SOURCE: “XPDNC / Writing Caesar,” in Classical Antiquity, Vol. 15, No. 2, October, 1996, pp. 261-88.

[In the following essay, Henderson explores how the act of writing helped to create the image of Caesar that he wanted to project of himself.]

Whereupon Henderson rose, in his place, to speak his motion (surrexit sententiae suae loco dicendae). And moved (pro sententia sua hoc censuit):¹

that: Caesar's Caesar tells, undecidably, of a peace-keeping war² which didn't have to be, yet had to be, fought over the “self-regard” the world owed him and his Caesar self (dignitas)—“not status for Caesar but something approaching self-respect” (his apologist might aver) “and knowledge of his actual worth and the offices it entitled him to seek, meaning more to him than life itself.”³ From the horse's mouth, what a Caesar is worth, is.

—that: the monological, even monomaniacal, myth of Caesar's writing puts De Bello Ciuili in denial, where fiercely dialogical contestation powers and motivates every turn of the rhetoric through its repression. The text plays host to the welter of writings occasioned by the dispute between Caesar and his world; parasitic on them, Caesar hides his parade of self.

—that: Caesar's Commentarii run, and should be read, together: notwithstanding that they are all divided into three parts.

—that: Caesar, “whose every word denied the inevitability of such an outcome,”⁴ wrote all over the imperium. Caesar wrote his self, Caesar, onto the world, until the world, and all the writing in it, was his. The writing that won and lost a world war.

—that: Bellum Ciuile reinforces Caesar's thinking over Caesar's thinking. In the protestation of a Roman identity, the masking/marking of iconoclasm with conformity.

1. CROSSING OUT THE RUBICON (FAC ET EXCUSA)⁵

The Man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled; he wills it. He is not driven forward, but drives himself. There is nothing immodest about this.⁶

Litteris Caesaris … “The letter from Caesar was successfully delivered to the consuls and the utmost exertions of the tribunes just about got it read out to the Senate; but nothing could get a motion arising from the letter put to the Senate. Instead, the consuls put to them the national interest.” (BC [Bellum Ciuile] 1.1.1f.) Not, then, the letter of Caesar, the letters written by Caesar, Caesar's writing; but the res publica. So begins the text of Caesar's Bellum Ciuile, at once opening the rift that would tear down SPQR and write up Caesares.

Readers are never to have this letter from Caesar to the Senate read out to them. One had to be there. Some editors cannot believe this is not the chance injustice of scribal accident.⁷ They cannot believe how unlucky Caesar's Bellum Ciuile has been, to be deprived of its opening paragraph, or so.⁸ “The contents of Caesar's letter were very important and however hastily Caesar may have written the BC it is almost inconceivable that he did not spell out the offer he was making: that either he should be allowed to retain his command, or that all holders of commands should lay them down.”⁹ The majority view, however, has been to accept this abrupt opening as Caesar's, to the letter.

The abruptness of the denial of debate on the matter of the letter from Caesar stands, in any event, as the symptomatic gesture that inaugurates the Bellum Ciuile, just as it initiates the civil war.¹⁰ The consuls of Rome refuse to comply with Caesar's written will. In so doing, they treat his letter as the report of a magistrate to the government; chivvied by the tribunes, they give the despatch an official hearing, despite pressing crisis; but insofar as Caesar's writing required to be handled as a proposal from afar, an in absentia representation to the Senate seeking to determine a vote, it is disallowed. Instead, a procession of senior figures produces an array of sententiae, from which the presiding consul selected the motion “that Caesar disband his army before a certain date, on pain of being seen to act against the national interest” (1.2.6). The veto from two tribunes on this successfully carried proposal was a week later dealt with by passage of the emergency decree (illud extremum atque ultimum senatus consultum), according to which the magistrates should “protect the national interest from damage” (dent operam … ne quid res publica detrimenti capiat), and the “inscription” of this declaration of martial law (perscribuntur) issued instantly in the “flight of tribunes the tribunes”= to Caesar” at Ravenna (profugiunt, 1.2.7, 5.3). The consul who blocked Caesar's written will was Lentulus Crus. He is to die a short way from the end of Caesar's text, “arrested by a king,” the Pharaoh of Egypt, “and executed in confinement” (3.104.3).¹¹ The proposer of the motion against Caesar was Metellus Scipio, joined in his resistance by Cato, through discussions convened by Pompey in an after-dusk unofficial meeting of senators (1.4.1-3). Both of these survive Caesar's text, though not before Cato has been humiliated when he flees Sicily before a shot was fired, complaining of being “abandoned and betrayed” by Pompey (1.30.5),¹² and Scipio satirized as first a “self-proclaimed imperator” after some setbacks in Syria, then the would-be despoiler of Ephesian Diana, and finally hubristic contender for Caesar's priesthood, counting chickens before Pharsalus (3.31.1, 33.1f., 83.1f.).¹³ Caesar's text is to cease—abruptly—with Pompey's killer, Pothinus the Pharaoh's eunuch guardian, himself “put to death by Caesar” (the last words of BC, 3.112.12, … a Caesare est interfectus; Pompey killed at 3.104.3). Yes, up to a point, the Civil War hangs together. Caesar picks off both the villains he stigmatized to begin with and the villains he picked out along the way.

All Caesar's writing in the BC constitutes a commentary on that first, slighted, text of his, suppressed from the historical (i.e. written) record by the enemies of Caesar in the Senate. This is indeed Caesar's own claim, regularly and insistently reiterated throughout the three books. His text bears witness to his keenness to propose a cessation of hostilities, until this becomes the theme of his prebattle speech to his army before do-or-die Pharsalus (3.90). Much of the text's business is taken up with supplying terms for that missing, and/or suppressed, opening letter from Caesar, from the paraphrase he gives to intermediaries to take to Pompey at the outset, “when he sent a letter to the Senate ‘that all should leave their armies,’ he couldn't even get that” (1.9.3, ut omnes ab exercitibus discederent).¹⁴ The lists and précis lengthen and shift, asserting, or betraying, a range of self-estimations: “… asserting the right to freedom of himself and the Roman People from oppression by a minority wedge” (… ut se et populum Romanum factione paucorum oppressum in libertatem uindicaret, 1.22.5), for example; or “… the senators should prosecute the national interest and govern together with himself; but if they ducked it for fear, he wouldn't shirk the burden and would govern the nation on his own account” (… ut rem publicam suscipiant atque una secum administrent. sin timore defugiant illi, se oneri non defuturum et per se rem publicam administraturum, 32.7).¹⁵ Caesar himself sails close to the wind at Massilia: “You should follow the authority of all Italy rather than defer to the will of a single person” (… debere eos Italiae totius auctoritatem sequi potius quam unius hominis uoluntati obtemperare, 35.1). And the game is all but up in Greece, when Caesar tries to give his final warning through Vibullius and his message shows Pompey his alter ego as would-be cosmocrat: “if fortune gives just a bit to one of the two rivals, the one who seemed superior would not abide by the peace terms and the one who was confident that he was going to be master of the universe would not be content with even shares” (… neque aequa parte contentum qui se omnia habiturum uideretur, 3.10.7).¹⁶ As shall be seen, the telegraphing of terms comes to founder on talks about talks, the slippery, “practical,” business of framing the exchange of terms. But terms are formulated, throughout this process of deferral, terms that set Caesar's self before the Roman state.

If every action in the text is a shot in the word war, each ascription of a view, position, or identity also colors its representation dialectically. The writing of Bellum Ciuile is strung, like all discourse, between (i) the selection of actional terms that determine reality and its mutation, and (ii) the supply of relational terms which establish a modal set toward the contest of wills:¹⁷ thus (i) Caesar, of course, plainly polarizes (his own) “set-back” against (their) “disaster,” “elimination” against “massacre”; (Pompeian) “flight” against (Caesarian) “withdrawal,” “boast” vs. “pledge,” & c.; but (ii) he also implants attitude, by dramatizing acts of judgment, reactions and responses: his account of his adversaries shows them to think, speak and write in self-seeking hatefulness. They brutalize themselves, they drag everyone they can down with them, they monger war from nothing; whereas Caesar wants no enemy, reinstates order and ideals, stays warm, human and social. All the solidary sentiments are his, the violence and tyranny theirs. This work of euphemism and denigration is passed off as description, while Caesar creates a profile for his Caesar from negative ventriloquist representation of his opponents. His Caesar thus depends dialogically on the projection of unattractive images of power and knowledge onto the othered. Not Caesar but Cornelius Lentulus, for a start, lets the biggest cat out of the bag: “hyping himself to his cronies as a/the second Sulla, for imperial mastery to revisit” (seque alterum fore Sullam inter suos gloriatur ad quem summa imperii redeat, 1.4.2).¹⁸

In the course of the narrative, it becomes clear how writing has, if it has, a role to play in Bellum Ciuile. On the one hand, letters are centrally important, and the letters that compose them carry the brunt of the campaign; for this war is, before all, a war of words, where the prize at stake in the Kriegschuldfrage is, more than diplomatic victory in psychological warfare, the very stairway to world supremacy.¹⁹ The stated, proclaimed, bandied platforms formulated by the combatants would win, accredit or dispute, and would set the seal on, interpret and calibrate, the victory. Moreover, Caesar's own text is itself nothing other than the most lengthy version of the case he put forward before the Senate, before the descent into hostilities, before the text could start. The vindication of the “truth” of Caesar's glaringly missing, or (let it be plainly said) purloined, letter is the work set for the narration at the outset.

