‘The renown achieved by history's actors and chroniclers is not at all equivalent’, observes Caesar's sometime subordinate Sallust (Cat. 3.2). The disproportion is particularly striking in the case of Julius Caesar, who played both roles, and the editors of this unusual Companion aim to redress the balance by supplementing recent work on Caesar the historical figure with studies focused on his literary achievements across a number of genres. Accordingly, the volume contains essays on the war commentaries, of course, but also on his speeches, letters and verse, his discussions of geography and the Latin language, and his invective against Cato. Also included are discussions of Caesar's historiographical models, his literary influence both ancient and modern, and the use of the Commentarii as a historical source from antiquity to the early twentieth century.
Under the broad heading ‘Literature and Politics’ the essays in Part 1 treat Caesar's literary engagement with contemporary political issues. K.A. Raaflaub (‘Caesar, Literature, and Politics at the End of the Republic’), Krebs (‘More than Words: the Commentarii and their Propagandistic Context’) and W. Batstone (‘Caesar Constructing Caesar’) discuss the broad topics of audience, message and authorial self-construction in the Commentarii. J. Rüpke (‘Priesthoods, Gods, and Stars’), A.M. Riggsby (‘The Politics of Geography’) and A.C. Johnston (‘Nostri and “the Others”’) focus on particular facets such as religion, geography and national character. In general these are efficient introductions to topics treated elsewhere at greater length, often by the same author. Raaflaub reminds us that Caesar's persuasive strategy sheds light on ‘central aspects of Roman thinking and politics’ (p. 27). Krebs usefully sets the Commentarii against the background of other media and other strategies for influencing public opinion at Rome, showing that Caesar prefigures Augustus in ‘the organization of opinion’ (to borrow the tag from R. Syme cited on p. 29). The themes of Caesarean propaganda are familiar: dignitas, libertas, lenitas, the sovereignty of the populus Romanus, but the supporting materials assembled here impress by their variety. Batstone, after complicating the concept of image-making by showing that in Caesar one cannot separate the image-maker from the object of image-making, presents a nuanced account of the tools, processes and signs that yield not ‘Caesar’ but ‘Césarité’. In Rüpke's chapter the concept of Caesarean writing about religion is defined broadly to include not only the lost treatise De astris and the ethnographic comments on the religion of the Gauls and Germans in the Commentarii but also a number of other Caesarean strategies – priesthoods, coins, buildings, ceremonies, the calendar, honours – for ‘writing’ religion into his legacy. Riggsby develops Rambaud's tripartite division of written space, showing how strategic space suggests Caesarean speed and how geographical space constitutes an argument for conquering all of Gaul and none of Germany. In the final sections of the paper he explores the different ways in which space is presented in the Civil War. Ethnography and the mutually reflexive constructions of Rome and Rome's enemies are the subject of Johnston's essay, which concludes this part of the volume.
Literature takes the stage in Part 2, ‘Genre, Rhetoric, Language, and Style’. The generic constituents of the Caesarean commentarius and the stylistic constituents of Caesarean elegantia are analysed by D.L. Nousek (‘Genres and Generic Contaminations: the Commentarii’) and Krebs (‘A Style of Choice’), the speeches by Grillo (‘Speeches in the Commentarii’). A. Corbeill (‘Wit and Irony’) elicits from humour evidence of Caesar's transgressive character, and a second essay by Grillo (‘Literary Approaches to Caesar: Three Case Studies’) provides a case study of literary reading. In view of the difficulty of situating Caesar's commentaries within the commentarius genre, given the absence of comparanda, Nousek explores their connections with other types of writing, including historiography as described by Cicero. Krebs frees Caesar from the constraints applied to the school author, a paragon of correct and simple prose, citing examples of anomaly, ornament and even excess, and highlighting a more interesting form of Caesarean elegantia, the stringent selection of narrative detail that ‘transforms disorderly realities … into seemingly rational and ineluctable moves in a game of wits’ (p. 129). His essay contains a wealth of details culled from two centuries’ worth of philological studies. Grillo's survey of the speeches begins with a synoptic table indicating the quantities of oratio recta and obliqua in each Caesarean book. He then explores the functions of both types, noting that Caesar, unlike Thucydides and Polybius, provides no methodological key. Speeches written for Critognatus (BG 7.77) and Curio (BC 2.32) receive particular attention. Corbeill successfully negotiates the challenge of finding irony, used for ‘muted invective’ (p. 148), and wit in the war commentaries before moving on to quips by and about Caesar, a known collector of witty aphorisms (Suet. Iul. 56.7). The literary readings modelled by Grillo deploy diction, intertextuality and narratology in analysing BG 1.2–4, 5.26–7 and 4.24–35.
