Νo Joel I had no idea that the shenanigans were yours. I thought you had better judgment. In my post I was replying to Randy’s ill-informed query about Caesar’s activities in Gaul. The rough analogy with our president’s behavior that I parenthetically appended I figured should be helpful: it met the point at issue and it was pertinent. That is more than can be said of your new thread (which masquerades as mine), and I think it deplorably high-handed of you to have intervened in such a way.
I don’t know about my judgement one way or the other, but we’re getting into silly season, and I think that it’s a good idea to banish this sort of thing over to the Academy while it lasts. For what it’s worth, I thought that your comment would have been better without the aside, and that a person could have predicted the likely response.
Joel, for the record, I think you probably did the right thing in banning discussions of current politics to “The Academy”. It’s not what I value out of Textkit, in any case. Anyway, I wasn’t the one who brought it up.
Caesar is always an interesting topic. Thanks to Michael for initiating it and calling me “a bit of a pain” and “ill-informed” 
- I take that as a sign he’s Michael being Michael and in good health!
Theodor Mommsen
Joel, This was a serious discussion, at least on my part. If you judged my political comparison out of order you could just have deleted it (it was a single short and parenthesized sentence) and told me why in a private message, then we could have avoided this unseemly public spat and the derangement of the thread. My apologies to Randy for the frankness of my reaction to his contribution, and to everyone else for having caused Joel to wreck the discussion through his wanton abuse (as it seems to me) of his privilege and power as Administrator.
But never mind. I love you all, even if I do get a bit tetchy at times. (But if you only knew the extent of my self-restraint …!)
I would like to intervene to support Michael in his reaction to Joel’s act of censorship. Anyone with a cursory familiarity with recent academic debate on Caesar and the late republic will know that comparisons with contemporary American politics are frequent and inevitable.
I referred in my earlier post to Christopher Pelling’s opening chapter. I will quote it more fully here:
“The conference from which this book was born took place in spring 2003, just after the Second Gulf War had begun. It was impossible for speakers and for audience to escape from the shadows that the conflict cast: issues of tyranny and freedom, of preemptive strikes, of empire, of slaughter, of deeply contestable questions of right and wrong were in all the participants’ minds. 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). In the spring of 2003 similar ideas were in the air: cartoons figuring the American president as Caesar were appearing in the press, and they were not friendly ones. Yet that is itself testimony to the lasting immediacy of Julius Caesar, for the man has always been a way of thinking about the present as well as the past. It is human nature to seek lessons from the past to illuminate the present; it is even more inevitable that the issues of the present create the filters by which we understand the past. The essays in this volume help us to see this, as in one period or culture after another the two perspectives of the first century BCE and of a later society come together. And doubtless we contributors are often writing about the present day too; such is the nature of scholarship, for good and for ill.”
It seems to me to be impossible to escape from our current political concerns in examining the past. Pelling acknowledges this in his final sentence.
Randy I was rather surprised that in my last post you didnt understand what I was saying. I have prejudices like everyone else and in this case I marked them by saying what my personal view is. My first sentence sentence of course was about what I think isn’t the proper object of history. O’Donnell seems to allow his personal view to cloud his description of Caesar. At least Aetos and MWH seemed to understand what I was getting at.
This has got lost in the spat. I haven’t read it but I was reading a review of Richard A. Billows, Julius Caesar: The Colossus of Rome. Roman Imperial Biographies. London/New York: Routledge, 2009. (https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2009/2009.07.29/ which mentions it thus:
“Indeed, it may be questioned whether there was need of yet another biography of Caesar. …The question becomes all the more acute when Billows’s work is compared with the “classics” produced by his predecessors in the twentieth century. The most important of these are Meier and Gelzer, both available in English translations. Written in the same style and available in paperback format, Meier’s biography of Caesar suffers from the absence of footnotes, which is no great loss for a work aimed at the general public. The biography of Caesar written by Gelzer, on the other hand, is written in a style that is perhaps less “lively”, but has a wealth of documentation that far surpasses what is provided by Billows.”
So if you want a general introduction it looks like a good read.
Or an introduction that doesn’t cite a lot of other secondary literature. Thanks!
The title of this thread is “How to read Caesar”. I’d say that “how to read Caesar” should involve asking why we read him in the first place. Certainly on a superficial level, we read him and many other classical authors to improve our knowledge of the language. But at some point, we reach a level where we must evaluate what we read in terms of personal relevancy and one of the obvious ways we do that is by looking for parallels. What makes this discussion different than the posts that often end up in the Academy’s threads is that it is not about “flag-waving”, nor is it in any way an attempt to incite a “flame war”. There is not a single person who has contributed to this thread that would even remotely consider doing that. It is a comparison of current American politics to the state of a Roman republic in which Caesar’s actions have repercussions down to our day. I can’t think of anything more relevant to a discussion of Caesar.