The writing of letters plays a shaping role in the fighting, as the war accumulates archival substance for the eventual writing: this dictator could dictate four letters to four different scribes at once—something of a strategic advantage, the smart weapon of smartness.²⁰ In this world, commanders report to base, just as proconsul Caesar had written his despatches from Gaul to the Senate through the 50s bce. They communicate and share knowledge—to provide for detailed calculations of movements and counter-moves, and (counter-)intelligence on both sides. But most typically they bear orders, or requests for orders, and are themselves borne by messengers as the most authentic versions of the will of the generalissimos. Letters are written and conveyed by messengers; the messengers carry mandata, whether in writing or for oral delivery is often unclear, and perhaps still more often an immaterial triviality; crucially, most of the messages are in the imperative, and, harbingers of an imperial future of fiat and decree, they make things happen—if only their delivery. But, even so, in this world writing is also, paradoxically, at a discount. This is a world of action and of reactions, where the œuvre of Caesar displays not the literate orator and man of writing-culture, but his giant maneuvers athwart the empire. A chief-of-staff's ciphers must deliver on this, or be dead letters.

Yet, since the Iliad, the business of war-correspondence has always inescapably moralized culture through the blockage of communication, through the blockade on colloquy. Thus, a certain L. Caesar began the invasion (so to say)²¹ by arriving at Ariminum with business to discuss (1.8.2-11.3): “he finished the conversation that was the reason why he had come, then indicated he was instructed by Pompey to speak to Caesar on private business (mandata priuati officii). Pompey wanted to be clean in Caesar's eyes, in case he took for an insult what Pompey had done for the nation (rei publicae causa): he had always held public interest above private ties” (rei publicae commoda priuatis necessitudinibus potiora). Further assurances of the same kind were added by praetor Roscius. Caesar's response is a paradigmatic display of acuity wrapped in statesmanlike courtesy, marked by his characteristic concessionary gesture,²² despite his own better judgment: “although these doings seemed without relevance for easing the wrongs done Caesar, nevertheless he took the opportunity of these suitable people to be intermediaries for delivering his will to Pompey. He asked the pair of them, since they had brought Pompey's message to him (mandata), not to shirk taking his demands back to Pompey too (postulata), in case with an ounce of effort they might be able to get rid of a vast quarrel and so free all Italy from terror. … So that all this might come about more easily and on settled terms, and be sworn on oath, either Pompey should come closer himself or allow Caesar to come; it would turn out that all the quarrel would be settled by talking with each other.” No cloak-and-dagger shabbiness from Caesar, but all the graces, and, congruently, the offer to short-circuit hostility and hostilities with face-to-face companionability. The ethos at the other end of this mission earns writing Caesar's ire: “taking the instructions, Roscius with (scripta … mandata), summarized as follows: Caesar return to Gaul, quit Ariminum, dismiss troops; if he did this, Pompey go to Spain. Meantime, till pledge were received that Caesar would do what he promised, consuls and Pompey not to desist from levying.” Where Caesar self-deprecates his fraternal greetings as postulata but dignifies the terse insults that returned as mandata, the generosity of his fulsome self-declaration to the go-betweens damns the cold inhumanity of his adversaries' intransigence not least by the modality encoded in the contrast in syntax. As the Commentarius comments, “An unequal exchange, these demands …” (erat iniqua condicio postulare …). Dutifully rebutting the proposal point-by-point, Caesar saw the strangled message screaming through the laconic formality: “Not to find time for talking together and not to promise to come brought it across that there was serious giving up on peace.” With the famous pendent “therefore” at this juncture (itaque, 1.11.4), the drive is on, and will not stop before Suez. So see how it all started here, when Pompey traded on the separation of young L. Caesar from his father, Caesar's legate, and their need to talk, but himself failed to meet even the basic etiquette of agreeing to meet with his old partner.

At the end of the road, Pompey will find himself obliged to “send a request to be received in the name of guest-friendship and friendship with the host's father. … The people sent by Pompey did their diplomatic job, but then started chatting all too freely with the guards.” The result: “those who were sent by Pompey were given a generous up-front reply (palam) and were told to tell him to come. But the same people began a plot and sent on the quiet (clam)—a pair of heavies to kill Pompey” (3.103.3-104.2). Messages bring finality.

Between these moments, letters and instructions divide the sides in antipathy, even as they both pull their separate business together. “Domitius sent to Pompey in Apulia people who knew the area, for a large bonus, plus a letter to beg and pray for help. … When the town was mostly enveloped, those sent to Pompey returned. After reading the letter, Domitius started acting. … Pompey had written back that … if there was any chance, Domitius should come to him with all his resources.—Not that he could …” (1.17-19). The letter gets through, but only to draw a blank, or worse, and decipher as betrayal.

Later, the grand pattern of hubris is marked by “the letter and messengers that brought word to Rome” (litteris nuntiisque), “written out by Afranius and Petreius and friends in anything but the plain and dry style” (pleniora etiam atque uberiora … perscribebant). This started a dash of runners to Pompey in Greece, “some bent on being first to bring such news, others worried they might seem to have waited on the out-turn of the war, or to have come at the end of the queue” (1.53).

The same communiqué, “written out really expansively and windily by Afranius,” set Varro in further Spain “to dance to fortune's dance” into self-deflating mockery of resistance to Caesar. His downfall is sealed by a letter from the people of Gades to say that they were joining Caesar, which prompted him to “send to Caesar that he was ready to hand his remaining legion over to anyone he told him to” (2.17.4-20.7). Script for a farce.²³

The tragic equivalent: “Caesar's messengers and letter announcing (genuine) victory in Spain,” which inspired his lieutenant Curio to fatal over-confidence in Africa—disregarding the messages that reached Curio and his opponent at the same moment, to the effect that Juba's vast hordes were at hand (2.37.1f.).

Readers regain the narrative track when “Caesar's letter arrived, informing Calenus that the ports and shorelines were all occupied by the other side's fleet,” just as he put out to sea with the reinforcements embarked, “in accordance with Caesar's orders.” One private vessel under its own steam went ahead: every last human on board was executed, to the very last one (3.14). This was, truly, a red letter day.

Polarized parallelism between the principals goes on through the contrasts between their correspondence: “Pompey's admirals were torn off a strip (castigabantur) by a volley of letters for failing to stop Caesar's crossing”; “troubled by developments, Caesar wrote pretty strictly to his men in Brundisium” (3.25.2f.). In his bureau as in all else, Pompey is an outmaneuvered but considerable opposite number—worth writing a war with, a decent way to write Caesar, the best of a bad job.²⁴

Through all the deadlock and circling, the consul Caesar parlays unilaterally, for the duration. Two matching episodes tell of perfidy within the business of negotiation: first Caesar picks twice-pardoned Vibullius “to send with instructions to Pompey, summarized as: both men to bring their obstinacy to an end, walk away from war and risk fortune no further. … Vibullius heard the account and thought it no less necessary for Pompey to be informed of Caesar's sudden approach (aduentu Caesaris), so that he could take counsel for that, before any dealings began on the instructions” (3.10.2-11.1). Then, “informed by letter about the demands of Libo and Bibulus,” Caesar calls them “for talks.” Caesar had to excuse Bibulus, “whose reason for shunning the talks was in case a matter of the greatest hope and greatest expediency might be hog-tied by his wrath.” They said they wanted “to learn Caesar's demands and send to C.-in-C. Pompey,” but Caesar sussed them out by requiring personally supervised “safe-conduct for representatives to Pompey”; Libo “would not receive Caesar's representatives nor assure their safety, but referred the whole matter to Pompey.” So “Caesar realized that Libo had started up the whole scheme in view of the danger he was in … and was coming across with no hope or term for peace” (3.16.2-17.6). Waffungstillstandsunterredung was only a pretext for playing for time.

Furthermore, when Scipio entered the frame, Caesar “didn't forget his original strategy,” but sent him a mutual friend, Clodius, “handing him a letter and giving him instructions for Scipio, which summarizes as: Caesar had tried everything for peace, and reckoned that the zero progress was the fault of the people he had wanted to take responsibility for the business, because they were afraid to carry his instructions to Pompey at a bad moment. … Clodius delivered these instructions to Scipio,” but “he wasn't allowed to join any talks … and went back to Caesar in failure” (3.57). The breakdown in communication has now itself broken down. And, this time, Caesar's message is a masquerade—really a string of bare insults.

But the mail will get through, eventually: though Pompey “never got used to writing-in his acclamation as imperator as his letter-head” (3.71.3), the victory he won it for was quite wrongly diagnosed by his officers, who therefore turned it into defeat (in analysis)²⁵ and the occasion of their own fatal and final hubris: “just as if they had won by their own courage and as if no change of fortune could occur, they celebrated that day's victory all through planet earth, by word of mouth and by letter” (fama ac litteris, 72.4). Now this climax to Caesar's chain of dramatic tales of reversal²⁶ makes big big waves: “Pompey had sent out letters through every province and township about the battle at Dyrrhachium, and rumor had hustled far more extensively and windily than what had actually happened: Caesar repelled and on the run, most all his forces lost” (79.4). This hype, the telltale miscommunication that betokens a fake sociality, the Pompeians' spurious bid to speak to and for their country, and not the actual battle at Dyrrhachium, threatened to break the inexorable pattern of the narrative. Caesar was obliged to force it back into shape, encouraging a fresh spate of loyalty to himself by sensational but (he has said) “controlled” aggression. As Henderson will have demonstrated, they must have brought it on themselves, when Caesar must take out a people's town: regrets, he had a few, but then again, almost too few to mention.

So Caesar writes his instructions, demands, letters. They invite readers to come to talk, if only about talks. His Commentarii do not pretend to be other than documentary drafts, a condensed saturation of documentation, intermediate between the utilitarian pragmatics of the performative world of reports to GCHQ and orders to units, and the elaborated synthesis of a historian's finished text.

The Commentarii, that is to say, pretend to be no other than rough drafts, a provisional string of raw documents, indeterminate between the signals telegraphed from generals to soldiers and back and the clamorous prosecution of a raft of conditions for a new political order.

