

Caesar had no doubt reported to the Senate his action against the Veneti and his own success and that of his lieutenants. But, at the most, he had only made truer the claim of the previous year that Gaul was pacified and he has nothing to say of a thanksgiving granted to him. It is possible that he was beginning to believe that the Gallic problem did not end with Gaul. During the year 56 his political position had been secured by a renewed agreement with Pompey and Crassus, and his command in Gaul had been prolonged to last until 50 b.c. if not later. Thus Caesar could pursue long plans as proconsul if he wished to do so, and bring Germany and Britain within his calculations. The next year was in fact to contain three events: the sharp repulse of a German invasion, and two reconnaissances, the one across the Rhine, the other across the English Channel.

4. THE FOURTH BOOK

In 58 b.c. Caesar had driven the German Ariovistus out of Gaul. During the winter of 56/55 he became aware that a new invasion of Gaul was happening and that behind the invasion, and indeed the cause of it, there was the dangerous power of the Suebi, ‘the most numerous and most warlike of the German peoples’.³⁸ He explains that they had driven from their homes two tribes, the Usipetes and Tencteri, who in the end had crossed the lower Rhine into Gallic territory to find lands to settle. He took the field earlier than usual, marched against them and destroyed them by trickery and the merciless use of force. He then decided to bridge the Rhine and enter Germany. He explains his motives: he wished to deter further German aggression by showing that the Romans were able and ready to cross the river, to impress this fact on the Sugambri on the right bank, and to encourage the Ubii, who had sought Roman protection, to believe that, with Roman help at need, they could maintain themselves against the Suebi.³⁹ In the course of eighteen days he ravaged the country of the Sugambri, displayed his legions to the Ubii, and returned to Gaul, destroying the bridge behind him. But he did not venture to advance far enough to give battle to the Suebi, who had concentrated far back in their territory and left to him an empty country to march across. Caesar declared that he had achieved all his objects.

Then, though summer was near its end, Caesar carried out a brief invasion of Britain. He says that in almost all the campaigns in Gaul the Britons had sent help to his enemies, and that it would be an advantage to become acquainted with the land, harbours and landing-places, for of all these the Gauls knew hardly anything.⁴⁰ The British help to the Gauls and the Gallic ignorance of Britain are not beyond doubt. That Caesar wished to see what could be done about a serious invasion of Britain is probable enough. There may have been another reason, to make an effect on Roman society. Cicero in his speech on the consular provinces, delivered in 56, had proclaimed not only the conquest of the old enemies of Rome but the opening of new regions of the earth.⁴¹ The admirers of Pompey had dilated on his achievements in the East in like terms a decade before. Germany was still terra incognita, and Britain was near the world's end, and stretched into mystery. The Romans, so far as they were explorers, had explored sword in hand, and if Caesar's main purposes were military rather than tinged with the spirit of inquiry that had been a part of Alexander's expedition to India, he might well have in mind the impression his enterprises might produce. Neither the demonstration into Germany nor the reconnaissance into Britain meant any significant extension of Roman power, but they had their effect, and on the news of them the Senate decreed a further thanksgiving of twenty days. And during the winter great preparations were made to carry a larger army to Britain in the next year (54 b.c.).

5. THE FIFTH BOOK

In Gaul itself Caesar had sought to increase the influence of the Aedui, the old allies of Rome, and to advance the local power of chieftains whom he believed he could trust. In doing so he had incurred the hostility of Indutiomarus, an able and determined chief among the Treveri. Gallic notables were to accompany the Roman army to Britain as hostages for the good behaviour of their communities, and when the Aeduan chief Dumnorix tried to escape he was pursued and killed. It was becoming plain that the best the Gallic leaders could expect was to be the clients of Rome. Although an army of three legions under Labienus watched Roman interests in Gaul, Caesar campaigned in Britain with the knowledge that he must not stay too long. The south-eastern Britons had found an able leader in Cassivelaunus, who led the national resistance until Caesar was content to admit him to a surrender which was complete enough to protect Roman prestige. And that was all. Caesar returned to the continent.

