Caesar in Gaul and Rome: War in Words

by Andrew M. Riggsby

Winner, AAP/PSP Award for Excellence, Classics and Ancient History, 2006 Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with Latin knows "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres" ("All Gaul is divided into three parts"), the opening line of De Bello Gallico, Julius Caesar's famous commentary on his campaigns against the Gauls in the 50s BC. But what did Caesar intend to accomplish by writing and publishing his commentaries, how did he go about it, and what potentially unforeseen consequences did his writing have? These are the questions that Andrew Riggsby pursues in this fresh interpretation of one of the masterworks of Latin prose. Riggsby uses contemporary literary methods to examine the historical impact that the commentaries had on the Roman reading public. In the first part of his study, Riggsby considers how Caesar defined Roman identity and its relationship to non-Roman others. He shows how Caesar opens up a possible vision of the political future in which the distinction between Roman and non-Roman becomes less important because of their joint submission to a Caesar-like leader. In the second part, Riggsby analyzes Caesar's political self-fashioning and the potential effects of his writing and publishing the Gallic War. He reveals how Caesar presents himself as a subtly new kind of Roman general who deserves credit not only for his own virtues, but for those of his soldiers as well. Riggsby uses case studies of key topics (spatial representation, ethnography, virtus and technology, genre, and the just war), augmented by more synthetic discussions that bring in evidence from other Roman and Greek texts, to offer a broad picture of the themes of national identity and Caesar's self-presentation.

Genres: History

286 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2006

Reviews

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I currently teach Advanced Placement Latin at an elite independent school, and before this year, I had never read Julius Caesar before. To the uninitiated, this may not seem like much of an issue, yet those familiar with the Advanced Placement curriculum will immediately decry me for the fraud I know I am. Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, which documents seven years of his famous conquest of Gaul, now modern France, is a new, essential text for the Advanced Placement exam. In fact, Caesar is one of only two authors that Latin students must read to prepare for the exam, and the exam, in turn, asks students to translate and answer syntactical questions on selections from De Bello Gallico that its creators assume they have read in class.

Given the importance of my responsibilities as an Advanced Placement Latin instructor, I decided to familiarize myself with some secondary literature on De Bello Gallico in addition to the Latin text itself. Caesar in Gaul and Rome: War in Words, written by University of Texas at Austin classicist and ancient historian Andrew Riggsby, has been an ideal source for me as a teacher to draw upon in an effort to complicate and contextualize Caesar’s deceptively upfront and simply written commentarii. In seven excellent chapters and a learned introduction, Riggsby addresses a wide variety of themes and questions that concern De Bello Gallico: Caesar’s use of space, his conception of the Other, his attitude toward and reconceptualization of virtus, formal questions about genre, audience, and voice, Roman “theories” about just war and Caesar’s own justification for the war in Gaul, and whether De Bello Gallico constitutes propaganda. While classicists have spilled much ink on these subjects over literal centuries of academic scholarship, Riggsby’s conclusions are fresh, incisive, and sometimes unexpected. In effect, he condenses decades of research over the past half-century and offers his own solutions in a trim volume accessible to classicists and nascent Latinists alike.

Riggsby opens Caesar in Gaul and Rome with an important declaration. He intends to treat De Bello Gallico as a historical event unto itself and not necessarily as a historical account of the war in Gaul from 58-52 BCE (while the war ended in 50, Caesar concludes his narrative after the battle of Alesia in 52), which scholars can use to reconstruct what “really happened.” This attempt at veracity is misguided: “It is by now notoriously difficult to confirm or refute anything Cesar says,” Riggsby writes. “There are few other sources for the Gallic War, and none can be shown to be substantially independent of Caesar’s account.” The text, on the other hand, has a “social life” and history of its own to which “many things can be brought to bear.” To that end, Riggsby notes that there are a few extant sources that attest to De Bello Gallico’s reception among Rome’s elite and, more importantly, “that we have a variety of different sources for how Romans might talk about the war and about the other topics of De Bello Gallico.” Having delineated the scope of his study, Riggsby introduces the “methodological coherence” that binds together his seven chapters and specifically emphasizes intertextuality, a “key notion” for the book.

While a relatively impoverished notion of intertextuality signifies textual allusions in poetry (for example, the repetition of a particular word or phrase across different poems that may attest to some shared theme or motif), Riggsby puts forth a notion of intertextuality that examines relationships across genre boundaries, applies to prose just as well as poetry, and, most notably, involves relationships to entire literary discourses—what Riggsby calls interdiscursivity. “The existence of a discourse on some topic creates what might be called a ‘field of positions,’ a set of distinctions, contrasts, axes, and spectra with respect to which terms are defined and positions taken,” Riggsby writes. This idea—interdiscursivity—underpins nearly all of Riggsby’s conclusions, since he often points to how it “creates covert argumentation” in De Bello Gallico. “The narrator of De Bello Gallico does not make arguments,” he explains. By the location of certain sententiae (“sound bites” or opinions) in a milieu of positions established by other texts, however, “descriptions and narratives can become argumentative.”

