![]() ![]() For instance, he portrays the Germans as animists, worshippers of nature, and admirably simple in their lives, but also as a nation of formidable and independent warriors - an aspect that would be carried forward by Tacitus, and eventually come to form the basis of the collective identity imagined by 19th-century German nationalists. He is also something of an ethnographer and writes about the customs of the tribes his army encounters. But a spirit of adventure, and a sense that Rome needed to have frontiers far from the city to live in comfort, meant that the Roman legionary spent many years away from home at war with the Gauls.Ĭaesar the writer excels in his descriptions of war, and his brief notes describing the exact way in which he defeats Pompeius at Pharsalus are used in military strategy even today. The conquests were not productive economically because the Gallic tribes were underdeveloped and far behind the Romans. These lands were occupied by a people known to the Romans as Gauls, who were divided into several fierce and warlike tribes which the Romans tried to subdue. The book describes the decade Caesar spent as a general in what we know today as Switzerland, France, Belgium and Germany. The great Roman orator Cicero, himself a fine writer, described Caesar’s prose as unadorned, like the classical, naked statues of Greece. ![]() And, like Hemingway and Naipaul, he has the ability to write elegant but spare prose, with a direct manner of communication and few adjectives. Caesar writes in the third person, and is careful not to praise his own role. The Gallic War, selected for its clear and easy prose, just as they studied Greek through Xenophon’sĪnabasis. Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres ” (Gaul is a whole divided into three parts)” - the opening sentence, achingly familiar to generations of students in England, who were taught Latin through Both works have survived in full, and are wonderful material. The other is the laterĬommentarii de Bello Civili, ‘The Civil War’, in which he describes his defeat of the forces of Pompeius Magnus and his election as dictator of Rome. Everything we know about him comes from a work called in LatinĬommentaries on the Gallic War, written by Caesar himself - one of two books he authored. He appears in theĪsterix comics of Goscinny and Uderzo as the leader of the Gauls, a handsome man with flowing hair and a long moustache who remains defiant even when defeated by the Romans led by Julius Caesar. Readers may remember the character Vercingetorix from their childhood.
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