Veni, Vidi, Dixi

 From Spencer Klavan at The Claremont Review of Books:

Gallic War is a collection of field reports on these achievements, written with the general voting public in mind. It would have had the effect of transferring to the folks back home some of the enthusiasm that Caesar inspired in his soldiers. When he delegated command to senior officers, he fleshed out his own narrative with their notes—the last book, the eighth, was written entirely by one of Caesar’s high-ranking subordinates, Aulus Hirtius, to clear up some final details after Caesar’s own assassination. The whole thing is vivid with color commentary from the barracks: jokes the men told, slang terms they came up with. Soldiers in every time and place have a habit of christening their weaponry: British privates called their muskets “Brown Besses.” The pilots over Hiroshima and Nagasaki learned from their superiors to call their bombs “Fat Man” and “Little Boy.” In much the same way, Caesar’s men dug spike-filled booby traps outside their siegeworks and called them “lilies,” because they looked like deadly flowers. It’s often said that Gallic War is written in the third person, since Caesar so often refers to himself as “he,” not “I”: “at first Caesar decided to refrain from battle.” But the true grammar of the book is in the first-person plural: “our army,” “our province,” “our men stood armed and ready to attack.” The main character, the hero of the story, is us: the Roman army, of which Caesar presents himself (impersonally, but not at all impartially) as the consummate representative. It is a master class in building esprit de corps.

The Roman public had never seen anything like it. They voted to hold festival after festival of thanksgiving in Caesar’s honor. These were the achievements that made him a hero in the eyes of his men and a threat, in the eyes of his enemies, to the already wobbly balance of power in the republic. Plutarch writes of Caesar that he “wrapped his army around him like a cloak” to make himself unstoppable: that was the kind of unwavering allegiance he won from his soldiers in Gaul. The popular support inspired by that campaign made it possible for him, just a few years later in 49, to step across the Rubicon a legion at his back. In the wake of that cataclysmic event, Shakespeare imagined the assassin Cassius asking his co-conspirator Brutus, “Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed / That he is grown so great?” The answer is in Gallic War. It is an astonishing book about the making of a world-historic man. (Read more.)

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