I write to plug James O’Donnell’s new translation of the Gallic Wars, with a must-read introduction.
For 15.37 US, I can hardly resist! Michael, I know you don’t care much for translations, so this must be one hell of an introduction! Speaking of introductions, I’m reading Boyle’s introduction to his edition of Thyestes right now. Of every thing I’ve read up to this point, his work is the most approachable, as well as the most comprehensive.
For the UK
https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/069117492X/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Cheapest incl. postage on Marketplace: £17.95
Aetos, Well, I do like good translations (impossible for verse), and this is an exemplary one, crisp, stylish, true to Caesar’s Latin. And the introduction and notes etc. come as a blast of fresh air, blowing away stale and plodding textbooks. Caesar redivivus (for better or worse).
Let us know what you think.
Incidentally (and badly off-topic), I myself prefer Tarrant’s Thyestes to Boyle’s, particularly on the matter of performance.
After I read “There is no denying that this is a great work of literature (Caesar’s B.G.), one of the greatest, and at the same time, there should be no denying that it is a bad man’s book about his own bad deeds. I think it is the best bad man’s book ever written.”, I was hooked! I can’t imagine anyone reading that and not wanting to read on.
Well perhaps we should bear in mind that Jim O’Donnell is a devout Catholic, with a firm sense of good and bad. But his assessment of Caesar is surely spot-on. He has now done for Caesar what he did for Augustine. It’s striking—and a bit troublesome?—just how much he sees them as having in common (self-promotion, social climbing, etc., and the Confessions and the Gallic Wars alike designed to mislead their readers).
It seems like the fight between the optimates and populares is eternal. I read part of a 19th century biography one time that, if I remember right, compared Julius Caesar with Jesus Christ. I think the author’s name was Froude. The book seemed pretty silly to me, so I only read the first part of it. Anyway, I’m sure there will always be a lot of populares around that consider Caesar a hero, and optimates that judge him to be a bad man.
Froude was one of the most important historians of the 19th century. But any comparison of Caesar to Jesus Christ is absurd. Christ’s legacy is far worse, though he can hardly be held responsible for it..
Was Caesar any worse than Pompey, I wonder? There was no shortage of bad men in their time, just as there is no shortage now. And obviously the bad/good dichotomy is simplistic (as O’Donnell of all people must know). I’m cooling a bit on O’Donnell’s souped-up presentation, refreshing though it undeniably is.
To judge Caesar morally or politically or historically is tricky business that requires knowledge and conviction about the history of the 50’s BCE. For anyone who wants to take this on non-superficially, I highly recommend Leo Raditsa’s “Julius Caesar and His Writings” in the ANRW.
Well, I’ve finished reading O’Donnell’s introduction to The War for Gaul and enjoyed it thoroughly. I can’t remember the last time I was amused by an introduction, but this one had me issuing a few chuckles. Chuckles? The man is telling the story of a “very bad man”. What is there to laugh about? I suppose the only good answer I can find is in the way he tells that story. As Michael indicated, it is a “breath of fresh air”. It is that. I had to laugh out loud when I read “the greased pole of Roman politics”, or “In these shabby years, the two most important bad boy might-have-beens of Caesar’s age both came to bad ends, Catiline and Clodius” or his definition of a Pontifex Maximus as “Chairman of the Board of governors of Roman ritual practices”.
Normally, I expect an introduction, especially an introduction to a work of classical literature, to give me (or at least point me in the direction of) the background information necessary to understand and appreciate what I’m about to read in the main text. To be honest, quite often, it’s a chore and it’s not optional. It’s information that must be learnt before you can go any further. This introduction is rather different than those. It’s at times witty and at all times a passionate diatribe against the horrors of empire building and the men who engage in the process, particularly one Julius Caesar and because of his personal ambitions in this area and their long lasting effects, he is painted as a “bad man”. I was not completely shocked by what O’Donnell writes, having read Mary Beard’s SPQR, but I think it always hurts when another of your heroes bites the revisionist dust, because Caesar was someone I admired back in my high school days. I even tried listening to a conversation (with my sister), writing a letter (well, exercises really) and speaking to someone else (my little brother) simultaneously. I didn’t really succeed, although thanks to flying later on, my division of attention skills got much better. Thanks to O’Donnell, my one time hero is now ranked above (or better, below) “mere strivers like Napoleon and Hitler” and never again will he be a hero to be admired and emulated; rather, I’ll have to content myself with appreciating his positive qualities, not forgetting his bad qualities and always being grateful to him for helping me learn Latin.
