Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres,” or “All Gaul is divided into three parts.” So begins Julius Caesar's “Commentaries on the Gallic War,” a work taught in high-school Latin classes and widely admired for the purity and incisiveness of its style by scholars throughout the ages. By the time Caesar had ended his tenure as proconsul in Gaul it was no longer divided but entirely under the control of Rome. This accomplishment made possible the rise of Caesar to the very top of Roman politics, his ultimate if brief elevation to the office of dictator for life.
Reading the “Commentaries on the Gallic War” one might not realize how vast was the destruction behind Caesar's victory. The ancient estimate had it that under Caesar the Romans killed roughly one million people in Gaul, enslaved another million, and captured no fewer than 800 cities. Towns that offered Caesar resistance paid excruciating penalties. In one he chopped off the hands of all who fought against him and sent off their wives and children into slavery—this under a general later known for his clemency.
In “The Gallic War” Caesar writes of himself in the third person. Throughout the book one comes across such sentences as “Since Acco had been the leader of this plot, Caesar pronounced an unusually harsh sentence on him and had him executed according to an ancestral tradition of Rome.” Alone among Roman leaders, Caesar had the privilege of writing his own history. This privilege was bestowed upon him by a combination of his extraordinary organizational power and his literary talent. Of the former, he was said to be able to dictate four letters nearly simultaneously—and this, often, while on horseback. As for his literary talent, Cicero, himself a superior stylist and a critic of the highest discernment, wrote: “'The Commentaries' really must be thought excellent. For they are naked and lovely, with every oratorical ornament stripped away like clothing…. In history nothing is sweeter than pure and clear brevity.”
Along with historian, in “The Gallic War” Caesar is also often the working ethnographer. Here he is on the tribe of the Suebi, which he describes as “by far the most warlike of all the German nations”:
“From boyhood they are not in the least accustomed to observing duty and discipline, and they do nothing at all against their will—these all nourish their strength and make them men of immense physical size. Moreover, although they live in extremely cold regions, they have cultivated the habit of wearing no clothing but animal skins, and these skins are so small that much of the body is exposed; they also bathe in rivers.”