The enterprise, for all the skill and fighting power displayed in the campaign, had proved a doubtful investment of Caesar's military strength. For when Caesar returned and held a council of Gallic leaders at Samarobriva he had cause for anxiety. He distributed his legions in a wide arc in north-eastern Gaul. The reason he gave for this distribution was that there had been a poor harvest and this was the best way of securing his supplies of corn for the winter. But when he says that no two legions were more than a hundred miles apart except one that was in a perfectly peaceful district he gives a hint of danger, and he determined to stay at hand until all the legions had fortified their appointed positions. Whatever his fears, they were justified. A widespread revolt had been planned by Indutiomarus and the first blow was struck by the Eburones under an able and relentless leader, Ambiorix. A Roman army of a legion and five cohorts under his lieutenants Sabinus and Cotta was lured out of its camp and destroyed almost to a man. The Nervii, in numbers that refute Caesar's claim that he almost destroyed them three years before, attacked the camp of Quintus Cicero. He was invited to march out into safety. But he was not to be tricked and held out stoutly. How dangerous the situation was may be seen from the fact that no word had reached Caesar until a slave sent by Cicero got through to him with an appeal for help. His chief lieutenant, Labienus, was pinned down by the Treveri. Acting with great speed and resource Caesar marched to the relief of Cicero just in time. It had been a near run thing and, all that winter, Caesar stayed in Gaul beset with anxieties. Only the Aedui and the Remi could be trusted. The general readiness to revolt was, Caesar says, not so surprising: among many other reasons, it was natural that tribes, considered the bravest and most warlike of mankind, should resent bitterly the complete loss of this reputation which submission to the rule of Rome entailed.⁴²

Whereas in the third and fourth years of his governorship of Gaul Caesar appears to have the initiative, with the winter of the fourth to fifth year he is really on the defensive. Rome had two formidable and enterprising enemies, Indutiomarus and Ambiorix, and Labienus skilfully drew Indutiomarus within his reach and killed him—‘Fortune justified the plan that human foresight had devised.’⁴³ This success made Gaul somewhat quieter for the time being. Three legions were raised to do more than replace the loss of the army of Sabinus and Cotta. ‘This large and rapid reinforcement showed what Rome's organization and resources could accomplish.’⁴⁴

6. THE SIXTH BOOK

In 53 b.c. Caesar himself took the field before the normal campaigning season began, and re-established Rome's control of central Gaul. Labienus reduced the Treveri to submission, and set up a loyal chieftain to rule over them. There remained Ambiorix, and Caesar was concerned to prevent his receiving help from the Menapii, who had so far shown no signs of submitting to Rome, and from Germans beyond the Rhine. He swept through the country of the Menapii and then decided to cross the Rhine for a second time. But, once more, he did not feel able to advance so far as to bring the Suebi to battle, and once more he retired, though he left part of the bridge standing to show that he might return to the German side of the river.

Then came the systematic devastation of the country of Ambiorix, the attempt to make a solitude so as to call it peace. A general invitation to all comers to plunder the territory of the Eburones was accepted by 200 horsemen of the Sugambri, who then were tempted to try their luck in a surprise attack on Q. Cicero at Atuatuca, where he guarded the impedimenta of Caesar's army. The surprise was all but successful; Cicero had become careless and the recruits he had with him were seized with panic: indeed, only the bravery of the centurions and some veterans prevented a serious disaster. Caesar complained that fortune played hhim false,⁴⁵ and all the efforts he made to capture Ambiorix just missed success. He executed a Gallic chief who had plotted a revolt and outlawed others who had not waited to be tried. Two legions were posted among the Treveri, two others among the Lingones, and the remaining six were left concentrated in central Gaul. It is clear from the dispositions that Caesar was ill at ease, but he returned to Italy for the winter ‘as he had planned to do’.⁴⁶

7. THE SEVENTH BOOK

The book which follows is the climax of Caesar's own Commentaries on the Gallic War. It begins with the words ‘Quieta Gallia’, and goes on to present a chronicle of dangers which taxed Caesar's skill and courage as never before. So far as the first two words justify his absence south of the Alps ‘as he had determined’, the justification is submerged by a vivid account of the widespread resentment at the loss of Gallic freedom, of the hopes aroused by his presumed preoccupation with a political crisis at Rome, of the progress made by the national movement under a new leader before the news reached Caesar, of his perplexities and the risks he had to run to rejoin the army, so that with all his speed and resource it was hard to brave winter and his enemies with success. The striking compliment which he was to pay to his lieutenant Labienus, ‘tantis subito difficultatibus obiectis ab animi virtute auxilium petendum videbat’,⁴⁷ gives the essence of his own reaction to these perplexities.