That’s my plea to allow the mention of political affairs currently afoot. Now let me put in a word for Joel. He’s got a tough job, which he also does for free and is one of a handful of people who can combine technical expertise with a love for the classics to give us a safe place to learn the languages of our choice and engage in discussions that are hard to come by unless your local pub is located next to a classics department. He deserves our thanks and perhaps our forgiveness for those rare moments when the trigger finger gets a little too itchy
Thanks, seneca and Aetos, for your sober and supportive posts. I’m sure Joel’s intentions were good, and of course I forgive him. His technical expertise, so generously applied to the maintenance of Textkit, is invaluable to us all, and I am glad to pay tribute to it.
Once again, Joel has acted with wisdom and timeliness. Thank you, Joel, for your decision!
Seneca wrote:
Randy I was rather surprised that in my last post you didn’t understand what I was saying.
Seneca, sorry I was so obtuse (I was also a bit of a pain and ill-informed - I guess I was having a bad day!). Thinking on it more closely and reading your explanation, I think I get it now.
If anyone’s still interested in the subject of this thread after Joel’s mutilation of it (yes I’m still sore about that), I’ve just seen a good informative review of O’Donnell in the June 18 London Review of Books, covering Caesar’s massacres in Gaul and the subsequent events at Rome that culminated in his assassination at the hands of his fellow-senators after he refused to surrender his power and had taken the title of Dictator in Perpetuity (Dictator Perpetuus).
I draw no modern political comparison.
I like the title already: “A Very Bad Man”! Here’s the link:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n12/michael-kulikowski/a-very-bad-man
“Gaul is divided, all in three parts” seems like pretty awkward English.
True, though it’s a good strong opening and undeniably catchy. (“I am a Dutchman, fi and begone.“) That “Gaul” and “all” happen to rhyme is … galling. But “all,” like omnis (which is not tota), is plain and simple, and I guess that’s what O’Donnell was prioritizing.
“Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.” Why not “Gaul is all divided into three parts”? At least that’s better than “All Gaul …,” which I’ve also seen, and keeps Gallia up front where it belongs.
Seems to me that rhetoric could simply be defined as the art of using language well. In recent times, “rhetoric” has become associated with dishonesty, sleigh of hand, and propaganda, but none of these things belong to rhetoric inherently.
Automatically putting yourself on guard with an author just because he is good with language doesn’t strike me as the most wholesome approach to reading.
While I agree that “rhetoric” has in the present day become a pejorative term, I dont agree that the problems you list are not inherent in “rhetoric”.
Mistrust of the power of speeches is exemplified in many places in fifth century Greek literature and onwards. Implicitly it is questioned in tragedy particularly in Euripides. Aristophanes famously lampoons the sophists in the Clouds revealing “rhetoric” as a source of anxiety for Athenian audiences.
If you are successful in using rhetoric to persuade others you necessarily have to be selective about what you include and exclude. Caesar doesn’t start his commentary by telling us that he was involved in an illegal war designed to garner huge sums of money to further his political career. He begins in what appears to be a factual way inventing the very space in which he is going to carry out his campaign.
Wholesome or not I think it is very necessary to be cautious when reading ancient authors. So steeped are they in the art of manipulation that at the moment they seem at their most compelling you have to be most on your guard.
Seneca, I’m curious. Setting all else aside, do you think Caesar was a good writer?
Randy, Since I initiated this thread, I take it upon myself to answer your question. Yes, Caesar was a good writer. That was fully implicit in seneca’s post, and is beyond dispute. If you have a point to make, please make it.
Earlier in this thread you asked Aetos (rather belligerently, I thought)
“What do you think Caesar was doing in Gaul all those years? Was he not executing Roman policy?”
This too I took it upon myself to answer, replying that he was pursuing his own interests. That is hardly controversial, but if you want to argue otherwise, please do, and we can discuss. Signing yourself Theodor Mommsen is hardly sufficient.
We may have different points of view, Randy, and we obviously do, but we are not at war.
Aetos, my man, I trust you know nothing I ask you is intended belligerently 
.
Seneca, my friend, I am genuinely interested in what you think of Caesar as a writer. And still am, unless you’re happy having Michael speak for you .
Michael, I find judgement about Caesar a fascinating topic, and I’m grateful you started the thread. When my friends express an opinion, I’m just probing to see if I understand properly the basis for their opinion. I’m a friendly guy and I don’t take myself all that seriously. I certainly am not at war. I’m not the one who lobs accusations like “pain in the ass” and “ill-informed”, and I’m not the one who presumes to speak for others.
What constitutes a good writer? We could talk about vocabulary selection, style, and so forth, certainly. For me, a good writer is able to absorb you into his point of view without your noticing. Caesar does that for me. I find that I have to force myself to step back and take a critical perspective.