“In a real sense, as long as Caesar could write this narrative, the Republic still existed. For such writing would show it was still possible to know the public interest rather than simply to idealize it.”²⁷ Or, rather, as any less partisan view would have it, writing Caesar turns on disavowed will to power.

2. WRITE EVERY WRONG

As when <Shakespeare= said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, “Caesar, thou dost me wrong”—he replied: “Caesar did never wrong but with just cause.”²⁸

Like many who believe their own propaganda, often used the Caesarean third person.²⁹

The most obvious place to look for Caesar's missing letter is not in the putative preliminary lacuna, where the reader was not privileged or entitled to hear its wording before the senatorial meeting despatched it to the rapidly filling wastebasket of Republican history's might-have-beens, but rather in every letter he goes on to write as commentary on his claimed attempt to stave off the need to fight, write and right the Civil War. Caesar has hidden the letter of his law where it is most easily overlooked, on display through the pages of his public record.³⁰

His account might easily read as, exactly, confirmation that his initial representation of the sending of this first-ditch letter as an attempt to pull everyone back from the brink to safety was itself the prototype for all his subsequent barrage of déformations of the historical record.³¹ In any event—and this is the point, certainly the predicament readers are in—every re-formulation of Caesar's terms in the course of the three books is put across as a raise on the same stakes he began with. Readers begin with the question of his sincerity, the authorial sincerity embodied in the promissory terms of the pledges he vouches for. As the opening episode means to suggest or impose, this intersects with the question whether sincerity from Caesar could affect the reception it was possible to give him, once the Senate conspired to cross its Rubicon and quarantine contacts from him. This compounded question will never be left behind: it extends, unfolds and articulates to become the question of the BC.

So can be read the first displacement operated by this project of writing Caesar in that opening blockage of any motion based on Caesar's letter. According to Caesar, even those who blocked serious consideration of the missive, Lentulus and Scipio, told the house they and Pompey might or might not do a deal of some sort with Caesar, take it or leave it; and a series of senators nevertheless ventured proposals pacific or appeasing (1.1.2-2.4). The text indeed wades straight into efforts by the players to interpret Caesar's will and read Caesar—while the attendant events were being shaped to exclude effective moves to meet him half-way. By the time Caesar supplies readers with that first, foregrounded, summary of his letter's drift (1.9.3), he has shown how irretrievable a situation had (been) developed, and has obliged his reader to reflect on the momentum endemic to the escalation from entrenched antagonism to all-out war.

The letter of Caesar had been a text and an affidavit: could he be held to it, or did the spirit which prompted its sentiments belong strictly to that determinate instant of history? Could letters hold on to what they meant in a context of slide and slippage into crisis—or could no one dare credit them with meaning what they 32 A letter belongs to its moment, even if that moment never arrived. However, this absent letter presences the eternal moment of Caesar's text.

Now the momentaneous Caesar the Romans of the time were “reading,” and the Caesar that he was and is writing, were not invented from scratch. That is, at least, first base or bivouac in Caesar's self-presentation. Rather, this is the proconsul of Rome, victor over Gaul and Germany, proved in a series of wars and ordeals against the age-old barbarian threat to Roman Italy, the unprecedentedly acclaimed imperator. This is the hero of a thousand despatches, written up as the mastermind of the sevenfold Gallic Wars, equally apt to write as to fight. This same exemplary citizen and would-be servant of Rome is now the victim of his own success. Writing just one more epistle back home, he is feared and cold-shouldered. As if he leads a Gallic tumult, or as if the Roman government were tribal chieftains intimidated by the approach of the Roman Caesar they had learned to know and (rightly) fear. Yes, the trace of Gaul will persist in De Bello Ciuili.

In time, Caesar's lieutenant and amanuensis Hirtius would ape the hupomnêmata of Alexander's marshals, plug the gap in his leader's story, in his text and in his rhetoric. But when he did that, with De Bello Gallico VIII, the Caesar he would be writing for would have moved on many a mile. The project had become to complete the record of Caesar's progress to full “rationalization” of the Republican system of a bouleutic Senate supervising its temporary and inducted magisterial representatives—and the eventual nemesis of assassination by former associates and adversaries in coalition. The loyal Caesarian Hirtius' mimetic project of marching behind Caesar in filling out the record of his campaigns,³³ provisionally working up the most suitable primary despatches he could solder together into a supplementary Commentarius, may have been completed under the aegis of the dictator, as he seems to claim. Or the project may have been finished after Caesar's example, by the compilation of the remaining episodes in the corpus Caesarianum, up to and including, or down to, Caesar's ultimate battle of Munda, at the world's edge (BG [De Bello Gallico] 8 Praef.). Something an administrator could delegate, perhaps. The effect, at any rate, is to complete the soldierly biography of the soldier Caesar, as if the completion of his world conquest remained primarily a military matter, the progressive consolidation of exploits from prouincia to prouincia. But, it is patent to all, the geopolitics of Caesar's career invaginate any such portrait.

At any rate, the story Caesar made true by fighting, then writing, the Civil War down to his victory over, and vengeance for, Pompey made Caesar himself into an over-achieving imperator who could scarcely—and this on the most optimistic reckoning—take one more step without confirming the fears he has rejected so firmly from the outset.³⁴

By the end of Book III, the fame of Caesar meant the world was his oyster. As he (correctly as ever) reckoned, “all space shall be indifferently secure for Caesar” (3.106.3, aeque omnem sibi locum tutum fore), even if he does contrive to camouflage this new omnipotence adequately behind his cliffhanger of a finale: Caesar's back to the wall in Egypt. Romans must see that he is the new Savior: Pompeius—never Magnus in BC—has (it could seem) been cut down to size in the city that is the necropolis of Alexander, whose degenerate Ptolemaic wardens must be punished for the hubris they dare commit on the person of the great Roman Pompey, and then on the majesty of the serving consul of the populus Romanus, Caesar. (The Alexandrians killed Pompey “because the fasces paraded before Caesar … This was treason against the <videlicet Egyptian= crown,” 3.106.4: quod fasces anteferrentur … maiestatem regiam minui.) At this juncture, Caesar, come from the other end of the earth and its untamed barbarians of Britain all the way to the corrupt hyperculture of Egypt's eunuchs, queens and boy-kings, stands forth as beacon to all those in peril on the political main: he takes charge of the Pharus (112)—though, ironically, he could not himself sail out of Alexandria against the prevailing winds (107.1), the political winds that had blown him clean across the map, blowing with him until the end-point where he had prevailed over his Roman adversaries.

On the one hand, the victory at Pharsalus turned Caesar into the (double) savior of Ephesian Diana (105.1-3), blessed by annunciation across the Hellenistic East of the Macedonian diadochoi—from Olympia to Antioch to Ptolemais to Pergamum to Tralles—blessed, that is, with the charisma of a new super-Alexander (105.3-6). On the other, Caesar finds himself, for the first and last time in the text but, fatally, not for the last time in his life, as over-confident as any of his Roman adversaries had proved, and by “trusting in fama” gets outnumbered and bottled up “with troops no way numerous enough to trust in” (106.3, 109.2). For all the world, if one knew no better, like some second-rate Pompey. Like some Hector caught by his swift-footed Achillas?

As Caesar plays the perfect Roman magistrate in Alexandria, he gets the chance to re-play, his way, the Lentulus scene where he and writing Caesar came in. In Egypt there is, naturally, civil war, fought between kin. First, brother and sister; then another sister joins in, but soon disputes break out de principatu, and the united front needed to face the alien Roman teeters on the edge of collapse—just as the text gives out. These disputants were all reges—whereas Julius would continue, less and less plausibly from this moment on, to repeat to his subjects Caesaremse, non regem, esse.³⁵ Caesar thought the quarrel “involved the national interest and his own, as invested in his office” (ad populum Romanum et ad se, quod esset consul, pertinere). He also had a personal stake of honor, in the shape of past connections with the disputants (107.2)—just as in that opening chapter of BC Lentulus had, he said, had with Caesar (1.1.3). Caesar knew the solution: “Our recommendation is that Ptolemy R. and Cleopatra his sister dismiss the armies they have, and negotiate their differences before himself at law rather than between themselves at arms” (107.2, sibi placere regem Ptolomaeum atque eius sororem Cleopatram exercitus quos haberent dimittere et de controuersiis iure apud se potius quam inter se armis disceptare; cf. Bell. Gall. 8.55, ad fin., quoad sibi spes aliqua relinqueretur iure potius disceptandi quam belli gerendi, and 1.9.3-5, omnes ab exercitibus discederent … ipsi exercitus dimittant …, etc.). In the text, the threatened fusion of se with se here surely tells tales on the repressed investment in this work of boundarying the self against the disowned selves that are scheduled for abjection. Caesar cannot quite rise above his own rhetoric. Meantime, in the action, the solution doesn't work, for this state is indeed truly rotten, and needs saving from itself.

Caesar in Egypt faces the classic impurity of molten civil war: a rabble of Gabinius' former troops now married to natives, spawning hybrids as they unlearned “the name and norms of the Roman people” (nomen disciplinamque populi Romani) and turned to Alexandrian ways of license. Add a heap of bandits and robbers from all over, rootless flux. Stir in lots of criminals with a price on their heads, chuck-out exiles. Every runaway Roman slave made a bee-line for the foreign legion at Alex. Long decadence had made civil war a way of life: in the anti-politics of chaos, these forces stuck together, settling the hash of courtiers, extorting bonuses from the palace and even king-making.