While the fighting strength of his army was at its zenith, Gaul had become a sea of enemies; the friends of Rome were few, and their loyalty was precarious. The faithful Commius⁴⁸ even deserted his fidelity, the disunion of the Gauls was transmuted into a good measure of unity under Vercingetorix, the leader of the Arverni; a people who, a generation before, had held the primacy of Gaul, a general able to organize for victory and to rise superior to reverses. Caesar had pursued the traditional Roman policy of promoting friends of Rome and trusting to client princes and above all to the power of the Aedui: in this crisis the policy became a liability rather than an asset. The season did not admit of the rapid movements that might have daunted the insurgents, the siege of Avaricum succeeded but at the cost of twenty-seven precious days. The siege of Gergovia was ended by a reverse which Caesar comes short of dissembling by saying that his troops overran his own discretion, if even that is true. For all the vigour of Caesar and Labienus, it seemed impossible to grasp and retain the initiative, to bring about a decisive battle under favourable conditions.

The narrative moves with urgent, almost anxious speed. The defensive system which rested on hostages kept in the territory of the Aedui breaks down when they take the field against the Romans, and it looks as though the great adventure of the conquest of Gaul might end in failure. The Roman province has to be rapidly organized for defence and Caesar, surrounded by enemies, has to put out all his skill to find a way of restoring the military situation. Vercingetorix suffers a reverse and retires on Alesia, and Caesar risks all on the hazard of besieging him, while the Gauls raise a great army which might hope to destroy the legions. For if Caesar's defence against them failed, it was the end of him and his whole army. Had this happened it is hard to see how the province could have weathered the storm, and how nearly it happened is plain from his narrative. The climax of the battle is reached; the fighting qualities of the legions, the vigour and courage of Caesar himself achieve victory. Vercingetorix surrenders, and the campaign ends with the Roman forces disposed to make good the control of central Gaul. The last of Caesar's own Commentaries on Gaul ends with the news reaching the Senate and the voting of a final supplicatio. Caesar himself winters at Bibracte for he knows that he is needed. His lieutenant Hirtius, who describes the events of the next two years in the Eighth Book of the Commentaries begins his book with the words ‘Omni Gallia devicta’. The rest of that book shows how much has still to be done to make those words wholly true. But for whatever reason, Caesar is content to end his own story of his achievements in Gaul with the crowning mercy of Alesia.

8. THE CIVIL WAR

When we turn to the Civil War, it is noticeable that it begins with the first day of a Roman year by the current calendar. For that is the day on which the first event mentioned occurred. The first two books cover roughly the events of the year 49 and between them made up one Commentarius. But some scattered operations which happened in this year are brought into the Third Book, so that the strict division of commentarii by years is not preserved any more than between the second and third books of the Gallic War (p. 35). In the earlier chapters of Book i Caesar presents his case as regards the political and constitutional aspect of the outbreak of the war. Caesar is an advocate for himself, not wholly scrupulous, but wholly sincere. It is plain that he believed that he had not received the treatment which his exploits and his dignitas deserved, and that his army shared his belief. He did not seek to overthrow the Republican constitution, but only to have it work for his interests and not against them. He was prepared to meet his enemies at least part of the way provided he did not forfeit his career, to come to terms with Pompey in a new coalition in which, however, he would be at an advantage over his former ally. The civilis dissensio need not be a bellum civile; it was not by his choosing that his enemies made it one. As he said at Pharsalus, ‘they would have it so’—‘hoc voluerunt’.⁴⁹ The exposition is subtly contrived so as to be built up partly of what he said and did and what his opponents said and did, but it does not attain an objectivity in which no one could believe.

The military operations are militarily discussed with a cool evaluation of the application of ratio belli by both sides. It is taken for granted that Caesar would not sacrifice any military advantage to assist negotiations, and that his enemies would take the same line. But Caesar was anxious to show clemency where he could safely do so, to avoid bloodshed if he could advance his ends without it. The folly of Domitius Ahenobarbus at Corfinium, the pessimism of Afranius, the brutal violence of Petreius, the vacillation of Varro, the bad faith of the Massiliotes, the timidity of Varus, are revealed, but so far there is nothing that would embitter the conflict past reconciliation. There is no triumph over Pompey at his withdrawal from Italy, which Caesar no doubt judged more justly than Cicero, who complained of it, as though he understood war. There is not even a reference to the desertion of Labienus, though the fact that he was now in the opposite camp might be deduced from an incidental remark.⁵⁰ The support given by Juba of Numidia to his enemies in Africa is, in a way, justified.⁵¹

