Is Caesar "Boring"?

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Scribo
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Is Caesar "Boring"?

Post by Scribo »

It's not often it's truly worth discussing whether a text is boring or not - I'm very much a fan of context and as such, such things are petty - but Caesar represents an interesting case. He was a traditional early author and even now seems to be undergoing something of a...if not a renaissance, he is benefiting from renewed interest from students. Or, rather, those who have spent quite a bit of time looking at rhetoric (which is very much in).

I've heard more than one person mistake Caesar's clarity for simplicity (and thus basically are they added to his victim count, very suave is he) or simply declare themselves uninterested in his campaigns. What do you think? I find that Caesar, like Xenophon, is an author I enjoy very much.
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Re: Is Caesar "Boring"?

Post by Qimmik »

Caesar's Gallic War is so blatantly self-serving. Everything turns out perfectly in the end thanks to Caesar's skill and adroitness. All the massive slaughter of Gauls and Germans is perfectly justified by their barbaric anti-Roman behavior. Caesar's taut, economical and limpid prose style is admirable, however.

Xenophon is self-serving, too, but there are some genuine hardships and adversities--and failures--that give the Anabasis much more interest. Xenophon's prose is merely workmanlike.

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Re: Is Caesar "Boring"?

Post by Scribo »

It's interesting to see the dichotomy you present vis a vis style and content. I think in one, general, sense I do agree. At least that Caesar is a considerably better stylist than Xenophon. That said, is Xenophon any less self serving? the dissonance between his account of the Achaemenid empire and historical fact seems pretty blunt to me. I think he gets away with more just because of how unfamiliar that period/area is to most rather than any ingenium on his part. Caesar has no such luck, talent or no.

As I re-read Caesar I am amazed at the length he went to in order to paint his actions as some sort of inexorable manus fortunae.

I find it annoying that even though I'm asking myself a very simple question - "Is Caesar boring?" - I sit here mulling over the query in terms of pedagogical value (his Latinity, where he fits in with curricula focused on rhetoric, prose style and rhetoric, etc etc). Heu, I guess...Ah blast it...
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Re: Is Caesar "Boring"?

Post by Qimmik »

From a pedagogical point of view, I think, Caesar is useful, if not essential, at least for second-year students, because he presents all the constructions they learned in the first year--particularly indirect speech--in a very unadorned, stripped-down style that allows the student to focus on the syntax without being distracted by confusing superfluities.

Yes, Xenophon is self-serving, but at least there is some real struggle and even failures. From that point of view, X offers more interesting material than C.

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Re: Is Caesar "Boring"?

Post by daivid »

Caesar does describe how quite often things went badly wrong and mistakes he made. This is of course to some extent a rhetorical trick - he is always the one to brilliantly come up with the move that snatches victory from the jaws of defeat. However, while not the absolute truth it is clearly closer to reality than the propaganda that some kings had cut into the sides of mountains.

Both Caesar and Xenophon were writing to justify themselves but both also knew that others were publishing rival accounts so they had at least to some extent be truthful to maintain credibility. And theirs are some the few battle accounts written by eyewitness to have come down to us.
Last edited by daivid on Sat Aug 22, 2015 2:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Is Caesar "Boring"?

Post by Damoetas »

A great book on this topic is Andrew Riggsby, Caesar in Gaul and Rome: War in Words (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). Here's the link to a Bryn Mawr review: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2006/2006-09-32.html
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Re: Is Caesar "Boring"?

Post by Sofronios »

as a beginning classic-lover, my short term aim is to be able to read Caesar and Xenophon while sitting on a couch somewhere in the suburban coffeeshop, or while riding a train/bus on a trip.. I will be alone doing that, as the languages are incomprehensible to the rest of my country-folk...

ah nevermind I just talking to myself :lol:
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Re: Is Caesar "Boring"?

Post by jeidsath »

as a beginning classic-lover, my short term aim is to be able to read Caesar and Xenophon while sitting on a couch somewhere in the suburban coffeeshop, or while riding a train/bus on a trip.. I will be alone doing that, as the languages are incomprehensible to the rest of my country-folk...
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I was translating some Homer for my wife at a crowded restaurant in Bergen, Norway last week -- the food was very late -- and the woman sitting next to us turned out to have studied classics at Bryn Mawr. On trains in the U.S., I've been asked twice about what I was reading -- once by a classicist and once by someone who had done some Biblical studies. And one person spotted me with a Loeb at an international airport.