These experienced mercenary muckers made of Caesar what civil war threatens to make of any commander, or disputant: a street-fighter, Caesar must descend to messy working from house to house, must turn the apparatus of orderly civic life into so many sordid fortifications and foxholes—theater, palace, harbor, docks, lighthouse. Egypt ultimately makes of Caesar 36

But this, the start of the Bellum Alexandrinum, was not a Roman civil war.³⁷ Here, Caesar could insist, was Caesar the servant of Rome still, carrying on where he left off in the wastes of the north, down in the post-civilized pit of the south, standard-bearer for the ethical center of the Roman world, upholding the order of Republican institutions. Best if the writer Caesar desists here. Rather than take his readers and his notes up the Nile, to serve Clio by living it up and writing it up on Cleo's barge!

Besides, the wars to come, in Africa and Spain, were both easy and impossible to tell as unCivil Wars, with too many eminent Roman deaths, among them the suicides of the greatest Republican names alive, the aristocrat in spades, Metellus Scipio, and the walking legend Cato the martyr; and worse to come, with the unglamorous chore of mopping up Pompey's litter. No doubt it could be done, by Caesar, rather than botched as it is by his loyal lieutenants. But whatever the causation, the question should be asked, just what flows from the fact that Caesar's text stops where it does, delegating the task of completing the campaign report to adjutant acolytes in the secretariat?³⁸

Henderson's story had to be that the débâcle in Alexandria caps Caesar's denial that he has fought a civil war. He may have been dragged involuntarily into circumstances that look mighty like civil war, but anyone who should take the trouble and take up the challenge to write up these drafted Commentarii will find that Caesar has consistently and resolutely engaged (us) in, at most, an involuntary series of bella minus quam ciuilia (“Wars this side of civil”).

There is Civil War in the Bellum Ciuile. But it appears just where Caesar doesn't. Inside the walls of Corfinium, under Caesar's blockade (1.20.3); in the mutual destruction of ships bent on battering the enemy in Massilian naumachy (2.6.4); and in Thessaly, where the Pompeian leader must be a ueteris homo potentiae, and his Caesarian rival a summae nobilitatis adulescens (3.35.2). The pattern where fraternization threatens to dissolve hostility into integration, but is foiled by desperate officers, does threaten to bring the horror too close to Caesar: in Spain, “civil war,” a sedition within the opponents' camp, has the troops “look out and call for anyone in Caesar's camp they knew or who came from the same town … complaining of bearing arms against people who were close to them and related by blood.” “Two camps were just looking like one,” when the Pompeian generals returned, to turn it round with savage war-crimes and cursed oaths (1.74-6). In return, as was noticed, Curio off in Africa had to scotch Varus' efforts to seduce the former Pompeian soldiers he once messed with at Corfinium (2.28). And in Greece, “between the two camps of Pompey and of Caesar, there was one river alone.” The soldiers kept talking to each other. Caesar sent Vatinius to the bank to yell out awkward questions about “why citizens couldn't send representatives to citizens … especially when the object was to stop citizens fighting a decisive war with citizens …” (ciuibus ad ciues … ciues cum ciuibus). Talks got as far as fixing venue and time, hopes ran high, but BC's villain, Labienus, pounced, as mysterious missiles hailed down, and told them off: “Stop talking about a settlement; for there can be no peace for us without fetching Caesar's head back with us” (3.19: capite relato). This “near thing” is twinned with Pompey's immediately preceding declaration, in response to proposals to discuss Caesar's instructions: “he interrupted him in full flow and barred him from another word, saying, ‘What use do I have for life or citizen status if I seem to have them by Caesar's favor? That opinion of the matter will be ineradicable, when … I'm thought to have been brought back to Italy […]’” (3.18.4f., reductus). So Civil War is waged in Pompey's camp; and Caesar is involved only as disputant trying (so Caesar writes) to end the dispute.

Otherwise, so Henderson observed, civil war in BC abides where it should—in downtown Alexandria. And Caesar searches only for “a farewell to arms on equal terms” (aequis condicionibus ab armis discedatur, 1.26.4), as he is led west to “learn the lie of the land / his opponents' position” (cognita locorum natura … ubi cognouit per Afranium stare quominus proelio dimicaretur) and offer battle in Spain “on equal ground” (aequo loco, 1.41.2f.), then as consul establishes “evenness” in the civil administration (aequitate decreti, 3.20.2), pleads for an armistice while the balance between the two sides was still “even” (aequa parte, 10.7), and still, at the death, offers battle “on even ground” against Pompey in Greece (aequum in locum, 55.1): although Pompey “kept drawing up his line at the roots of his hill, waiting to see if Caesar would subject himself to uneven ground” (iniquis locis), “one fine day Pompey's line advanced a little further beyond its daily routine, so it seemed possible for the fight to be on ground that was not uneven” (non iniquo loco, 85.1, 3). Pompey had all along “refused to let anyone get even with him in dignity” (neminem dignitate secum exaequari uolebat, 1.4.4). The rest, the text leaves to be gathered, is history.

3. LE PORTRAIT DE CéSAR, C'EST CéSAR³⁹

Soy esa torpe intensidad que es un alma⁴⁰

… ut de suis homines laudibus libenter praedicant …⁴¹

In 42 the precision of his circumvallations, the organization of supply, engineering, logistics.⁴³ And performatively his writing gives the order to relate his orders to the national interest. This, Caesar's message runs, is how these three books of writing-talk come to exist.

The author Caesar does not tell all that Caesar the actor did or was. In particular, his Caesar is not sighted composing the two books De Analogia on crossing the Alps between winter quarters and the front (Spring 54 bce). Here Caesar the purist Man of Letters once told Cicero's Empire how to speak Latin, in no uncertain terms.⁴⁴ He could make words stick to the world, close up description and prescription so tight that nomen and nominatum must bond in unique propriety.⁴⁵Commentarii in this stylistics could slough or veil their definitionally subjective particularity as a species of memoirs, for their narration blanks out marks of personality, limiting the narrative to an ascetic régime of reportage paradedly shorn of palpable mentalité. What was done, not what was being thought of; tactics not strategy; a world of detail, observation, specification, not overview, impression, valorization.

The proconsul in this field is but primus inter pares among the characters, an agent with the same strong exteriority of an officer-administrator's accounts; the narrator with the omniscience of retrospect writes a Caesar strictly intent on his business, dividing and ruling tribes and chiefs in the time-honored manner of the Roman commander.⁴⁶Any officer might be compiling these reports from the frontier? Almost.⁴⁷ But the writing Caesar twins with the written Caesar in their shared manner,⁴⁸ of swift, forceful, precise, pointed application to the matter in hand, customized rhetoric indistinguishable from impassive dash—“il velo dell'impassibilità, dietro il quale lo scrittore si nasconde.”⁴⁹ One signifier per signified. And in the BC, the dyad will shoot the moon.

That tenacious construction, the conqueror of Gaul, must become the reserve of credit that the Bellum Ciuile draws on. One complete set of Commentarii, one narrated Bellum, one Caesar. By analogical theory, BG and BC must bear the same referentiality, formal and actual, across the textual wound that is to be sutured by Hirtius. In this poetics, there will be no holding the boundary between Gaul and Italy, which Caesar and his texts must cross and re-cross as they progress their work.⁵⁰ The seven hundred and seventy five occurrences of “the letters of C-æ-s-a-r” (the letters of Caesar's name) that line up through BG and BC are one, in seamlessness.⁵¹

The narrative works hard to make the theory bite: features of BG litter the stages of BC. Guerrilla warfare in Spain has rubbed off on the legions “because they have got used to fighting Lusitanians and other barbarians in a barbarian-style of battle: this is something that generally happens, that soldiers are greatly affected by the habit of the regions in which soldiers have matured” (1.44.2). Lusitanian and local troops found it “easy to swim a river, because the habit of all of them is not to go on campaign without skins déjà vu feeling is completed when Juba deploys the “two thousand Spanish and Gallic horse” of his bodyguard, who did the traditional maneuver of fake retreat, before the sucker-punch (40f.). Greece had “barbarians” of its own, of course, as at Salonae (3.9.1), but wherever Caesar, or indeed Pompey, go, still the familiar old braves who have stayed the whole distance in writing Caesar ride in from the pages of the BG: most memorably the two Allobrog troopers, “men of unmatched courage, on whose top-quality services, best of warriors, Caesar had capitalized in all his Gallic Wars” (3.59.1f.; cf. 63.5, 79.6, 84.5). With the assistance of these old totems, Caesar's old wars are reinscribed to make up the Bellum <quam minime= Ciuile (“The War non-Civil”).

4. MEIN BUMPF

In short, you can beat personality tests.⁵²

Crude, violent, barbarous, the enemy has been cleanly divided from Rome; the mission of the imperium, a secure future behind pacified borders, has been celebrated for Latinitas; the moral center has repelled extremism far away to the Atlantic margins, rectified by Roman order: such are the grand mythologizations of the “realist” story of proconsular res gestae—the Caesaris … monimenta magni.⁵³ Now the Bellum Gallicum's greatest accomplishment, Caesar, must make himself count in a world bent on othering him, with ritual, with ridicule, and with righteousness. Caesar is The One, the same, in the field and on the page. His meanings must prevail, as before.

The authorities at Rome determined to prevent Caesar from articulating his case. They ruled out his criteria for making an intervention, effectively banishing him from the res publica: “they no longer lived in the same worlds, even though the words they spoke, barely now more than a convention, sounded the same.”⁵⁴ Like Coriolanus, Caesar must invent a one-man collectivity where he may retort in defiance, “I banish you.” If this was to respond to elimination outside the state by setting himself in its place,⁵⁵ he must transform the basis of his claim to serve the Republic still, the proconsul's solidarity with his legions, into a revisionary dispensation where Rome was retrieved from inimical déformation and distorting Tendenz. Caesar's victories will say what goes, what is what, and straighten out the rules for wor(l)d-dealing in Rome.⁵⁶ It wasn't Caesar's fault. It wasn't Rome's. Just a misguided cabal of losers.