The Third Book strikes a sharper note. Metellus, Scipio, Labienus, Bibulus are attacked, the thwarting of Caesar's efforts to find a way to peace by the violence of Labienus, the egotistical ambition, the partisan hatreds, the unreasoning self-confidence of the nobles are portrayed. The skill of Pompey is not denied, but the break-down of his spirit when his plan miscarried at Pharsalus is revealed—‘summae rei diffidens et tamen eventum exspectans’.⁵² The death of Pompey is recorded curtly after a phrase in which some critics have seen a touch of irony.⁵³ The book seems to reflect the anxieties that beset Caesar, the strain on his troops and the courage which both needed until the victory at Pharsalus and then the reaction to triumphant self-confidence ‘confisus fama rerum gestarum’ which made him believe everywhere was safe for him.⁵⁴ The anger of Caesar at finding himself in danger from the soldateska of Achillas and from the intrigues of Pothinus glows in the closing chapters of the book, which ends abruptly. If Caesar wrote the last words ‘This was the beginning of the war of Alexandria’ they seem to dismiss a topic beneath the level of Caesar's attention. It has been suggested⁵⁵ that the statement of the preceding sentence that he put Pothinus to death is a kind of dramatic ending with the avenging of Pompey, but that is an over-subtlety and to the matter-of-fact Romans Pompey would not be avenged while his assassins, Achillas and Septimius, lived. The Commentarius does not contain all the history of the year's operations, and it remains, for whatever reason, formally incomplete.

.....

What has appeared in the preceding three chapters, the plain unadorned matter-of-fact character of a commentarius, the content of which is so predominantly a narration of military events militarily viewed by a military man, would make a reader expect to find the style of the Commentaries uniform almost to the point of monotony. It would be very much the same story told in very much the same way, for it need not, or should not, be told otherwise. But there is more than this: Caesar had the habit, it would seem, of deciding what was the best word for this and that, and then never admitting any other. As is pointed out in the first chapter (p. 16) Latin had been a rather luxuriant language with several words meaning very much the same thing, but since the second century b.c. it had been pruned. This process was carried further by Caesar, so that when the same thing happens it is natural and proper to find the same words or phrases used about it. The precision of his mind works in with his interest in words and language, tends to reflect the recurrence of an idea or of an action in a repetition of words and phrases, and this helps to produce a uniformity of diction.

Granted that this is so, the intensive study by so many scholars of Caesar's vocabulary and phraseology has not been in vain. It has shown how little ambiguity or vagueness has slipped past the guard of Caesar's sharp clear mind to cloud the elegantia of his style.⁵⁶ Apart from faults in the manuscript tradition of the text, there may be passages in which some report or the like by another hand has not been fully converted by Caesar into his own diction. This may be so more often in the Civil War than in the Gallic War, if, as is probable, Caesar produced parts of the Bellum Civile under pressure of haste. But when account is taken of these possibilities, the major part of the Commentaries shows the special qualities of the Caesarian style.

