The Serial

The Gallic War was published a book a year, while the war was still being fought, to be read aloud in Rome to people who could not read it. This is what that does to a war.

A course on the thought of Caesar.

Philosophy · Antiquity

Course outline

  1. The Sentence Everyone Can Quote — Gaul is a whole divided into three parts. It is the most quoted opening in Latin prose and it is also a rhetorical figure, built in a ring, by a man who told orators to avoid an unusual word the way…
  2. Written While It Was Still Happening — Two of the best historians of the century assumed the Gallic War was composed as a unit at the end of the decade. Caesar left evidence against them in his own pages, and it costs nothing to check: in…
  3. Read Aloud to People Who Could Not Read It — The audience was not the Senate. The phrase populus Romanus appears forty-one times in Book 1 alone, the panic at Vesontio is blamed on well-connected young officers from Rome while the ordinary…
  4. The Winter It Went Wrong — Book 5 was supposed to be the conquest of Britain. Instead a legate was killed under a flag of truce, another died fighting, and the survivors killed each other in the dark rather than be taken.…
  5. Not a Man Lost — In 55 Caesar destroyed two German peoples he put at four hundred and thirty thousand, and reported his own losses in the same sentence as none. Cato proposed in the Senate that Caesar be handed over…
  6. Whose Name Gets Used — Centurions are heroes in the Gallic War and they are heroes as a class — brave, anonymous, reliably present at the crisis. Legates get named, and the ones who get named most vividly tend to be the…
  7. The King They Needed Him To Be — Fifty-eight Gauls are named in the Bellum Gallicum. The word rex is used of fourteen leaders and eleven of them are enemies of Rome. Vercingetorix is introduced in a single paragraph that inherits…
  8. He Stopped Writing — There is no eighth book by Caesar. The campaigns of 51 and 50 went unwritten, and the gap was filled after his death by one of his own officers. The most revealing decision in a decade of publishing…

Built from

A synthesis of 3 books.

Part of the Simposeum course library.