For Latin scholars, translating extracts from Caesar's "Gallic Wars" is an evocative, if not nostalgic, experience, because for so many of us our earliest Latin textbooks featured sentences and passages taken from this famous work, albeit these were usually heavily abridged for young learners. Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.), while perhaps the greatest general and statesman in Roman history, was also one of the foremost exemplars of Latin prose in the Late Republic (i.e. 80-40 B.C.), a period about which we are astonishingly well informed, mainly through the histories of Caesar and Sallust, and the letters, recorded speeches, and philosophical works of the great Cicero. Although Cicero's writing is generally considered to provide the highest development of Latin prose, it is perhaps a little too florid and rhetorical to be ideal as a basis for the initial steps in the learning of the language. On the other hand, the clear and straightforward qualities of Caesar's prose make it suitable for this purpose, and for this reason it has often been the model around which successive generations of European students have acquired a facility in the Latin language.
Having formed the First Triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus, Caesar became consul of Rome for the first time in 59, and, after administering a number of important reforms, he became governor of Transalpine Gaul, which in a number of epic campaigns he conquered during the years 58-51, while at the same time leading two expeditions to Britain in 55 and 54. When the Senate sought to remove his command from him before he could resume the consulship, he crossed the Rubicon in 49 and initiated the Civil War (49-45), which he won decisively. He was appointed dictator and piloted a number of significant further reforms, including the introduction of the Julian Calendar in 46. When he was appointed dictator for life in 44, he was treacherously murdered by a group of his former supporters on the Ides of March, two days before he was due to depart for a campaign against the Parthians. Civil War broke our again, but following the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. Caesar's adopted son, Octavianus (later known as Augustus) seized sole power and thus confirmed the demise of the Republic and the foundation of the Imperial system, which his adopted father had played the pivotal role in founding.
The close relationship between Caesar and his troops was undoubtedly at the heart of his greatness as a general. Apart from his strategic and tactical genius, Caesar's ability to strike a rapport with his legionaries was remarkable. Caesar's record of almost unbroken success in Gaul from 58 to 51, and later during the Civil War from 49 to 45, testifies to his remarkable qualities as a military leader. Two tributes to him are quoted below. The first is from the introduction to "Caesar: The Conquest of Gaul", translated by S.A. Handford, Penguin Classics, 1951: "Caesar's own contribution was that of a superb tactician and military leader. No man ever knew better how to surprise and baffle his opponents by speed of movement, or how to snatch victory out of a battle that was very nearly a defeat by throwing in reserves at just the right place and the right time. No man ever won greater respect or more affectionate loyalty from his troops. For eight years of hard fighting, hard digging, and hard living, they gave him everything he asked of them" (p. 22). The second quotation comes from "Julius Caesar, man, soldier, and tyrant", by Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1965: "As a leader of men Caesar stood head and shoulders above the generals of his day, and it is more as a fighting than as a thinking soldier that his generalship has been judged ... First, it must be borne in mind that normally the battles of his day were parallel engagements in which the aim was to exhaust and then to penetrate the enemy's front. They were methodical operations in which, when both sides were similarly trained and organized, success depended largely on superiority of numbers. Caesar modified these tactics by basing his campaigns, not on superiority of numbers and meticulous preparations but on celerity and audacity. By surprising his opponent he caught him off-guard, and got him so thoroughly rattled that either he refused his challenge to fight and in consequence lost his prestige, or, should he respond, was morally half-beaten before the engagement took place" (p. 321). Another cause of his success was the confidence which his men had in him. This is demonstrated in the aftermath of the defeat at Gergovia in 52, when Caesar lectures his soldiers for disobeying his orders. The implicit message of Caesar's speech was that the Roman army might not always be victorious, but that Caesar himself was invincible. This was certainly the message which Caesar wished to convey in his dispatches to Rome, and his soldiers believed it.
Caesar was also a great orator and prose writer. The only writings of his which have survived are his war commentaries, the "De Bello Gallico" (The Gallic Wars) and the "De Bello Civili" (The Civil War). The first is comprised of seven books, each one covering a year in his Gallic campaigns and his visits to Britain, with an eighth book written by his associate Aulus Hirtius, covering the final two years (51-50); the second comprises three books written by Caesar himself, with Book III leading up to the famous battle of Pharsalus in 48, where Caesar's army, despite being seriously outnumbered, won a glorious victory over Pompey, and a further three books, traditionally attributed to Caesar, but definitely written by others. While much much of what we know of Caesar comes from these writings of his, other important sources are the biographies of Caesar written by Plutarch of Chaeronea (46-119 A.D.) in Greek, and Suetonius (69-122) in Latin, also available on this blog (see the entries dated 1st August and 29th October 2014 respectively). The "Roman Histories" of the Greek historians, Appian of Alexandria (95-165) (see the entry on this blog dated 25 August 2015), and Cassius Dio from Bithynian Nicaea (155-235) also include information relevant to Caesar's life and career.