The precision in the use of words, the pura et inlustris brevitas which Cicero praises in Caesar's writing is a constant phenomenon. But as the Commentaries proceed, they exhibit some difference of style. It has often been observed how the First Book of the Gallic War is more formal in the commentarius manner than the Second, and that after the Second the style becomes slightly more informal in the next four books. The Seventh Book has more movement still and, as it were, flows faster, and the same is true of the books of the Civil War. The constructions and run of sentences become freer, and there are changes of a kind which suggest a change of habit rather than a reasoned change of preference in the search for the right word. Such a change of habit is hard to understand if Caesar composed the first seven books of the Gallic War in one continuous literary activity within a short space of time. It is in fact a strong, perhaps the most cogent, argument for the view that the Gallic War was written in stages over a number of years. If this is so, it may have been quite natural for Caesar to become less concerned to preserve the stylistic effect that belongs to the commentarius form. There appears, indeed, in the First Book of the Gallic War to be deliberate avoidance of literary polish. Thus in the third chapter two successive sentences begin with the phrase ‘ad eas res conficiendas’. In neither sentence can the phrase be merely struck out as an interpolation without harming the sense, and it is hard to suppose that the repetition is due to hasty writing. It appears rather to be a deliberate roughening of the style. So too there are instances in which the antecedent to a relative is repeated in the relative clause, with something of the cumbrousness which is characteristic of Roman formal documents. This kind of thing disappears in the later books of the Gallic War. In the first six books we do not find speeches in oratio recta. It is necessary to give the gist of what was said on occasion, but this is done in oratio obliqua, thus avoiding the dramatic literary effect of a fictitious speech in direct speech which is the ornament appropriate to the literary character of historia. In the Seventh Book there is one complete speech in oratio recta, that of the Gallic chief Critognatus during the siege of Alesia.⁵⁷ Critognatus urges his compatriots to do as they once did when the Cimbri and Teutoni invaded them and feed upon those who are unfit for war. The striking character of this suggestion is used by Caesar to justify the insertion of the speech—‘non praetereunda videtur oratio Critognati propter eius singularem et nefariam crudelitatem’. But when one reads the speech one finds that the singular and nefarious cruelty plays a small part in it, and what one remembers is what Caesar may have meant his readers to remember—the difference between the transient raid of the Cimbri and Teutoni and the eternal yoke of iron which Rome and Caesar are placing on the necks of the Gauls.

A somewhat subtler use of the same device is to be found in the speech in the same book,⁵⁸ in which Vercingetorix defends himself before his countrymen when they accuse him of treachery. The speech is in oratio obliqua except that in two places with peculiar dramatic force there is a sudden turn to oratio recta. The first is ‘“Haec ut intellegatis” inquit “a me sincere pronuntiari, audite Romanos milites”’, and the second is as dramatic—‘“Haec” inquit “a me” Vercingetorix “beneficia habetis, quem proditionis insimulatis; cuius opera sine vestro sanguine tantum exercitum victorem fame paene consumptum videtis; quem turpiter se ex hac fuga recipientem, ne qua civitas suis finibus recipiat, a me provisum est.”’ A good critic has well observed the skill with which the first ‘a me’ in this passage is thrown into relief by its position between ‘inquit’ and ‘Vercingetorix’,⁵⁹ and the same device is used again to underline the self-sacrifice of the centurion Marcus Petronius,⁶⁰ or the fatal plea of Sabinus at the council of war that preceded the destruction of his army.⁶¹

In the Civil War there is one speech, or rather a pair of speeches, in oratio recta—those of Curio before the disaster which befell him in Africa;⁶² and here Caesar violates his general rule to give an impression of the fiery spirit of his friend. Caesar plainly cared much for Curio, and the speeches are an epitaph. They are fictitious in the sense that the phrasing is Caesar's—with the brilliant ending ‘Equidem me Caesaris militem dici volui, vos me imperatoris nomine appellavistis. cuius si vos paenitet, vestrum vobis beneficium remitto, mihi meum restituite nomen, ne ad contumeliam honorem dedisse videamini.’ And there is another exception in the short speeches of Pompey and of Labienus before the battle of Pharsalus—the fanfare of pride before the cold narrative of the battle itself.⁶³

The plainness of the narrative style, combined with the brevity in which Latin surpasses other great languages, can produce a singularly striking effect without any use of rhetorical ornament. For example, at the crisis before Alesia when the relieving army is making its final effort from without, and Vercingetorix is making a desperate sortie from within, Caesar chooses a place where he can see what is happening and dispatches help, now here, now there, to his lieutenants; until at last, when almost all seems lost, there comes the simple undramatic sentence—‘accelerat Caesar, ut proelio intersit’,⁶⁴ then the one vivid touch—‘eius adventu colore vestitus cognito’. This is not for picturesque effect, it is that the colour shows the imperator himself is there in his battle-cloak. The battle reaches its climax, until in a sharp staccato come the brief sentences, like blows that hammer defeat into victory:⁶⁵ ‘Nostri omissis pilis gladiis rem gerunt. repente post tergum equitatus cernitur; cohortes illae adpropinquant. hostes terga vertunt; fugientibus equites occurrunt. fit magna caedes.’ There is hardly a word that is not pure prose, but the effect is epic. Whether the effect is deliberate artistry or whether Caesar wrote down or dictated straight after the battle exactly what happened and then saw that it was good, no one can say. What is certain is that it is hard to imagine how better it could be done, and it was done within the economy of the commentarius.

