This monograph offers a new book-by-book reading of Caesar's Bellum Civile (henceforth BC) in support of the proposition that the work reveals in nuce the political programme of Caesar the dictator. Ayelet Peer's Caesar was aiming for sole rule from the outset of the war and wrote the BC in service of that ambition.

The first two books of the BC, P. argues, were written to influence the course of events during the war — to discourage contemporaries from joining Pompey (2), minimize Cato's influence (25) and contribute to a contemporary debate (29), for example — while the traitor Labienus is largely overlooked because Caesar may still have hoped to win him back (33). BC 3, on the other hand, ‘serves as the founding narrative of Caesar's ascent to sole rule in Rome’ (113). Sustaining this argument requires P. to argue away the Republican ideology present throughout the text, even in BC 3. For example, Caesar's deference to the populus Romanus at 3.1.5 is treated as a tactic designed to shift criticism from himself onto the populus (116). Apropos of Caesar's proposal to seek a solution to the military stalemate from the Senate and people at 3.10.8, P. maintains that ‘these are not the words of a consul who genuinely believes in the republican system’ (118). Perhaps not, but they are the words he put into his text. When Crastinus heralds libertas at 3.91.2, she suggests that he is either exposing his deluded belief in Caesar's slogans or referring to military discharge (126). In these and other places the reading proposed here gives us a Caesar who intends his readers to see through his empty rhetoric to the underlying reality (for example, 52).

P.’s reading is predicated on her view, presented in the appendix (167–81), that BC 1–2 were written and published seriatim in 49 b.c.e. and that BC 3 was written in 48 b.c.e. and finalized and published in 46 b.c.e. in connection with Caesar's triumph (167). The dating questions, which have long been the subject of scholarly debate, are not resolved here, where the evidence for incompleteness is dismissed and the argument for serial composition rests largely on ‘changes and developments from book to book in tone, vocabulary and themes’ (177). No explanation is given for the delay in publication. P. overstates the closure achieved in BC 3 as a tale of retribution — ‘Caesar set the matter straight and punished the murderers’ (159) — since only the regent Pothinus is dead by the end of BC 3, while Achillas and young Ptolemy survive into the Bellum Alexandrinum and Septimius' death goes unreported. She also leaves unexplained Caesar's provision of details (such as the descriptions of the Alexandrian army, 3.110, and Pharus Island, 3.112) that are irrelevant to the story of revenge.

The book contains, in addition to the aforementioned appendix, an introduction, conclusion and twelve chapters, some of them quite short; one of the best chapters is ‘Caesaris Miles’ (83–96) on the speeches Caesar wrote for Curio in BC 2. Here P. analyses Curio as both mouthpiece and foil for Caesar and as a worrying echo of Petreius and Pompey, and shows how Caesar has Curio say things (for example, praise for Caesar himself and criticism of Domitius Ahenobarbus) that Caesar himself could not or at least did not include in BC 1. Other highlights are the discussion of how Caesar uses Pompey's letter against him at 1.9 (28) and the demonstration of the irrelevance of the Rubicon myth to Caesar's narrative needs (60–1). P. offers a useful corrective to the generalization that the Pompeians are depicted as barbarians or un-Roman; she sees them instead as Romans ‘degraded … and … consumed by their own ambitions and greed’ (141).

The extended close reading of Caesar's rhetoric presented here is marred by occasional imprecision on matters large and small. For example, the status of Pompey in 48 b.c.e. is repeatedly misrepresented. Not even Caesar claims, as P. does, that Pompey was ‘bereft of any legal position of authority’ (113) or that the Pompeians were ‘unlawful rebels who rallied troops against the constitutional leader of the republic’ (141). Nor is it ‘obvious’, as P. asserts on the basis of Hirtius' preface to BG 8, that ‘Hirtius was the author of both the Bellum Alexandrinum and the Bellum Africum or at least played an important role in writing them’ (169). One of the arguments in favour of the proposition that Caesar ‘envisaged a new form of government in which he would assume control, while the senate's role would be diminished’ (163) is that in the BC Caesar never consults his staff on policy, but he does not show himself consulting in the BG either. The analysis would have benefited from a closer engagement with the Latin. For example, the argument that paucorum audacia at 1.5.3 sets up factione paucorum at 1.22.5 is circular (16–17) since the emendation that gives us the former expression is based on the latter. There are some mistranslations (e.g., ‘the last resort of the senate’ for the SCU (16), ‘equality’ for aequitate (28), ‘necessities’ for necessitudinibus (50), ‘well deserved by the republic’ for bene de re publica meritum (52)), and translating rem publicam at 1.32.7 as ‘republic’ is tendentious (55). There are likewise some significant typos in the Latin (e.g., suo instituto consuetudine (39), res publica causa (51), ductum interitum (163 n. 1)). The political argument of the BC remains elusive.