In Part 3, ‘The Fragmentary Works’, the authors elicit from scant remains a picture of Caesar as linguist (G. Pezzini, ‘Caesar the Linguist: the Debate about the Latin Language’), orator (H. van der Blom, ‘Caesar's Orations’), poet (S. Casali, ‘Caesar's Poetry in Context’), pamphleteer (Corbeill, ‘Anticato’) and correspondent (R. Morello, ‘Innovation and Cliché: the Letters of Caesar’). Pezzini contextualises Caesar's two-book On Analogy in contemporary linguistic debates, arguing that it is a response to Cicero's On the Orator; he also explores connections between Caesar's grammatical theories and his intellectual and political endeavours. Caesar's several speeches to the Roman people and the senate, along with his early prosecutions and funeral orations, are discussed by van der Blom, who notes their consistently ‘people-friendly’ character and, with detailed analyses of some surviving fragments, their impressive solemnity. Casali, who has only seven verses and a handful of testimonia to work with, discusses Caesar's poetic output in the context of elite literary production, exploiting well the dialogue with Cicero implicit in their contrasting aesthetic verdicts on Terence, a ‘half-sized Menander’ in Caesar's pithy critique. Rivalry with Cicero is naturally prominent in Corbeill's discussion of Caesar's invective against the dead Cato, a misjudged attempt to refute Cicero's encomiastic Cato. Corbeill sets the extant fragments in a framework of contemporary rhetorical theory and argues that Caesar's rhetorical traditionalism was a political mistake. Despite the survival of a mere six letters from Caesar's ‘remarkable epistolary machine’ (p. 224), Morello, after sketching what is known about that ‘machine’, achieves a rewarding analysis of Caesar's carefully-calibrated use of letters for ‘self-positioning and diplomacy’ (p. 228) in the crucial early months of the civil war.
Part 4, ‘Sources and Nachleben’, is necessarily something of a grab bag, its aim being to provide orientation to vast topics such as the influence of Greek and Roman historiography on the Commentarii (L. Pitcher and M. Chassignet) and the reception of the Commentarii as a literary and historical source in the immediate aftermath of Caesar's assassination (J.F. Gaertner), during the Roman empire (C.S. Kraus, T.A. Joseph, J. Thorne), from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century (H. Schadee) and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories of Caesar's campaigns (Thorne). In looking for echoes of Greek historiography in the commentaries Pitcher (‘Caesar and Greek Historians’) prudently concentrates on narrative patterns such as overconfident predictions, premature celebrations and elusive enemies, although he does suggest Thucydidean intertexts for two Civil War scenes (BC 3.32.2–3, 3.10.6). Like Pitcher, Chassignet (‘Caesar and Roman Historiography Prior to the Commentarii’) begins with the difficulty of linking the Commentarii to historiographical antecedents, but she then moves on to significant similarities of structure (annalistic), content (contemporary events, geography, ethnography, numbers, speeches) and purpose (apologia). Caesar's stylistic influence on his several continuators is, as Gaertner shows in ‘The Corpus Caesarianum’, various: while Hirtius’ language in BG 8 is close but not identical to that of Caesar, the styles of the Bellum Hispaniense and the Bellum Africum have other models, and that of the Bellum Alexandrinum is heterogeneous. In the essay's final section Gaertner argues that Hirtius compiled the extant Corpus. Kraus (‘Caesar in Livy and Tacitus’) discusses Caesarean narrative techniques and sentence structure as part of the ‘historiographical matrix’ (p. 280) in which Livy anchors the Ab urbe condita, and adduces specific points of connection to the commentaries in both Livy and Tacitus’ Germania and Agricola, especially the latter, where the relationship is ‘pervasive, intertextual, and agonistic’ (p. 285). In his short paper on two voluminous poets Joseph (‘Caesar in Vergil and Lucan) focuses on the poets’ resistance to Caesar: in Virgil, resistance to Caesarean type scenes and rhetoric, in Lucan, to his narrative economy and authorial reticence. Thorne (‘Narrating the Gallic and Civil Wars with and beyond Caesar’) examines the degree to which later accounts of Caesar's wars are dependent on Caesar, looking first at two groups of ancient sources (Plutarch, Suetonius, Appian; Dio, Orosius), then at some well-chosen accounts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Napoleon I and III, Mommsen, Rice Holmes, Jullian), concluding that although the earlier group of ancient authors and Jullian avoided or tempered Caesar's version where they could, the others followed Caesar rather uncritically. Schadee (‘Writing War with Caesar: the Commentarii’s Afterlife in Military Memoirs’) surveys military memoirs written in Latin and the vernacular from the Renaissance to WWI. As she shows, the appeal of the Caesarean model was less ‘the sleek simplicity of Caesar's prose’ (p. 325) than the veneer of antiquity and the precedent of success, particularly for wars fought in the same areas as Caesar's, and it declined over time owing to changes in education and military demography. The volume ends with a substantial collective bibliography (pp. 333–71) and indexes of subjects, citations and persons.
The editors are major contributors to the volume, authoring not only the introductory chapter, ‘Caesarian Questions: Then, Now, Hence’, but also four essays in Parts 1 and 2. All the contributors have to contend with the problems posed by either too much material or too little, using judicious selection or cautious extrapolation as necessary to reach plausible but often aporetic conclusions. One of the editors’ stated aims is to encourage further research on Caesar's intellectual achievements (p. 8), and to that end they have reinvented and retitled the genre of the chapter-concluding bibliographical guide, which in this Companion appears under the heading ‘Further Reading and Research’. These guides, and the essays themselves, provide welcome indications of topics worthy of further study with an eye to giving Caesar the writer his due.
