The Case for the Defence

The Gallic War celebrated killing foreigners. The Civil War had to justify killing Romans — and every technique in it follows from that, down to which Latin word an army swears its oath with.

A course on the thought of Caesar.

Philosophy · Antiquity

Course outline

  1. The Victory He Could Not Celebrate — A Roman general who won a war got a triumph — a parade with the enemy dead counted out and the enemy leaders walked through the streets. There is no triumph for Pharsalus, because the dead were…
  2. There Is No River in This Book — The Bellum Civile opens with a letter being read to the Senate against procedural resistance, and with a fight over whether a question may be put. It never mentions the Rubicon, the die, or the night…
  3. There Are Oaths, and Then There Are Oaths — Latin has more than one word for a military oath, and they are not interchangeable — a commentator on Virgil sets out three kinds of service with three different swearings. Caesar's men take one of…
  4. Ivy on the Tents — Caesar's men take Pompey's camp after Pharsalus and the narrative stops to look at it: arbours, laid tables, silver, floors turfed with fresh sods, tents shaded with ivy. Then Pompey takes off his…
  5. Mercy Has to Mean Something — Clemency was Caesar's signature and he advertised it hard — a temple, a coin, letters written during the war. It was also, in a civil war, logically unstable: Roman pity presupposed that the sufferer…
  6. The Book That Cannot End — Every book of the Gallic War closes the same way — enemy beaten, army into winter quarters, thanksgiving voted — except Book 5, which stops on the words that Gaul was a little quieter for a while.…
  7. Somebody Else Finished It Again — Four more books complete the corpus and Caesar wrote none of them. Hirtius supplied the last year of Gaul and probably the Alexandrian war; the African and Spanish books are by soldiers whose Latin…
  8. The Next Reader — Napoleon read the whole corpus and wrote a commentary on it, campaign by campaign, closing each chapter with Observations. He finds Caesar reckless at Dyrrachium, atrocious at Uxellodunum, and…

Built from

A synthesis of 3 books.

Part of the Simposeum course library.