The battle pieces of Caesar, indeed, stand by themselves in ancient history-writing if we except the highest efforts of Thucydides in his Seventh Book. The best worth examination is the battle with the Nervii, a desperate encounter battle.⁶⁶ How concrete is the picture of the place where the Romans halt, how skilful is the suggestion that Caesar had after all done what a good general could do (despite Napoleon's strictures) in his first disposition, how sudden the attack comes; then the phrases which show what the moment needed—‘Caesari omnia uno tempore erant agenda’; then follow three chapters in which the growing confusion of the battle, the quickening of its tempo are reflected in the rhythm and in the grammatical construction of the sentences until the climax is reached when Caesar's Gallic cavalry rides for home bearing the news: ‘Romanos pulsos superatosque, castris impedimentisque eorum hostes potitos.’ In these chapters there is no word of Caesar. The battle is for the moment out of hand. And then the next chapter begins with the word ‘Caesar’, and there follows the brilliant little description of his own intervention, how he snatches a shield and rallies his troops. The tide of battle halts and then turns, and the rhythm makes it audible to the ear—first the spondees of the halt and then the movement again—‘Cuius adventu spe illata militibus ac redintegrato animo’ and so on. (It is to be remembered that ancient narrative was written, or dictated, to be read aloud.) And then Caesar again, but this time not the fighting soldier but the disposing commander—‘Caesar, cum septimam legionem, quae iuxta constiterat, item urgeri ab hoste vidisset, tribunos militum monuit.’ Then the steady advance to victory and with victory the phrases that praise the enemy—how after all they had performed what was almost a military miracle: ‘Hard it was what they had done but their high spirit had made it easy.’ The battle had been a desperate affair: it is described as no other battle in Roman literature. Pharsalus is another story: there we do not find the concreteness of the setting, still less the part that Caesar himself played in the actual engagement; instead the perfect formal description of a battle as a work of military art—almost a game of military chess, the unconscious hint of the fact that by then Caesar had become a virtuoso in the art of war, almost an impersonal directing intelligence.

Thus it may be seen that Caesar's Commentaries, whether of his set purpose or not, reflect the personality of the writer, and his mind. It is to be remembered that Caesar is not content to do no more than set down simply a string of events. By now the Romans had come to expect more than that. Hirtius had praised Caesar's ‘verissima scientia suorum consiliorum explicandorum’.⁶⁷ Caesar is concerned not only with actions but with the springs and motives of actions. There had, in fact, been a reaction against the mere annalistic record of events. Fifty years before Caesar, Sempronius Asellio had written: ‘nobis non modo satis esse video, quod factum esset, id pronuntiare, sed etiam, quo consilio quaque ratione gesta essent, demonstrate.’⁶⁸

While Caesar's style is in general not ornamented with rhetorical devices, the Commentaries contain passages in which there is a formal composition which might be due to the desire to produce an artistic effect. For example, it has been observed that in the opening chapter of the first book of the Civil War the personages who take part in the debate in the Senate are so enumerated as to produce a definite effect. But this may be due rather to Caesar's orderly mind than to the employment of a rhetorical arrangement for effect. If we may suppose that the stylistic effectiveness of the account of the battles against the Nervii and before Alesia is due not to conscious art but to the vividness of the events in Caesar's mind as he wrote, we may suppose that a dramatic quality in Caesar's narrative, where it is found, is the direct unartificial effect of the vivida vis animi with which he remembered as well as acted. It is the strong impact of Caesar's mind, rather than conscious art, that creates his style, where it rises to distinctiveness. It may march along, orderly as a legion, setting out intelligibly and with intelligence the course of action or the ratio belli and practical calculations that are the springs of action. Most of what happens seems to be inevitable, almost remote, without emotion. Thus, when Caesar has described the surprise attack on the Usipetes and Tencteri, he continues: ‘at reliqua multitudo puerorum mulierumque—nam cum omnibus suis domo excesserant Rhenumque transierant—passim fugere coepit, ad quos consectandos Caesar equitatum misit’.⁶⁹ This is not a device to leave his readers to imagine the scene for themselves; nor is it the conscious hardening of his heart; it is that his heart is not awake. But when, at Dyrrhachium, his own army breaks so that it is out of hand, then ‘eodem quo venerant receptu sibi consulebant omniaque erant tumultus timoris fugae plena, adeo ut, cum Caesar signa fugientium manu prenderet et consistere iuberet, alii dimissis equis eundem cursum confugerent, alii ex metu etiam signa dimitterent, neque quisquam omnino consisteret’.⁷⁰ Here, as Caesar lives again through this crisis in his fortunes, the plain style is for a moment infused with the vividness of his recollection. When the army of Curio is routed in Africa the climax is reached with almost the same phrase: ‘plena erant omnia timoris et luctus’.⁷¹ Here Caesar is stirred by the thought of that disaster which broke the victorious course of the war and by his sympathy for his troops, but above all he records the death of his friend in expiation of his fault—‘at Curio numquam se amisso exercitu, quem a Caesare 72

