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Has anyone read this book?

If you had, you might have noticed that Caesar writes entirely in the third person. I thought this was unintentionally funny.


The question I mean to pose is: Were the Gallic Wars justified for the protection of Rome or not?

Actually my esteemed colleague, the third person was used because it was supposed to be transcribed by someone in Rome, not Caesar himself and for whatever reason it was never done this way.

Caesar was given the Governorship of Gaul because as an ex-consul, he was entitled to a territory for one year. (in his case 5 years)

Yes and Caesar killed hella Gauls. (some actually died because he burnt their earth and crops, starving them)

His enemies in the Senate tried to give him the roads and paths of Italy (actually a government office) as his "province" when he completed his year in office as consul, but he managed to get Transalpine Gaul instead.

As I remember it, the whole thing started with the Helvetii deciding to migrate westward out of Switzerland and Caesar marching over to "discuss" it with them. I'll have to go back and reread to see how the whole thing got out of hand and the defensive move against the Helvetii became an outright conquest. I don't necessarily blame Caesar for either the conquest or his methods, that was how things were done back then. And anyway, the Gauls sacked Rome in 390 BC, I doubt they were particularly gentle.

Oh, and the 3rd person thing was just the way you wrote in those days. I've also read that the Commentaries were reports from Caesar to the Senate, left deliberately unpolished to serve as a resource for future historians (though they do come across as excellent, plain Latin and have been praised as such ever since).

That's pretty close, it was probably "O Helvetii, non!" mrgreen Or maybe "Helvetii ad domum" ("Helvetii go home").

And the Commentaries blend right into the books on the Civil Wars, too, though those aren't quite as good.

Read it in LATIN and I had to TRANSLATE it. It was by FAR the easiest thing of his I translated. I was pretty good (talking in third person is so cool) but the words he used, he was the only one to use them (ex. ut).

Caesar had a pretty good pretext in defending Cisalpine Gaul, even if it was debunked by Cato the Stoic and company. The Cimbri and the Teutones had killed a whole shitload of Romans in a nasty massacre not too long ago. The bodycount of that Germanic migration was stupendously massive, at several hundred thousand. So even though the Romans had turned this threat back, people would be rightfully cagey about Germanic issues. So his initial pretext did at least appear with plausability. Of course that's out the window the moment he starts shuffling the Gaulish client states and poking that hornets nest.