So the arrogation of power for a Caesarian logonomy must amount to a complete bouleversement, tearing up the codes of his defeated enemies, reversing their verdicts, and yet, finally, dissolving the claim that any revolution has occurred. No, Caesar was never enemy to Rome; his vindication of the res publica brought no nouae tabulae; rather, he brought restoration, repair and renewal to the city. Those lost ones had done “what had never happened before” and gone “against all parallels from Antiquity,” “introduced the political novelty of armed quashing of tribunician veto,” “uttered new-fangled orders” (1.6.7f., 7.2, 85.8). All over Italy, “funds were extracted from the townships, lifted from consecrated shrines—throwing the divine and human rulebooks into confusion” (1.6.8).⁵⁷ Contrast Caesar, who saved that “holy of holies, the Roman treasury” (1.14.1), as he will restore his bullion and dedications to Hercules of Gades (2.21.3); later, a letter's opportune arrival from Pompey, urgent because of Caesar's lightning approach, “saved Diana of Ephesus' ancient vaults” from Scipio—shortly before another timely letter, from Favonius, turned Scipio's course, and “so Domitius' energy saved Cassius, Scipio's velocity saved Favonius” (3.33, … haec res Ephesiae pecuniae salutem attulit, 36.6f., … ita Cassio industria Domiti, Fauonio Scipionis celeritas salutem adtulit). Finally, as was remarked, “Caesar saved Ephesus' treasures a second time” (105.2, ita duobus temporibus Ephesiae pecuniae Caesar auxilium tulit). The one-and-only, true, Caesar.

That “Caesar's arrival caused panic flight” of his opponent as he violated every code (“arrival,” or “epiphany”: interpellatum aduentu Caesaris profugisse, 105.1) is the refrain established from the very start, where Caesar's adversaries are swept away in flight by his very proximity (1.13.1-3, aduentu Caesaris cognito … Varus … profugit, 15.3, Lentulus Spinther … Caesaris aduentu cognito profugit, 3.12.1-3, [Caesaris] aduentu audito L. Staberius … profugit).⁵⁸ So all fund-raising opportunities come not from Caesar, who only rewards his troops' efforts above and beyond the call of duty, but are, without exception, desecration: illegal expropriations meant to bribe the world's population to face Caesar.⁵⁹

Caesar's sanctity (he was, since 63, pontifex maximus) is further entrusted to narrative in military dress through the medium of the military oath of loyalty, named religio (1.67.3): his opponents stopped fraternization between the two camps dead by exacting “an oath not to desert or betray the army and generals, and not to plan their own individual salvation”; combined with their terroristic reprisals, the “unprecedented sanction of the oath” prevented progress to peace (iusiurandum; crudelitas in supplicio, noua religio iuris iurandi, 1.76.2-5). On the other hand, when their old commander Varus talks over the former Pompeian troops by recalling their “first memory of taking the oath,” the failed Caesar-clone Curio bucks up his panicky squad by discrediting “the oath dissolved by their surrender” in favor of the “fresh oath” sworn to serve Caesar; in the teeth of disaster, he himself refused to come back without the army entrusted him by Caesar and went down fighting (primam sacramenti … memoriam; sacramentum; noua religio, 2.28.2, 32.9f.; 42.5).⁶⁰ To stop his panicking army in Greece bolting from Caesar's approach, “Labienus swore he would not desert Pompey and would take his chances with him, and the rest then followed suit” (3.13.3f.). But when crews surrendered on receipt of Otacilius' “oath not to harm them, they were all led out and executed before his very eyes, in violation of the oath's sanction” (iureiurando; contra religionem iurisiurandi, 3.28.4): when his town came out for Caesar, Otacilius at once took to his heels (fugit, 29.1). For the climax of Pharsalus, Labienus again dashingly “took an oath that he would not return to camp unless victorious,” and got the rest, including Pompey himself, to follow suit (iurauit, 3.87.5f.). Pompey precisely fled back to camp, in the “rout” (fuga) that ensued, whereas the Caesarian hero Crastinus showed how it should be done, with the simplicity of a promise—minus the histrionics of oath-taking—“I shall see today, my general, that you thank me alive or dead” (91.3). In the event, Crastinus (Tomorrow's man of the present moment: cras, cf. hodie), “was killed in combat, when a sword stabbed his face/mouth: and so it came true, all he'd said on his way to the fight …” (99.2f., gladio in os aduersum coniecto). Here the savage justice of slaughter through the mouth seals the “truth” of his appeal to his ole buddies: “Follow me, … and give your general the service you pledged” (uestro imperatori quam constituistis operam date, 91.2). Self-reflexively, the character books his place in Caesar's heart, and record: an exemplum to be mentioned in despatches: BC is, not least, figured as Caesar's homage to his army, written fides.

Finally, “the edict signed by Pompey, which told all males of serviceable age to enlist, whether Greeks or Roman citizens,” failed, as Pompey was shooed onwards by Caesar's relentless approach and his “flight” (fuga) continued past shut city-gates as “the word of Caesar's approach spread through city on city” (iurandi causa; cognito Caesarisque aduentu ex eo loco discessit, iamque de Caesaris aduentu fama ad ciuitates perferebatur, 102.2, 4, 8). The only place on earth which would take Pompey in, perverse Egypt, duly did take him in, and treacherously executed him, too, at the hands of the Egyptian minion and of Pompey's former aide “against the pirates,” now turned pirate, not on the high seas but in a “toy dinghy”—the state that Pompey's ship had shrunk to (bello praedonum; nauiculam paruulam, 104.3). The ultimate poetic irony, then, is when (it has already been observed) Caesar's “approach” behind his consular fasces stirs this one township's population against Caesar, while he is kept from flight by the winds and, more than taken in by treacherous Alexandria's open door, he is holed up there at journey's end!

Now all this combination of sacrality and finance, words and bonds, that Henderson has rehearsed, goes to prove this was never a tale of civil war. Caesar did not engage in any such abomination, however it may have threatened to engulf and stain his majestic state procession bringing peace on earth. Those self-dramatizing oaths always figured in tragical narrative structures as prelude to nemesis, after fortune has oppressed Caesar, then capsized to punish his rivals for hubristic over-confidence on a Herodotean scale.⁶¹

Caesar made his righteousness plain to doubters among his readers when he assumed the fasces at Rome to inaugurate, bless, and commandeer BC Book III. As who did not know?, debt cancellation “habitually follows wars and civil fallout” (fere bella et ciuiles dissensiones sequi consueuit); the unjustly condemned victims of Pompey's law Caesar “put back into one piece again” (in integrum restituit), by due process of magisterial legislation ad populum. When these unfortunates offered him their services initio belli ciuilis (3.1.4)—one of the very few concessions Caesar ever makes to the stakes of his title and his predicament⁶²—he did no such thing. Rather, he acted as if he had taken up their offer, though he had never fought dirty from the beginning of the troubles onwards. “He had decided they should be restored by the verdict of the Roman People rather than rescued by favor of Caesar” (3.1.3-5).⁶³

This from Caesar as legitimate and acknowledged dictator of Rome, and duly elected consul designate, to boot. Now for a negative proof, if proof could be needed. While he religiously held the elections and the Latin festival before duly abdicating the temporary crisis post of dictator and setting off to campaign abroad, his own aide, Caelius Rufus, tried to stir up, as praetor, resentment against Caesar's new equity; failing to find cracks here, Caelius turned to legislative intervention but was suppressed and suspended from office by consul and Senate; resorting to an unholy alliance with Pompey's discredited and banished former aide, Milo, he tried to stir up rebellion in Italy, while pretending to join Caesar. Their gladiators and pastores, debtors and armed slaves, and attempts to bribe Caesar's Gallic and Spanish cavalry, were scotched by local citizenry and a legion. Milo was killed by a rock flung from a town-wall; Caelius by Caesar's troopers. “So it was that this overture to world-shaking events … had a lightning and effortless finale” (3.20-22, Ita magnarum initia rerum … celerem et facilem exitum habuerunt). Here, in microcosm, is the turmoil and contamination of civil war—what could have filled the pages of the Bellum Ciuile. A caricature because a miniature, a storm in a might-have-been teacup; but, for all that, an exemplary lesson in the temperate abstention of the Pompey-Caesar dissension from the anticipated brew of social anarchy, opportunistic terrorism and cataclysmic mischief.

Above all, Caesar uses the Caelius-Milo sideshow to displace from himself the mindset of devilment. The minions ape the comradely conduct of war which the leaders manage to preserve between them through the narrative, as if by concerted arrangement. And Caesar begins his show-down campaign against Pompey as the moderate and balanced representative of legitimate Roman authority, impossible to confuse with any traitorous trouble-maker such as the hostis renegade Caelius (3.21.5). The “secret messages” from Caelius to Milo (clam nuntiis, 21.4) Caelius dissimulated virtually at once; Milo's “letter,” circulated to claim he acted under Pompey's “orders” as the commission brought to him by an intermediary (litteris … mandata, 22.1), cut no ice, so he dropped the idea on the instant. Contrast these botched perversions with Caesar's crusade of honest negotiation and sincere self-positioning …

Well on the way to becoming Caesar, the consul installs the “representational economy” of his self, plotting self-action in relation to his progressive escape from the bind of his framing as invader of his country, toward transcendence of the parameters within which civic identities should abide.⁶⁴ When writing Caesar prepares to leave him ice-cold in Alex, he has, for the first time, been disjoined from his armies. No longer the soldiers' soldier, he has not yet the autarky of the autonomous imperial ruler; but, now that there is no need to defeat Pompey, he must float upstream, and get ready to re-negotiate the terms of his interactive sociality with the rest of his world's ciues Romani. Readers know how far he is to travel toward arrogating the Pharaonic preeminence that commands official history in any autocracy. Caesar will dispense and own justice, his will to power coincident with the political will. For a short pancratic while, before the first Ides of March in Julian temporality initiated his ascension to divinity as Diuus Iulius, Caesar could try out less deprecatory selves for size. It would be left for Lucan to read/write back into the Civil War zone the prefiguration of every monarch of the West by “Julius Caesar (the memorable Roman Emperor).”⁶⁵

Yet in the anathematic Caesarian third person narration,⁶⁶ there already lurks the logic of a subservience of the world of writing Caesar to the writing of Caesar. The narrator's devotion to first-hand “I”-witness depiction of the generalissimo in the ascendant threatens to model already the exclusive focusing of history on a Sun-King's autofellatory self-orbiting.⁶⁷

5. L'ÉTAT C'EST MOI

Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.⁶⁸

All latin masters hav one joke.