As in Caesar's account the swift achievement of victory before Alesia once the tide of battle has turned is reflected in a rapid staccato, so the urgency of speed in a supreme effort may be reflected by a use of the historic present to a degree rarely found elsewhere in the Commentaries. Once Caesar has crossed the Rubicon it is for him all-important to sweep down Italy and above all, if possible, to intercept the retreat of Pompey across the Adriatic. In the chapters which describe this effort there are found at least as many historic presents as in all the rest of his writings put together. This is to be explained not so much by the desire to impress the reader by a kind of rhetorical device as by the subconscious revelation of Caesar's own vehement desire to finish the war at a stroke. The reader would know that Caesar did not in fact achieve this purpose; what mattered was not what the reader would think but what Caesar felt and hoped and strove to attain.

Thus the study of Caesar's style may be revealing for the study of Caesar's mind and will, especially at moments of crisis. When he is describing the doings of his lieutenants the style is, in general, less emphatic, less vigorous, though even in these, as in the account of Curio's campaign or, again, in that of the disaster to the army of Sabinus and Cotta and the events that led to it, there is a more dramatic treatment of the situation. It becomes more personal as Caesar's imagination of what must have happened is engaged. On the whole, though, the operations of the legati are described so that the military quality of their actions, their consilia, so far as these are their own and not Caesar's at one remove, can be appraised, but that is all.

None the less, a close study of those parts of Caesar's narrative which rest on the reports of his lieutenants may reveal stylistic touches which are taken over in a kind of submerged quotation. Thus in the account of the siege of Massilia the texture of the narrative appears to show three strands, the matter-of-fact technical siegecraft of Trebonius, a livelier tone in the report of naval operations which would be supplied by the admiral Decimus Brutus, and the occasional comment of Caesar himself.

There is a habit of Caesar which may reflect more than one stylistic motive. When he is describing actions or the springs of action he invariably refers to himself in the third person by his name Caesar. This may in part be due to his adoption of the Commentarius form, though that form is found elsewhere to admit the use of the first person by a narrator. It is true that the use of the third person has an air of objectivity, almost of detachment, which may subtly win the reader's assent; though it may seem to be monotonous, it serves the clarity of the narrative: it perhaps needs no other explanation. But it may, at least in part, be a revealing mannerism. Here and there, outside the Commentaries, what seems to be good tradition shows Caesar referring to himself by his name, where the first person would seem more natural. The famous words ‘You carry Caesar and Caesar's fortune’ is hardly an example, for his boatman needed to be told who his passenger was. But the equally famous dictum that Caesar's wife must be above suspicion might have run ‘my wife’ or ‘the wife of a Pontifex Maximus’. To say ‘Caesar's wife’ has something that is in a way more than either, something that has a sharper impact. The effect may be illustrated, though it is no more than an illustration, by the high-riding words that Shakespeare makes Caesar use in his decision to go to the Senate House on the Ides of March, when the omens give their warning of danger:

The gods do this in shame of cowardice:
Caesar should be a beast without a heart
If he should stay at home to-day—for fear.
No, Caesar shall not: danger knows full well
That Caesar is more dangerous than he:
We are two lions litter'd in one day
And I the elder and more terrible,
And Caesar shall go forth.

To return to what is evidence. When at Pharsalus Caesar saw his enemies broken he spoke words that may well have been truly recorded by Asinius Pollio, who stood at his side. ‘Hoc voluerunt’—they would have it so; and then—‘tantis rebus gestis Gaius Caesar condemnatus essem, nisi ab exercitu auxilium petissem’.⁷³ Here, in this cri du cœur, his name springs to his lips, it adds something, it throws into the scale his belief in his own greatness. It is thus possible that the constant use of his name in the Commentaries is not only a convention or a mask of objectiveness, but includes, as it were, the natural, almost automatic, expression of his conscious preeminence.