I think that you can still retain your admiration for caesar. Painting historical figures in such lurid colours as O’Donnell does, although it is attractive and entertaining, is as misleading as Caesar is himself in his Gallic war. A healthy dose of scepticism is necessary when reading anything from the ancient world imbued as it was with rhetoric. The more authoritative something sounds perhaps the more one should question it.
It doesn’t make sense to me to make judgements about whether Caesar , Clodius, Pompey et al. were “bad” or “good”. From a personal perspective they all seem pretty ghastly. I find Seneca a sympathetic character precisely because there is some sense that he acknowledges his shortcomings - others only see hypocrisy.
I bridle at the use of “revisionist”. History is necessarily in a constant process of revision. I know that you did not mean to imply a particular ideology when you used it but often it is used as a term of abuse particularly by the right. A hobby horse of mine I am afraid. 
When I was a child I was taught that Brutus was a great (if flawed) figure. Perhaps this was influenced very much by Shakespeare - I imagine in the English speaking world the playwright’s version of events has the most influence on the popular mind. Imagine my surprise when I discovered him in the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno along with Cassius and Judas Iscariot being mangled by the three mouths of Satan!
You might find “Maria Wyke, Julius Caesar in Western Culture . Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2006” interesting - Although you have a lot to read already! As Christopher Pelling says in the opening chapter:
“Julius Caesar had always been an equivocal figure, as this volume will make very clear. Within a few generations of his death the elder Pliny would admire the extraordinary range of Caesar’s ability, but still doubt whether the Gallic campaigns were really so glorious, “so great a wrong to the human race, even if a necessary one” (tantam etiamsi coactam humani generis iniuriam, NH 7.91–2).”
Any comments on Christian Meier’s Caesar: A Biography (trans. David McLintock). It was literally just given to me as a gift…
Hi Aetos and everyone else. Glad to see we all seem to be getting by so far in the pandemic.
It doesn’t make sense to me to make judgements about whether Caesar , Clodius, Pompey et al. were “bad” or “good”. From a personal perspective they all seem pretty ghastly.
I was agreeing with “our” Seneca until I got to his second sentence, in which it seems to me he did exactly what he eschewed in his first sentence! And actually, I wouldn’t say it doesn’t make sense to judge historical figures - that’s part of the reason we study history - but how do we go about doing so?
Speaking of history, I wish I were with my daughter and son today, July 4, as always in years past, boring their kids by reading them the Declaration of Independence from the back page of The New York Times just as I did them every 4th when they grew up. But alas, the corona virus.
Speaking of American history, Should Mississippi have retired its flag which contained the Confederate flag? Yes, I say! Should Fort Bragg be renamed? Yes, I say! Should we think hard about why land that was given by treaty to the Oglala Sioux is in a South Dakota county named “Custer County”? Yes, I think so. Should we take down statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because they were slaveholders? No, I don’t think so.
Regarding the twentieth century history I was born in to and that dominated the discussions of my parents and teachers, I don’t hesitate to name Hitler and Stalin as absolutely evil. Genocide and mass murder don’t require any reflection on my part. Do I think Seneca and his countrymen should take down statues of Winston Churchill because of something Churchill may or may not have done in India as a young man? No, I don’t think so.
These are all judgements I readily come to. Why? I’d have to think about that. It gets a lot harder with figures like Caesar from the ancient past. (I don’t know anything about James O’Donnell, but from what I can glean from what you, Aetos, and Michael say, Michael’s initial plug notwithstanding, he’s too moralizing for me to spend my time on. I still recommend Raditsa’s article for anyone who wants to pay DeGruyter $42 for it.)
Regarding Caesar, I don’t have any reason to question his personal morals. With respect to historical outcome, my personal sympathies are with Athenian democracy and Roman republicanism. But I don’t pretend to know from afar what decisions any particular Athenian or Roman statesman might have made differently to prevent their demise. (I do know what decision I’ll be making November 3.)
How then do I judge Caesar politically? I don’t have a ready answer to that. But to anyone who does, I would ask these questions:
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What was the reality in Roman politics and “foreign affairs” that Caesar was confronted with? I have to decide what he was dealing with before I can judge how he dealt with it. From what I can tell, Caesar at least looked reality squarely in the face and dealt with it without flinching. Not everyone by any means does so, then or now.
