Texts such as Caesar's Commentarii have long been studied from a political angle, and indeed the Bellum Civile (BCiv.) has come under fire over the centuries as a work of bald propaganda, or at any rate, one filled with Caesarian aggrandisement. More recently, studies of the Commentarii have taken a more holistic view of their author's status as not just a military and political man, but a well-regarded intellectual. G.'s book represents the latter strand of Caesar studies, and is a thought-provoking and engaging analysis of, as the title suggests, Caesar's strategies for self-representation and persuasion. As G. explains in the introduction (p. 2), his work ‘sets out to reconsider [the BCiv.'s] style, rhetoric, and architecture in order to disclose its art and ideology’. The book is divided into seven substantial chapters, with appendices that discuss the chronology and narrative structure of the civil war, questions of composition and publication, and the manuscript tradition as it affects our understanding of book divisions. There follow a comprehensive bibliography, an index locorum and a general index.
G.'s study follows a trajectory from small-scale interpretative issues to larger topics such as the overall architecture of the BCiv. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on close readings of individual episodes as a model for understanding Caesar's modes of characterisation in the BCiv., which G. sees as connected through repeated deployment of key terms and moral concepts. In the middle chapters G. builds upon the foundation created by this model to study the way Caesar has each side create community, first in terms of military and political fidelity (Chapter 3), and in the complex network of status-relationships laid bare by Caesarian claims to mercy (misericordia) in both foreign (BGall.) and civil wars (BCiv.) (Chapter 4). Caesar's polarising use of the discourse of ‘Otherness’ to identify himself and his side with Rome, while barbarising the enemy, is the subject of Chapter 5; G. demonstrates how Caesar's aim to unify and integrate these two polarised communities through assimilation (versus Pompeian alienation) gradually brings the two sides closer together, at least on the level of the larger community. Finally, G. pans out to examine the narrative structure of the BCiv. and especially the effects of Caesar's manipulation of chronology and textual organisation. In this way, G.'s book not only demonstrates Caesar's careful attention to linguistic detail and artful expression throughout the BCiv. (and always with a view to parallels and shifts from his expression and characterisation in the BGall.), but shows how these putatively superficial aspects in fact contribute to the larger ideological and moral aims of the work. As G. indicates (p. 13), ‘the virtuoso stylist cooperates with the general, military historian, statesman, and intellectual to justify his deeds and to seize a prominent role in the traditions both of Latin literature and of Roman history’.
How does he do this? It is indeed the complex relationship among Caesar as author, narrator and character that, as G. argues, allows him to control his self-representation and to characterise indirectly his opponents as feeble, inept, or mendacious. The Ilerda narrative that occupies so much of BCiv. 1 is especially productive in this regard. G. shows (pp. 16–23) how the quality of swiftness (celeritas), so commonly associated with Caesar, can be used against his opponents to demonstrate that without Caesar's superior planning, speed is ineffective. Other participants are allotted celeritas but none are able to deploy it effectively: Pompey (3.75–80), Vibullius (3.10–19) and most tragically Curio (2.33–41) are all thus characterised. G.'s important point in this discussion, moreover, is that Caesar's use of the word celeritas in these contexts does not criticise these men directly; rather, as G. states (p. 35), ‘seemingly scattered data convey crucial information and lead the reader toward the very conclusions the text refuses to draw’. In a text where Caesar is often blamed for the heavy-handedness and misinformation with which he advances his political and ideological programme, G.'s analysis shows admirably that the work is much more complex and subtle than often thought.
Other chapters contain many similarly important and insightful observations. In both Chapter 5, ‘The Barbarization of the Enemy’, and Chapter 6, ‘Two Army-communities and their Effect on the Roman People’, G. shows how Caesar shapes the reader's understanding of his opponents in ways that would have been familiar from Greek and Roman rhetoric about ‘Otherness’. G. shows how moral traits associated with barbarians in the Late Republic – indeed, most recently in the BGall. – are linked linguistically with descriptors applied to the Pompeians in the BCiv. G. demonstrates (pp. 113–30) that topoi familiar from the BGall. in regard to Gallic and Germanic enemies, such as barbarian cruelty, rash overconfidence and nimia luxuria are mapped onto Pompeian leaders throughout the narrative of the BCiv., thus hinting at the tenuousness of their position and emphasising Caesar's centrality as the representative of the res publica. This centrality radiates outward as Caesar adopts a strategy of ‘assimilation’, G. argues, in opposition to Pompeian ‘alienation’ (pp. 131–40). Put simply, Caesar's rhetorical and military strategy embraces communities and strengthens his claim to identification with Rome: as Caesar travels down the coast of Italy in early 49 (and likewise in the episodes in Spain and Massilia in BCiv. 1), the narrative repeatedly characterises Pompeian opposition as obstreperous and aggressively violent. As G. notes (p. 136) ‘the narrator constructs the role of the Pompeian occupiers in each community as a parallel to the dominance of the faction in Rome which he makes responsible for the civil war’. Caesar is repeatedly made to appeal to compromise, negotiation, mercy and assimilation, to which his Pompeian opponents respond with provocation, conflict and violence. In this way, G. argues, Caesar's approach leads to an expansion of his allies and their incorporation into his community, whereas Pompey's shrinks proportionally as his position becomes less and less tenable.
The final chapter examines the implications of the structural choices Caesar makes in crafting his narrative and is particularly engaging and illuminating. G. shows how the ending of each book offers a possible resolution to the war: the truce and surrender of the Afraniani at the end of Book 1 represent a model of Caesarian (bloodless) victory; the defeat of Curio at Bagradas in Book 2, conversely, offers a model of victory according to the ideal of Pompey. What then of Book 3, in which the narrative ends without closure? G. suggests perceptively (p. 169) that the author of the BCiv. well understood the complexity of civil war: ‘after the narrative builds up Pharsalus as the turning point of the conflict, the narrator makes it clear that a lot of work still awaits Caesar, since much resistance survives in different places’. Like Caesar's determination to impose a new understanding of Roman identity and ideology and the need to re-establish coherence in the political system (though at great cost), G.'s study of the Bellum Civile seeks to – and succeeds in – resolving the longstanding conflict regarding scholarship on Caesar, by incorporating both political and literary analysis.
