I studied Latin in high school, and like generations of students before me, Caesar was the first author I encountered in more than a sentence-long way. We read through all of the First Commentary as well as selected parts of the Commentary on Caesar's first expedition to Britain.
In latter years I've come to realize that the seemingly arbitrary order in which Latin is taught actually makes a great deal of sense, in that it proceed from a simple and unadorned style--Caesar's Commentaries--through ever more complex and sophisticated uses: with Cicero we learn the use of formal rhetoric, with Virgil we encounter epic poetry, with Ovid we are introduced to lyric poetry, and finally with Juvenal and others we truly learn how to play with the language.
The point of this digression is that, as high schoolers, I very much doubt that the reproaches of Caesar our translator makes in the pages of this book would have meant a great deal. At that age and stage in our education, only a tiny minority--even among Latin students!--would have been aware of the larger historical--let alone political and sociological--context in which Caesar wrote...or taken much interest.
No one disputes that Caesar often acted brutally both in battle and in dealing with his defeated adversaries. This would put him in the same category as pretty much every ancient leader whom history has memorialized: Xerxes, Hannibal, the Scipios, the Parthian general who crushed Crassus at Carrhae, and no doubt others whom I could find. The notion that Caesar was somehow exceptionally "bad" or "frightful" to use the translator's own term is overwrought.
Oh...did Caesar use an irenic tone to describe his accomplishments? Of course he did...as the translator admits, these were self-serving instruments of propaganda dressed up as sober After-Action Reports. But how is that different than in the modern, indeed the contemporary era? Let he who has never tweaked a report to make himself look better than he deserves, cast the first stone.
General Sherman famously observed that "War is Hell." General Lee said that "It is a good thing that war is so terrible, else we should become too fond of it." And the anti-war folk-singer Phil Ochs concludes his immortal "Draft-Dodger Rag" with the ironic line "...And if you ever have a war without blood and gore, I'll be the first to go!"
So, while I appreciate the addition of historical, political, economic and sociological context, I could have done without the finger-wagging and the hand-wringing.
Five stars for the translation and the basic, unadorned parts of the commentary on the Commentaries.
One star off for the anti-war, ahistorical, presentist parts of the commentary. Net rating: four stars.
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