“Gallic funerals are splendid and costly, for a comparatively poor country,” he observes. He offers insights into cultures that left no written accounts of their own. Unlike some other Roman authors, he was interested in non-Romans. Each year he sent another chapter to the Senate and had it circulated in Rome. Like Charles Dickens, he probably published his work in instalments.
And his dispatches from Gaul burnished his reputation as a brilliant military leader. He also faced possible prosecution for offences committed as consul the previous year, such as using troops to intimidate his political opponents.Ī military campaign was a chance to pay off those debts, from plunder. Having lavished sums on the Romans to buy popularity, Caesar was deeply in debt. He was one of a triumvirate of strongmen, along with Pompey (a general) and Crassus (a plutocrat). In 58 BC, when the action began, he was not yet the master of Rome. Since he had no atom bombs, this seems doubtful.Ĭaesar was not trying to write objective history. In one battle he claims to have routed an army of 430,000 Germans without losing a single legionary. Studying Caesar may help us understand our own age better.Īn observant reader swiftly spots that Caesar peddled fake news worthy of any modern demagogue. We, too, live in a world where men with armies misbehave, where politicians twist the truth, and where it is not clear which culture will be dominant in the decades to come. And also to ask what we can learn from the most consequential writer-soldier-statesman in European history. The aim was not merely to retell Caesar’s bloody, dramatic tale, but to look at how modern historians have questioned it. A quip apocryphally attributed to Winston Churchill could as easily have been Caesar’s: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”Ī copy of the “Gallic Wars” in hand (on a non-stone tablet), The Economist retraced some of Caesar’s steps, using fast French trains rather than oxcarts on Gaulish roads that had not yet had the benefit of Roman engineering. It is a priceless source for historians, yet also a slippery piece of propaganda. The “Gallic Wars” is also the only first-hand account of an ancient campaign written by a general of such stature. Cicero likened his prose to “nude figures, upright and beautiful, stripped of all ornament of style”. His “Commentaries on the Gallic Wars” is a fine work of literature.