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Modern history has been full of events and issues as least as momentous as the Roman civil wars: two world wars, totalitarian ideologies, the cold war, genocides, nuclear weapons, pandemics. Aside from Churchill, how many actors in modern history can you think of who wrote memoirs? Of any you can think of, how many were even remotely as clearly written and useful as Caesar’s Commentaries? To casually dismiss them as “propaganda” or ‘imbued with rhetoric’ as Seneca puts it I find uselessly superficial (Seneca, don’t get me wrong, I always like your point of view!).
First off, I should like to thank Seneca and Randy for their thoughtful, informed and as always educative responses. I expect I’ll be pondering these for some time.
Now, here are some quotes that I’d like to offer an opinion on:
I think this is an important point. Rhetorical skill was an absolute necessity in the Greco-Roman world and so it follows that the literature produced by that civilisation would be heavily imbued with rhetoric. Remembering that rhetoric is really the skillful use of language to persuade or to evoke an emotional response, I regard Seneca’s admonition to apply a liberal amount to scepticism when reading these authors also as an absolute necessity.
MWH also addressed this thought:
Seneca and Michael are pretty much saying the same thing: it’s impossible to apply a two-dimensional description to three dimensional human being. Feel free to adjust the number of dimensions-point is, no one neatly fits into one category or the other. I also think it’s quite possible to view an issue from more than one perspective and hold opinions that reflect those viewpoints. Personally, I may feel that the Romans were utter bastards (I’m stealing a line from the P.M. who shall not be named.). From a global perspective, however, I also have to respect and appreciate the contributions they made to literature, the arts and engineering. We have a lot to hate them for, but we also have a lot to thank them for as well and J.C., Pompey, Octavian, Marius and Sulla were the players that made it possible. Thanks to their ruthless ways, Rome survived, grew and dominated. According to O’Donnell, the repercussions of what Caesar did were felt up to 1922 with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire!
From what I’ve read up to this point (not just O’Donnell), the republic was pretty much doomed. Perhaps Caesar’s attitude was “desperate times call for desperate measures”. I don’t believe Caesar, social climber that he may have been, decided in the beginning that his dream job was to be dictator for life. I know I’m being simplistic, but I imagine that Caesar realised that so long as there were two powerful factions that were never going to agree on much of anything, the never ending struggle between those factions would continue to weaken the republic until it no longer could defend itself. He did not engineer the factionalism that prevailed in Roman politics and that would lead to the demise of the republic, but he certainly worked to put himself in a position to benefit from it and impose the ultimate solution.
Aetos - a friendly rejoinder:
the republic was pretty much doomed … social climber that he may have been … but he certainly worked to put himself in a position to benefit from it
I find lurking in your remarks two underlying assumptions: (1) that Caesar had a crystal ball (2) that ambition in a democracy or republic is a bad thing.
What do you think Caesar was doing in Gaul all those years? Was he not executing Roman policy?
But was he a fox or a lion?
Hi all,
I’ll have a little more to say later, right now I’m off to meet the parents of my niece’s betrothed.
@mwh: Michael, this is really your thread! I’m just helping to generate a little discussion.
@jeidsath: Joel, I’m going with fox.
Really Randy. you are being a bit of a pain. Do you not know the basic historical facts of Caesar’s extraordinary command, the terms of his proconsulship? So long as he didn’t get himself recalled (and the triumvirate ensured there was no chance of that) he could do pretty well what he liked in Gaul, and did, in his own ruthless interests. He needed cash to service his debts, and above all he wanted to safeguard and advance his political career. Absolutely no-one believes he was just “executing Roman policy,” whatever might be meant by that in this period.
But i’ll leave you to Aetos to deal with, if he cares to.
PS I posted this in response to Randy’s most recent post here, which I see he has now removed from this thread and transported to a new thread of his own on American Politics, entirely off topic. I hope the moderators will step in to put a stop to these shenanigans.
PS I posted this in response to Randy’s most recent post here, which I see he has now removed from this thread and transported to a new thread of his own on American Politics, entirely off topic. I hope the moderators will step in to put a stop to these shenanigans.
The shenanigans were mine (as I suspect mwh knew). I put the posts touching on more recent political leaders (mwh’s and Randy’s) in the new thread down below.