Caesar ad sum jam forte.⁶⁹

Writing Caesar necessarily paints himself into a complex and contradictory corner between conflicting discourses. On the one hand, the armies he led were “incomparably superior to any forces at the disposal of his adversaries.”⁷⁰ The celerity which gave him a bloodless occupation of Italy was not simply a genius' trademark;⁷¹ it also labels the expediency of his cause: “[H]e would not yield the advantage that the rapidity of his offensive gave him …, never prepared to lose the momentum of his offensive.”⁷² Military superiority must be veiled: this is not why Caesar would march on his country. Not that he ever did any such thing, nor does it in (that misnomer) the De Bello Ciuili.

No. Caesar has nothing to hide. Just not his style. As Henderson has noted and Caesar told, he nailed his colors to the mast, catalogues the Italian communities that spontaneously, enthusiastically, convincedly came over. Call it “bandwagon propaganda,”⁷³ but these peoples of Italy were won over by the justice of his case, his forbearance, sensitivity, authenticity. The (discredited) government representatives disqualified themselves: they turned tail, ditched their men, abandoned their vaunts, saved their skins because they were found out, cowardly, inept, hypocritical. None of this was the result of the imminent approach of the largest fighting force on the planet (= Caesar), veterans of no holds barred massacre and all-out scourging of the Hun and the Gaul, not at all.⁷⁴

Nothing to fear from their rapacity, not with this proconsul disciplinarian at the reins (actually, Caesar admits it once, “urgently instructing Trebonius per litteras not to let the town be forcibly stormed, in case the soldiers … killed all the adults, which they were threatening to do, and were with difficulty held from bursting into the town,” 2.13.3f.).⁷⁵ Nothing to fear, for those who learned the dual lesson of the twin Thessalian towns of (1) Gomphi, where the approaching Caesar's response to being misunderstood and refused entry was exemplary terrorism pour encourager les autres, as “he yielded the township to the troops for plunder” (reliquis ciuitatibus huius urbis exemplo inferre terrorem … ad diripiendum militibus concessit, 3.80.6f.); and (2) Metropolis, which was indeed encouraged by the chomping and gnashing of Gomphoi to admit Caesar, escape the same fate and provide the rest of Thessaly, and indeed the Roman and every soi-disant metropolis, with the moral (3.81). So: Caesar's men only behaved like those who crushed Gaul so they did not need to crush anyone (else). And, to read those who write on Caesar, it need never be known that this was a one-man superpower that tells the world it (he) was. That is not what the row of flag waving townsfolk lined their streets to say when they volunteered “to do the things he ordered” (quaeque imperauerat se cupidissime facturos, 1.15.2, sese paratos esse … quaeque imperauerat facere, 20.5, quae imperaret facturos, seseque imperata facturos, 60.1, 3.12.4, ciuitates imperata facturas, 34.2)—for all that this 76 is what it (and they?) meant: sc. (1) what the losers of Gomphi wanted to tell Caesar when they thought him beaten and shut their gates on him (3.80.); (2) the correlative of what the people of Antioch and its Roman citizens told the Pompeian fugitives, once beaten: “If you approach, it will gravely endanger your necks” (3.102.6, ne Antiochiam adirent; id si fecissent, magno eorum capitis periculo futurum); (3) denique (writes Caesar) what Alexandria did to fallen Pompey: “just the way disaster regularly turns friends to enemies” (ut plerumque in calamitate ex amicis inimici exsistunt, 104.1).

It was not that Caesar's lightning trajectory promised all the world in his path that an open arms welcome would help speed him on his way, the low-cost wait-and-see policy of prudence. Why, no one in the Bellum Ciuile supposes that this renegade Alexander controlled only his next host, while those in his wake hoped (erroneously) that Caesar could not be everywhere at once. The regrouping of government troops in the West behind Caesar's lines awaits Hirtius' sequel, after the initial sortie to hunt Pompey down is brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Nor had Caesar, in pursuit of the soonest cessation of the troubles, left the new provincial front-line unforgivably bereft of legions—as he would accuse irresponsible Scipio of doing when he left the Parthians rampant in his rear, and his men muttered, “We'll go if we're led at the enemy, but we ain't gonna shoot no citizen, nor no consul, neither” (sese, contra hostem si ducerentur, ituros, contra ciuem et consulem arma non laturos, 3.31.3f.).

For dutiful Caesar took care to leave regiments behind in Gaul, and had fresh outfits raised among the tribesmen. Not—not only—to block any assault from Spain (2.37, 39). Caesar's prompt siege also took Massilia out of the war, have mercy, as the obvious port and springboard for any counter-invasion of Italy from the West. That this plan, the plan to save Italy, continued seamlessly from the campaigns against the barbarians, except that success in Gaul had brought Caesar enormous fresh reserves of recruits and levies to use against Rome, was a fact that must both be obscured and yet also, for other considerations, paraded.⁷⁷

Caesar's command of his men rested on the mutual solidarity of loyal Roman vets. who had been through hell and high water together on an unconscionably prolonged tour of duty—“Nine long years,”⁷⁸ “something that had never ever happened in the army of Caesar,”⁷⁹ “Alesia and Avaricum—conquerors of most mighty nations,”⁸⁰ “just like Gergovia”⁸¹—they had seen many a close-run scrap. He was one of the boys, engrossing them within his own name-and-fame (e.g. frumentum … reliqui si quid fuerat, Caesar superioribus diebus consumpserat, 1.48.5, as if Caesar wolfed the lot), and never once tagging them Caesariani, but always nostri, in flagrant violation of his self-denying third-person autodiegetic narrative form.⁸² His proconsular dignity did at the outset repose on this guaranteed domain of mass approval: “a victorious general who had served the state well,” as the counselors of Auximum imperatorem bene de re publica meritum tantis rebus gestis, 1.13.1). One day's march was doubtless much the same as another, whether it took the standards into forbidden Italy or anywhere else. But this shower were not simply Caesar's might; this 'orrible lot (must somehow) model also his right.⁸³ Not just because they were bonded by transgression, as full of mercy as anyone with a price on their head. Not just—

Well. The same general who had (this must be so) mobilized and summoned his crack units from their original encampments to join him at the double, on the worst-case scenario, or the long-prepared plan,⁸⁴ of immediately overrunning all Italy, to wage his non-war of non-aggression, also made a virtue of his military ethos: straight talking and no taking needless risks or treating men as expendable cannon-fodder. This became and becomes the kernel of his pitch that he would avoid loss of life on both sides.⁸⁵

Far from setting a fearful horde on the civilians back home, Caesar would fight the good fight, no fight. Not unless it was picked with him. Far from prosecuting energetic Blitzkrieg, Caesar was not even at war—let alone civil war. Instead, the diplomatic mission to secure fair treatment for himself and his band of triumphant heroes rested on a solid bedrock of orderly communications, a word that was his bond, orders that kept his myriads in order. Streets rumbling with tanks? What tanks? What rapid reaction force? What peace-keepers?

Written Caesar stands on his dignity, from unopposed pacifier of Gaul to consul cornered in the suburbs of Egypt. His writer sees to that any which way, somehow. Rhyming writer-reader relations with officer-men rapport, until none can either discern the last proconsular conqueror of the Republic or discriminate the first writer and mythographer of the Empire. Only (the titular) “LETTER[S] OF CAESAR.”

imagine that a general electroencephalocardiosomatopsychogram were possible.⁸⁶

Notes

1. The sections of Henderson's essay articulate terms for this initial motion, cursively and cursorily as Caesar. Explicit recapitulation is as foreign to this pleading as capitulation.

2. Caesar “fights for peace,” Collins (1972) 957. For the liveliest introduction to BC, see Richter 166-79. On the opening chapters, cf. H. Oppermann, “Aufbau. Anfang des Bellum Civile,” in Rasmussen 138-64.

3. Raditsa 450f.

4. Ibid. 448.

5. “First do, and then justify.” For Caesar's “ben calcolata reticenza” on the Rubicon, cf. Pascucci 519f.

6. A. Hitler, Der Hitler-Prozess, in A. Bullock, Hitler, A Study in Tyranny (Harmondsworth, 1962) 117.

7. To start with consules is the Roman way; but unnamed consuls are an odd way to begin—as adrift as the Republican calendar, which Caesar would soon reform: the timing of the Bellum Ciuile would then require re-scheduling, commandeered by Julian temporality from 46 bce.

8. Esp. Carter 28, “All surviving manuscripts … lack the beginning of the work”; cf. 153f. for “strong reasons for believing that at least several sentences have been lost from the start of the book.” M. Gelzer, Caesar. Politician and Statesman (Oxford, 1969) 190 n. 5, “Unfortunately the beginning of Caesar's bellum civile as preserved in our manuscripts is defective, and the end of Hirtius' b.G. 8 is also missing.” Brunt 18, “The end of Hirtius' narrative and the beginning of Caesar's are both lost.” Raditsa 439, “The mutilated state of the end of bG 8 and the beginning of bc 1 make it difficult to assert with full confidence that Caesar omitted the contents of his letter to the Senate.” The MSS have the irritating intrusion a Fabio C. between the opening … litteris and Caesaris (= a Curione? Cf. Richter 175).