Pretty good despite the collapse of classical education.
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Re: Is Caesar "Boring"?

Post by donhamiltontx »

Scribo wrote:What do you think? I find that Caesar, like Xenophon, is an author I enjoy very much.
First, a Wittgenstein prelude. When I was a teen, I bought a copy of Maugham's Of Human Bondage for bedside reading, started reading it right away, got bored and put it in the drawer of my night stand. A few months later, I pulled it out again, started reading, got bored within a page or two, and put it back in the drawer. A few months later again, I pulled it out again, began reading and was thoroughly hooked. I did not read it from cover to cover, but I read it utterly enthralled until I finished.

Caesar and Xenophon both bored me. Xenophon has his moments for me, but the constant tramp from one town to the next, one populated, the next deserted, the dullest details of camp life, the whole thing. Where was his editor? As for Caesar, no saving graces, none. I also think the "rhetoric" is piffle. My hypothesis is that he dictated the work to a slave or subaltern from horseback while traveling. When he refers to himself as "Caesar"? That's not him, that's the scribe just calling him by his name. And the scribe, rushed for time and no literary genius, simply wrote the best he could and so it came out "artfully simple."

Norman Mailer's Naked and the Dead or Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, just to go with works in English, makes for a better tale about war, and I'm not even a big Mailer or Hemingway fan. As for Latin, I would go with Tacitus over anyone, and for Greek Xenophon's own Hellenika is a better read than the Anabasis.

But just my two cents.

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Re: Is Caesar "Boring"?

Post by jeidsath »

Xenophon has his moments for me, but the constant tramp from one town to the next, one populated, the next deserted, the dullest details of camp life, the whole thing. Where was his editor?
That's a good description of Book A chapter 2, but a poor description of the rest of the Anabasis. Chapter 2 is such easy greek and so repetitive that it's great for language learning and can't be skipped, but I think that a lot of schoolboys form their opinion of Xenophon based on it, which is inaccurate. It doesn't help that it's an early chapter and consequently takes more class time.

Crazy conspiracy theory: In other threads I've given my opinion that most of chapter 2 (and a few other sections of Anabasis that are radically different in language and interest from the rest) are part of a gazetteer that was taken over by Xenophon for his account. Presumably the gazetteer was by Themistogenes of Syracuse.
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Re: Is Caesar "Boring"?

Post by daivid »

jeidsath wrote: That's a good description of Book A chapter 2, but a poor description of the rest of the Anabasis. Chapter 2 is such easy greek and so repetitive that it's great for language learning and can't be skipped, but I think that a lot of schoolboys form their opinion of Xenophon based on it, which is inaccurate. It doesn't help that it's an early chapter and consequently takes more class time.
I didn't find it easy but it wasn't nearly as hard as the rest and hence is one my favorite pieces of Greek writing
jeidsath wrote:Crazy conspiracy theory: In other threads I've given my opinion that most of chapter 2 (and a few other sections of Anabasis that are radically different in language and interest from the rest) are part of a gazetteer that was taken over by Xenophon for his account. Presumably the gazetteer was by Themistogenes of Syracuse.
Given that the concept of plagiarism did not exist it is hardly a conspiracy theory -you pretty much describe standard composition technique of the time.
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Re: Is Caesar "Boring"?

Post by donhamiltontx »

jeidsath wrote:
Xenophon has his moments for me, but the constant tramp from one town to the next, one populated, the next deserted, the dullest details of camp life, the whole thing. Where was his editor?
That's a good description of Book A chapter 2, but a poor description of the rest of the Anabasis.
Agreed, but a chapter by chapter critique of the Anabasis would take me too long, and, worse, would require me to re-read the thing. I will confess to a general disappointment with most Greek writing, save the plays, which are almost incomprehensible still to me, and the Greek Anthology, which is intriguing and compelling. Latin works, with the exception of Tacitus, some of the "minor" poems of Vergil and some of the poems of Horace, leave me cold as well. As I have said in another thread, I would be happy to be schooled in what I may be missing.

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Re: Is Caesar "Boring"?

Post by Victor »

donhamiltontx wrote:I would be happy to be schooled in what I may be missing.
Sensibility, from the sound of it.

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