The quality of Caesar's writings.
Caesar's prose is, as stated above, relatively straightforward to translate. It is full of instances of the Ablative Absolute construction, which is perhaps the quintessential characteristic of the Latin language (see Sabidius' article "Ablative Absolutes" on this blog dated 20th May 2012). An Ablative Absolute is a phrase detached from the main clause of a sentence, at the heart of which is a participle, or verbal adjective, agreeing with a noun or pronoun in the ablative case (viz. an ablative of attendant circumstances), when this noun or pronoun is not the subject or object of the main verb. Because orthodox verbs in Latin lack the form of a past participle in the active voice, ablative absolutes using past participles passive are often necessary to compensate for this lack, with the grammatical sense having to be inverted into the passive voice. In translating into English, it is common to restore the active construction and thus to attach the participle to the subject or object of the main verb, something which is not possible in Latin through the lack of a past participle active. At the same time Ablative Absolutes are often used, as indeed are participles in general, as an alternative to subordinate clauses. When translating into English, it is common to replace the participle with such a subordinate clause, e.g. a temporal or concessive clause. The use of participles in general, and Ablative Absolutes in particular, facilitates that conciseness of expression and economy in the use of words which are hallmarks of the Latin language.
Other features of Caesar's prose writing which are visible in this work are his use of the Gerund and Gerundive (for information about these constructions the reader is referred to Sabidius' article "Gerunds and Gerundives" published on this blog on 6th March 2010, and also his articles, "Nunc est Bibendum" published January 17th 2011, and "Gerunds and Gerundives: Exemplification" published 23 January 2012), and the occasional use of the impersonal passive construction. Another feature of Caesar's historical writing is his use of the third person in his narration of events. Although he is writing of events, many of which he witnessed in person, and he is the principal agent of the story, his use of the third person gives a more impersonal and impartial flavour to his account than if he had written in the first person.
Caesar's constant recourse to the use of the Ablative Absolute and Indirect Discourse can readily be explained by the nature of his writing. He classifies both the "De Bello Gallico" and the "De Bello Civili" as "Commentarii", (i.e. reports or notes), upon which a more polished work of historical writing might later be based. Ablative Ablatives allow a large amount of information to be processed with a minimum of words, and represent encapsulated statements of fact which serve as background to what is being said in the rest of the sentence or paragraph. Indirect Discourse, as used by him is a form of 'barebones reporterage', or compressed statement, in which much information, normally important to the structure of the sentence, such as person, and the distinction between the subject and object, is stripped away, because it is obvious. Such linguistic usage was highly suitable to a military context, in which dispatches to the Senate and People of Rome from the front, or communiques to subordinates, might be composed, when compressed, yet factual language would be seen as a suitable example of Roman pragmatism and practicality. While this accounts for what is otherwise particular to Caesar's style, what is so interesting is that the quality of his writing was such that it created a genre in itself. Indeed, ancient sources describe him as a leader or proponent of the puristic style of Latin writing, called the Attic style, as opposed to the more highly wrought or aphoristic style, of which Cicero was seen as the most significant exemplar. Nevertheless, Cicero, who in the tradition of classical literature would normally have seen a polished style as an essential quality of historical writing, was to say of Caesar's "Commentarii" in his "Brutus", written in 46, that, "They are like nude figures, upright and beautiful, stripped of all ornament of style as if they had removed a garment. His aim was to provide source material for others who might wish to write history, and perhaps he has gratified the insensitive, who may wish to use their curling-tongs on his work; but men of good sense he has deterred from writing." What he meant, and goes on to make clear, was that Caesar's writing was so elegant in its lucidity and simplicity that only the unwise would seek to improve on it. It is important to stress the quality of Caesar's Latin, because, although he is the first author to whom young students of Latin have traditionally been introduced, his Latin can actually be quite difficult to translate. Terseness and compression are qualities that are hallmarks of the Latin language as a whole, and in Caesar's case the impersonal military concision which one associates with his Ablative Absolutes are especially good examples of these qualities; but, as the poet Horace in his "Ars Poetica" was later to say: "Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio (I labour to be brief, and I become obscure)". There are perhaps moments when this is true of Caesar's prose as well, since he frequently omits words which he considers can be understood from an earlier sentence or are obvious from the context as a whole, but for the most part the clarity and brevity of his style is admirable. At the same time, his prose style, while often being terse and restrained, never becomes monotonous or repetitive.
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