9. Carter 153.

10. Barwick 17f. argues that Caesar withholds the contents of his letter because, or lest, they might seem tantamount to menacing arrogance.

11. This event is marked out by necare, a solitarium in BC (I. Opelt, “‘Töten’ und ‘Sterben’ in Caesars Sprache,” Glotta 58 (1980) 103-119, at 112.

12. Cf. LaPenna 194.

13. Cf. Eden 115f.

14. ne id quidem impetrauisse here amounts to a back reference to the opening sentence of BC. Cf. the version in Suet. Div. Iul. 29.2, ne sibi beneficium populi adimeretur, aut ut ceteri quoque imperatores ab exercitibus discederent. Appian Bell. Ciu. 2.32.128 claims the letter “included a proud account of all Caesar had done from the start, plus a challenge to Pompey to resign simultaneously”; cf. Dio 41.1.3f. (See F. Kraner, F. Hofmann, H. Meusel, H. Oppermann, C. Iulii Caesaris Commentarii De Bello Ciuli [Berlin, 1959] 12f.)

15. “Half way between a threat and a promise,” comments Collins (1972) 957. That is, a threat; all the way (docet, wrote Caesar, 32.2).

16. For the terms stipulated by Caesar, cf. LaPenna 196-98, Barwick 47-70. Suet. Iul. 86 underscores Caesar's New Order: non tam sua quam rei publicae interesse uti saluus esset; se iam pridem potentiae gloriaeque abunde adeptum, rem publicam si quid sibi eueniret, neque quietam fore et aliquanto deteriore condicione ciuilia bella subituram.

17. See R. Hodge and G. Kress, Language as Ideology (London, 1993) 162-64.

18. On the Sullan typology, cf. Collins (1972) 961f. Prejudice for “the One” over “the Many” is coterminous with Caesarism, surfacing again e.g. at 3.18.2, where the summa imperii went to no one admiral after the death of butcher Bibulus. Prelude to the squabbling marshals counting their chickens before Pharsalus (3.83).

19. Cf. Collins (1972) 945f.

20. Plin Nat. Hist. 7.91. Cf. Rambaud 23.

21. For close reading of 1.8.1, cf. Pascucci 517-19.

22. See the important paper of W. W. Batstone, “Etsi: A Tendentious Hypotaxis in Caesar's Plain Style,” AJPh 111 (1990) 348-60.

23. For the farcical treatment of Varro, cf. A. Haury, “Ce brave Varron … (César, Ciu., II, 17-21),” in Mélanges d'archéologie, d'épigraphie et d'histoire offerts à Jérome Carcopino (Paris, 1966) 507-513; LaPenna 194; Eden 116. See Rowe for the articulation between the dramas in nearer and further Spain.

24. “Tear off a strip” is colloquial for “rebuke” (as sergeant-major to ordinary soldiers). Respect for Pompey: Collins (1972) 954; irony: Perrotta 20f.; satire: LaPenna 193f. In BC III, Caesar writes the pair Caesar and Pompey into all but parodic parallelism, e.g. 45.1f., 76.1f.

25. Explained well by Eden 108.

26. Rowe.

27. Raditsa 434.

28. B. Jonson, Discoveries, in J. D. Wilson, “Ben Jonson and ‘Julius Caesar,’” in P. Ure, Shakespeare, Julius Caesar: A Selection of Critical Essays (London, 1969) 241-52, at 245.

29. S. Sebag Montefiore, King's Parade (Harmondsworth, 1992) 67.

30. The modeling of the transference, the repetition compulsion, within reading staged in Poe's The Purloined Letter, the “figure in the text, something hidden in full view as one reads,” is summarized effectively in E. Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (London, 1984) 66f., 113, 114-16; cf. J. Henderson, “Becoming a Heroine (IST): Penelope's Ovid,” LCM 11 (1986) 7-10, 21-24, 37-40, 67-70, 81-85, 114-20, on epistoliterarity.

31. The classic prosecution of the guilt of Caesar scriptor compounding that of Caesar imperator is Rambaud.

32. Raditsa 439f. shows brilliantly, as Caesarian partisan, how the narrative mimes the impact of the events on interpretation of those events.

33. Cf. J. Tatum, Xenophon's Imperial Fiction: On the Education of Cyrus (Princeton, 1989) 208 for the compulsive drive of the bioscript primer: at the end, “The text of the Cyropaedia dissolves in mimetic replication of Cyrus, with his lieutenants and satraps doing what Xenophon's readers may now do in turn: imitate Cyrus.”

34. Contrast Collins (1959) 117, “BC is a work republican through and through; … it neither contains the spirit nor the foreshadowing of the ‘monarchial’ or ‘imperial’ idea” (discussed by Mutschler 198f.).

35. Suet. Diu. Iul. 79.2: “Caesar,” that is, “—not some dime-a-dozen king.”

36. Anarchic confusion in arming slaves formulaically tars the opposition with making war on the ciuitas, e.g. 1.24.1, 3.22.2, 3.103.1, Rambaud 339, Collins (1972) 953.

37. Cf. F. Ahl, Lucan: An Introduction (Cornell, 1976) 307. R. M. Ogilvie, “Caesar,” in E. J. Kenney and W. V. Clausen, eds., The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, Vol. II (Cambridge, 1982) 281-85, at 284f. accepts the incomplete state and status of BC III. Barwick 93-106 argues cogently (if only the uncanny or poetic be banished from our order of history) that BC is a finished, not an uncompleted, work. J. M. Carter, Julius Caesar, The Civil War Book III (Warminster, 1993) 233 notes laconically, “Caesar's narrative stops here, in mid-course.”

38. The argument that Caesar's greatest reader and interpreter, Lucan, makes much of the point of termination of Caesar's BC in his own bella plus quam ciuilia is more than presentably set out in J. Masters, Poetry and Civil War in Lucan's “Bellum Civile” (Cambridge, 1992) 216-59, “The Endlessness of the Civil War.”

39. See Marin 206-214, esp. 213, “to paint the king's portrait is to make the portrait of all possible future kings.”

40. “I am this groping intensity that is a soul,” J. L. Borges, Selected Poems 1923-1967 (Harmondsworth, 1962) 54: “Mi Vida Entera” (= “My Whole Life”).

41. “

42. suos ordines seruare, e.g. 1.44.3 and passim—military morality.

43. Caesar writes of engineering feats, instead of Caesar fighting, from Corfinium (1.21.4f., 19.5) and Brundisium (25.5), to Spanish ditch without rampart (41.4: a ruse), multi-channel ford (61), or the staple uallo fossaque (81.6; cf. Rambaud 248-50, “Travaux et Flottes”). War at Massilia, when out of the shipyards, consists in fanatically devoted description of fiendish towers and ramps (2.8-13.1, 15f.). In Greece, the war is a sapper's paradise: erat noua et inusitata belli ratio … in nouo genere belli nouae ab utrisque bellandi rationes reperiebantur (3.47.1, 50.1, cf. 39f., 43.2, 44.3, 46.1, 54, 58, 63.1). Beats civil war (like other ways in which mass killing can be recharged in telling of derring-do: for example, the race for the pass in Spain, 1.70, and the cross-country dash, 1.79).

44. Cf. E. Rawson, Intellectual Life in the Late Republic (London, 1985) 122, G. L. Hendrickson, “The De Analogia of Julius Caesar: Its Occasion, Nature, and Date, with additional Fragments,” CPh 1 (1906) 97-120, W. A. Oldfather and G. Bloom, “Caesar's Grammatical Theories and his own Practise,” CJ 22 (1926-1927) 584-602; for political grammar, cf. P. Sinclair, “Political Declensions in Latin Grammar and Oratory, 55 bce-ce 39,” in A. J. Boyle, ed., Roman Literature and Ideology: Essays for J. P. Sullivan (Victoria, 1995 = Ramus 24.1) 92-109, at 93.

45. E.g. Eden 86, “the same words for the same situations.” The Caesar of the Classical canon models (a) cultural politics where normative logocentrism is worn as the badge of semiotic power: “Caesar seems to have viewed the anarchic growth of language with disfavor, and in trying to bring order out of chaos to have applied almost a logician's insistence on having only one symbol for one concept or relationship” (ibid. 97; cf. Pascucci 493, 501). Readers need not imagine a cosmos of Caesarian Newspeak, but should rather trace the Caesarian texts' trading on the legend of their monologism from continual and cardinal violation to violation. The old style of scientistic study of Caesarian purism (e.g. J.J. Schlicher, “The Development of Caesar's Narrative Style,” CPh 31 (1936) 212-24: “the low percentage of dominant verbs preceded by two or more subordinate clauses or phrases in Books i and ii is probably due to the greater brevity and simplicity of the sentences, which average 30.3 per 100 lines”) has yielded to a more recent quest to tease out the self-disguised art of a plain stylist (H. C. Gotoff, “Towards a Practical Criticism of Caesar's Prose Style,” ICS 9 (1984) 1-18: “Obviously the Commentaries are a form of self-advertisement; what form of self-advertisement is less obvious. … It may be that Caesar has succeeded all too well in disguising his art; that centuries of readers … have failed to notice his diversity, his deceptiveness, and his power” (5f.). “Caesarian prose style,” that is to say, still gathers formalist panegyric (cf. M. F. Williams, “Caesar's Bibracte Narrative and the Aims of Caesarian Style,” ICS 10 (1985) 215-26) that is dead set against invasion by the politics of discourse. But what got written in 1942 as N. J. deWitt, “The Non-Political Nature of Caesar's Commentaries,” TAPA 73 (1942) 341-52? And what in 1948, as Perrotta 29, “Egli è il più grande Romano di tutti i tempi e riassume in sè tutta la gloria di Roma: ha l'impeto guerriero di Mario e il senno politico di Silla, l'audacia riformatrice dei Gracchi e l'aristocratica saggezza degli Scipioni”?

