Readers may remember the character Vercingetorix from their childhood. He appears in the Asterix 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. Everything we know about him comes from a work called in Latin Commentarii de Bello Gallico , Commentaries on the Gallic War , written by Caesar himself — one of two books he authored. The other is the later Commentarii 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. Both works have survived in full, and are wonderful material.
Lessons from antiquity
“ 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 The Gallic War , selected for its clear and easy prose, just as they studied Greek through Xenophon’s Anabasis . Caesar writes in the third person, and is careful not to praise his own role. And, like Hemingway and Naipaul, he has the ability to write elegant but spare prose, with a direct manner of communication and few adjectives. The great Roman orator Cicero, himself a fine writer, described Caesar’s prose as unadorned, like the classical, naked statues of Greece.
The book describes the decade Caesar spent as a general in what we know today as Switzerland, France, Belgium and Germany. 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 conquests were not productive economically because the Gallic tribes were underdeveloped and far behind the Romans. 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.
Caesar 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.
He is also something of an ethnographer and writes about the customs of the tribes his army encounters. 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.
Terrific work
The highlight of the book is the description of the Battle of Alesia, the final fight after which the Gauls are defeated and Rome takes over much of continental western Europe (Caesar was also the first Roman general to land his armies on the shores of Britain). The Gauls under Vercingetorix take up position in a fortress near what is today Dijon. Caesar builds a set of walls around this, extending for many miles. He has 80,000 soldiers at hand, which might give the reader some sense of the scale involved.
As the envelopment takes place, Vercingetorix sends for help, requesting another force of Gauls to attack the Roman encampment from the outside. However, Caesar builds a second set of fortifications on that side, including a giant ditch and a wall, and is able to hold off the attacks on his rear.
The Gauls surrender and are enslaved, while Vercingetorix (shown proudly throwing his shield and sword at Caesar’s feet in the comic) is made captive and later executed.
This triumph ensures that Caesar becomes the most powerful and respected general in Rome, and also the most hated. His rivals and the republicans within the state are afraid that he will overthrow the Republic and become a dictator, which, of course, he would go on to do.
There are two ways in which the modern reader can access the character of Julius Caesar. One is through Shakespearan drama. This is how most of us know of him (“Et tu Brute?”). But — as with Babar, another warrior-scholar — few things are as revealing of the man as his own writing. Modern scholarship has shown that some things Caesar has depicted as fact are actually disputable.
For example, the numbers he casually mentions when referring to the size of armies and the tribes that they are drawn from. It is not easy to figure out exactly what is history and what is exaggeration, but on balance, this is a terrific work, and though it describes events that took place over 2,050 years ago, reads as freshly as if it were written this morning.
A monthly series on the world literary classics.
The writer is a columnist and translator of Urdu and Gujarati non-fiction works.