Notes

1. ‘The title of Caesar's Work’, Trans. Amer. Phil. Assoc. xxxvi (1905), pp. 211-38.

2. ad Fam. viii, 11, 4.

3. Inst. Or. x, 1, 31.

4. Martial, xiv, 191, 2.

5. By F. Jacoby, Die Fragm. der griech. Historiker, ii d, pp. 639 f.

6. 48 ff.

7. In ad Verum Imp. ii, 3.

8. ad Attic. ii, 1, 1-2.

9. ad Fam. v, 12, 10.

10. ad Attic. iv, 6, 4; iv, 11, 2.

11. 75, 262.

12. Inst. Or. x, 1, 114.

13. iii, 37, 150-38, 154.

14. See G. L. Hendrickson in Class. Philology, i (1906), pp. 97 ff.

15. See W. A. Oldfather and G. Bloom in Class. Journ. xxii (1927), pp. 584-602.

16. Brutus, 29, 112; Pliny, N.H. xxxiii, 21; Tacitus, Agric. i, 3; Val. Max. iv, 4, 11; Frontinus, Start. iv, 3, 13.

17. Brutus, 35, 132.

18. H. Peter, Hist. Rom. Rel., i, p. cclxv.

19. ad Attic. viii, 9, 4.

20. Plutarch, Caesar, 18, 1; Appian, Celt. 1, 3, and xv; Dio Cassius xxxviii, 32, 4; Caesar and Dio Cassius do not mention Labienus.

21. B.G. 1, 12, 7.

22. B.G. 1, 26, 1.

23. B.G. 1, 52, 7.

24. ad Attic. 1, 20, 5.

25. B.G. 1, 11, 6.

26. B.G. 1, 31, 16.

27. B.G. 1, 33, 1.

28. B.G. 1, 40, 7.

29. Its truth is not challenged by Plutarch, Caesar, 19, or by the long harangue composed by Dio Cassius, xxxviii, 36-46.

30. B.G. i, 43.

31. B.G. i, 54, 2.

32. B.G. i, 1, 2.

33. B.G. ii, 3, 2.

34. B.G. ii, 35, 1-2.

35. B.G. ii, 35, 4.

36. B.G. iii, 1-6.

37. B.G. iii, 10, 3.

38. B.G. iv, 1, 3.

39. B.G. iv, 16.

40. B.G. iv, 20, 1-2.

41. 13, 33; see also Catullus, ii, 9-12.

42. B.G. v, 54, 5.

43. B.G. v, 58, 6.

44. B.G. vi, 1, 3.

45. B.G. vi, 43, 4.

46. B.G. vi, 44, 3.

47. B.G. vii, 59, 6.

48. See below, p. 79.

49. Suetonius, Divus Iulius, 30, 4.

50. B.C. i, 15, 2.

51. B.C. ii, 25, 4.

52. B.C. iii, 94, 6.

53. B.C. iii, 104, 3: ‘naviculam parvulam conscendit cum paucis suis; ibi ab Achilla et Septimio interficitur.’

54. B.C. iii, 106, 3.

55. By K. Barwick in Philologus, Suppl. xxxii, 2, p. 133f.

56. ‘Elegantia’ imports the choice of the right word, rather than any elaboration or elevation of style. See E. E. Sikes in Camb. Anc. Hist. ix, p. 764.

57. B.G. vii, 77, 3-16.

58. B.G. vii, 20.

59. H. Oppermann, Caesar, der Schriftsteller und sein Werk, p. 82.

60. B.G. vii, 50, 4-6.

61. B.G. v, 30.

62. B.C. ii, 31-2.

63. B.C. iii, 86-7.

64. B.G. vii, 87, 3.

65. B.G. vii, 88, 2-3.

66. B.G. ii, 18ff.; this analysis owes much to the insight of Oppermann, op. cit., pp. 56ff.

67. B.G. viii, Praef. 7.

68. H. Peter, Hist. Rom. Rel. i, p. 179.

69. B.G. iv, 14, 5.

70. B.C. iii, 69, 4.

71. B.C. ii, 41, 8.

72. B.C. ii, 42, 4.

73. Suetonius, Divus Iulius, 30, 4.