46. Cf. R. R. Dyer, “Rhetoric and Intention in Cicero's Pro Marcello,” JRS 80 (1990) 17-30, at 18 for the idea that Caesar's treatment of pacified Rome was on a continuum with the way he had earlier treated Gaul.

47. See Bérard esp. 93, “Il ne s'agit donc pas d'une autobiographie … mais d'un autoportrait.”

48. For the classic account of Caesar's style as mimetic of his generalship, see H. Fränkel, “Über philologische Interpretation am Beispiel von Caesars Gallischem Krieg,” Rasmussen, 165-88, esp. 182ff.

49. Perrotta 27. Cf. Bérard 94, “deux personnages, l'auteur-narrateur et le proconsul-protagoniste, qui se cachent mutuellement.” F. E. Adcock, Caesar as a Man of Letters (Cambridge, 1956) 76, manages to speak of written Caesar as “the natural, almost automatic, expression of his conscious pre-eminence.” Raditsa, who took the notion that there must have been a Machtsfrage behind the Caesarian Rechtsfrage seriously: “Such statements have consequences. One sees them in the faces of one's students” (440 n. 68)—admired Caesar because he “distinguished thought from feeling but did not suffer their opposition,” adding in a footnote, “Hans Oppermann (Berlin, 1933: repeated in “Probleme und heutiger Stand der Caesarforschung,” in Rasmussen 485-522, at 497) has beautifully put this … : ‘Der wichtigste (reason for the resistance to and murder of Caesar) ist vielleicht die Einheit von Caesars Persönlichkeit … ist Caesar die letzte Verkörperung der Lebensganzheit in der Antike’” (442 and n. 74).

50. Esp. Collins (1972) 932f., 942, puts notable effort into severing the limbs of the Caesarian corpus.

51. The often-repeated count was made by Rambaud 196f.; Caesar is normatively salient in its sense-units, cf. M. Rambaud, “Essai sur le style du Bellum Ciuile,” IL 14 (1962) 60-69, 108-113, at 67f. …

52. D. Huff, Score: The Strategy of Taking Tests (Harmondsworth, 1964) 110.

53. Catull. 11.10, “Caesar the Great's legacy.”

54. Raditsa 449.

55. Cf. S. Petrey, Speech Acts and Literary Theory (London, 1990) 95f., 98f., S. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1987) 143-77, “Coriolanus and Interpretations of Politics (‘Who does the wolf love?’).” Raditsa 439 bites the bullet, to show it isn't one: “the Senate grew incapable of negotiations with Caesar, and took unilateral steps toward war. It collapsed completely when it passed the senatus ultimum consultum. In its threat, it forced Caesar, who did not take threats lightly, to act.”

56. Caesar stresses he is the very model of the military passim, but esp. with his tactical play with the Roman reveille: “uasa” militari more conclamari (1.66.1: a ruse), ne conclamatis quidem “uasis” vs. “uasis” que militari more conclamatis (3.37.5 vs. 38.1: bungle vs. ruse). Disgrace at Dyrrhachium hurt, quod ante in exercitu Caesaris non accidit, ut rei militaris dedecus admittatur (3.64.4), but Caesar's “Up and at 'em” speech before Pharsalus was perfect: exercitum cum militari more ad pugnam cohortaretur … (3.90.1).

57. Cf. 1.32.5, omnia permisceri mallent …

58. See the powerful blueprint of W. W. Batstone, “A Narrative Gestalt and the Force of Caesar's Style,” Mnemosyne 44 (1991) 126-36, esp. 128f.; Rambaud 254f. saw how the formula encompassed the entire narrative.

59. See M. McDonnell, “Borrowing to Bribe Soldiers: Caesar's De Bello Civili 1.39,” Hermes 118 (1990) 55-66.

60. Seeing Caesar's Curio as “ein jungeres Abbild seiner selbst,” H. Oppermann, “Curio—Miles Caesaris?” Hermes 105 (1977) 351-68, at 352, cf. Gärtner 122-25.

61. See Rowe 404 (but cf. the critique in Mutschler 222 and n. 1).

62. The Bellum Ciuile, first called bellum at 1.25.3 (Pompey), 26.6 (Caesar; cf. 35.1, etc.). As throughout Latinity (V. Rosenberger, Bella et Expeditiones. Die antike Terminologie der Kriege Roms [Stuttgart, 1992] 150-60, esp. 158), euphemisms predominate, e.g. conficiendi negotii, initio dissensionis (1.29.1, 3.88.2; cf. Rambaud 66). At times Caesar talks as a military expert of “War,” simpliciter, for all the world as if circumstances don't alter cases (1.21.1, quod saepe in bello paruis momentis magni casus intercederent, 3.32.5, quod in bello plerumque accidere consueuit, 92.4f., est quaedam animi incitatio atque alacritas naturaliter innata omnibus, quae studio pugnae incenditur … neque frustra antiquitus institutum est …). Very rarely, Caesar steels himself to slip in pontification that does belong in a Bellum Ciuile: quod perterritus miles in ciuili dissensione timori magis quam religioni consulere consuerit (1.67.3), and qui fere bella et ciuiles dissensiones sequi consueuit (3.1.3). In the latter outrage, one can't even tell whether to read in ciuilia with bella.

63. On Caesar's financial moderation, mimetically captured in the apt syntax of et ad timorem nouarum tabularum tollendum minuendumue … et ad debitorum tuendam existimationem esse aptissimum existimauit (3.1.2), cf. LaPenna 198-200.

64. Cf. D. Battaglia, ed., Rhetorics of Self-Making (Berkeley, 1995), “Problematizing the Self: A Thematic Introduction,” 2-4 for interesting (anthropological) rehearsal of this critique/jargon.

65. W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (Harmondsworth, 1960) 9.

66. “We thought him too cold or—shall we say?—‘icily regular’. We cursed his eternal third person.” (H. P. Cooke, In the Days of our Youth (London, 1925) 12, cit. C. Stray, “The Smell of Latin Grammar: Contrary Imaginings in English Classrooms,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester 76 (1994) 201-220, at 204). This is all about power and the normative didaxis figured in this sadodispassionate “set book”: “The first author read is Caesar—particularly adapted to disgust a twelve-year-old boy with Latin.” (E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages [London, 1953] 51 n. Cf. E. Owen, “Caesar in American Schools Prior to 1860,” CJ 31 [1935-1936] 212-22.) Writing out of Berkeley, R. T. Lakoff, Talking Power: The Politics of Language (New York, 1990) 239-53, “Winning Hearts and Minds: Pragmatic Homonymy and Beyond” compares and contrasts Caesar's third person with that of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North: North “uses it to create emotional identification,” Caesar “detachment. But the positive impact of intimacy in a liteness style precisely parallels that of aloofness for a gravitas culture. The impact of each on its intended audience is similar. Both engender trust: this is a good person. … The plots are the same for both, and both shows are smash hits.”

67. Cf. Marin 39-88, “The King's Narrative, or How to Write History.”

68. F. Herbert, Dune Messiah (London, 1969) 47: “Words of Muad'dib by Princess Irulan.”

69. G. Willans and R. Searle, Down with Skool! (London, 1973) 47.

70. Brunt 13, citing Cic. Ad Fam. 8.14.3.

71. For Caesar's mastery of the time-space-socio-political continuum, cf. H. Fugier, “Un thème de la propagande Césarienne dans le De Bello Ciuili: César, Maître du Temps,” Bulletin de la Faculté de Lettres à Strasbourg 47 (1968) 127-33.

72. Brunt 21, 22.

73. Collins (1959) 120f., (1972) 958f.

74. See Collins (1972) 933f., for Caesar's atrocities and “ethnic cleansing” in Gaul, esp. BG 4.11.5. Caesar would hold the world record for scalps in battle: 1,192,000 (Plin. Nat. Hist. 7.92).

75. This was Massilia, symbolic home of the free, as Caesar indicates, when “he preserved them more for their name and fame in Ancient History than the way they'd treated him,” 2.22.6; for Caesarian troops bent on plunder, cf. 1.21.2, 3.97.1.

76. The terms belong in the minds if not the mouths of Caesar's soldiers, cf. 3.6.1, imperaret quod uellet, quodcumque imperauisset, se aequo animo esse facturos.

77. E.g. the brace of Gallic chieftains who desert Caesar, 3.59; who later tip off Domitius, 80.7, cf. 84.4. Turncoat Labienus is wrong as ever, “Do not think, Pompey, that this is the army that flattened Gaul and Germany …,” 87.1.

78. As Caesar told his troops, who roar approval, 1.7.7f. Cf. 1.39.2.

79. 3.64.4.

80. 3.47.5.

81. 3.73.6: an intertextual signal, cf. Gärtner 127.

82. Cf. Perrotta 14f.

83. These expressions are more army slang, from sarge to privates.

84. This suspicion is unsuccessfully neutralized by displacement onto Pompey: Caesar tells his troops the Spanish armies were “fostered against him for full many a year. … The whole shooting-match was readied against Caesar” (1.85.5, 8).

85. E.g. LaPenna 200 and Collins (1972) 960f. examine Caesar's abjuration of bloodshed (1.72, 74, 76, 3.90, 98 …), but without (I think) getting the point: linkage.

86. J. Derrida, “Dialanguages,” in Points (Stanford, 1995) 144.

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