All this high-flying theoretical jargon may seem irrelevant, yet it serves an essential methodological purpose throughout the rest of the book, especially since Riggsby tries to show how Caesar makes certain assertions (about Gauls and Germans, about virtus, about just war, etc.) without actually making those points explicitly. In doing so, Riggsby unearths implicit arguments in Caesar’s text that might otherwise go unnoticed by high school Latin students or undergraduates struggling to decipher Caesar’s Latin. In this way—and because Riggsby’s prose is accessible and the architecture of the book itself logical—Caesar in Gaul and Rome is extraordinarily helpful in the Advanced Placement Latin classroom.

Whereas Riggsby skillfully summarizes decades of recent scholarship in mere paragraphs throughout Caesar in Gaul and Rome, I lack the skills needed to condense his many astute points into a short review. Cognizant of this, I present here some of his most exciting, even groundbreaking conclusions in the order he presents them in the book.

First, Riggsby outlines cogently how Caesar’s ethnographic portraiture of Gauls and Germans diverges significantly from his literary predecessors (and some successors, such as Strabo) who themselves write about the northern European tribes, most famously Posidonius. While Caesar does indeed co-opt many of the same ethnographic themes in De Bello Gallico—Caesar’s Gauls, for instance, are stereotypically faithless, given over to homosexual promiscuity, and extremely and unreasonably violent—he acknowledges and reinforces meaningful internal divisions among the Gauls, contrary to his forebears. In accordance with the widely-held modern scholarly position that “the century or so before the Roman conquest saw a move in Gaul from political organization based largely on ‘tribes’ or ‘chiefdoms’ to more state-like arrangements,” Caesar, from the outset, insists on differentiating the Gauls geographically and culturally (“All Gaul is divided into three parts,” 1.1.1), quite unlike other authors for whom “the people and places of Gaul lack distinct identities; they are interchangeable and, in fact, interchanged.” Gallic society, however rudimentary, does have structure, and “the idea of structure is reinforced by Caesar’s frequent use of terms from the Roman social and political lexicon to describe the Gallic world,” such as plebs, gods given Latin names, and the class of “knights.” The Germans, on the other hand, stand in stark contrast to the Gauls (despite substantial archaeological and linguistic evidence that suggests the two groups were nearly indistinct), so much so that they constitute an other “Other” in De Bello Gallico. Unlike the Gauls, Caesar’s Germans are “conventional northern nomads” who neatly resemble the archetypal “barbarians” of the Greco-Roman historiographical tradition.

So what explains this unique tripartite ethnographical division (Romans, Gauls, and Germans), which Riggsby claims is “a striking exception to the general practice of ancient ethnography”? Riggsby offers two compelling answers: first, “by distinguishing the Gauls and Germans carefully, Caesar limits the task before him.” He will conquer Gaul, not Germania, and if the Gauls and Germans are radically distinct, and each thus occupies distinct geographic space, “then the conquest of Gaul would count as a completed task.” Second, Riggsby argues that “the Gauls and Germans are . . . designed to pose different threats to the Romans.” The Germans’ fluidity poses a particular type of problem for Caesar, and while their inability to recognize boundaries, “social or geographic,” persistently threatens Caesar’s success in Gaul itself, their exotic, nomadic lifestyle “offer(s) nothing to potential conquerors by virtue of having nothing in the first place.” To put it succinctly, there is no there there for the Romans to assimilate into their empire. The Gauls, on the other hand, are a people “suitable for appropriation”; the Romans can subsume their culture, however foreign, since they have a culture, and this makes their capitulation valuable from a Roman imperial perspective. Riggsby’s formulation of this tripartite ethnographical scheme is both true to the text and tremendously insightful, especially for how Riggsby demonstrates that Caesar legitimizes, via ethnography, his conquest of Gaul and Gaul alone—a prime example that Caesar makes implicit “arguments” through description.

Another important conclusion from Riggsby concerns Caesar’s reconceptualization of virtus, sometimes translated as “manly courage” or “manliness” defined in martial terms. Virtus, an unambiguously positive attribute, most conventionally signifies “excellence shown in serving the state, especially the courage of an ideal soldier.” Alternatively, though relatedly, scholars have defined virtus as “steadfast holding-out, stubbornly pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, rigid unwaveringness.” For Riggsby, these definitions are deficient, at least with respect to how virtus functions in De Bello Gallico. With reference to a smattering of textual evidence throughout the commentarii, Riggsby claims Caesar offers a modified, more nuanced conception of this prized Roman characteristic. “Virtus, De Bello Gallico implies, is the mental toughness to do what is required of one,” he asserts. It is not, then, “necessarily a spur to aggression,” for it just as well involves duty, self-control, and discipline. In certain instances, in fact, virtus requires endurance in harsh circumstances, whereas fighting, most typically associated with virtus, would allow one to escape those same wretched circumstances, a cowardly act.

To support this claim, Riggsby cites a speech from the Gallic leader Critognatus in Book VII of De Bello Gallico, when supplies are running low during the siege of Alesia before the pan-Gallic reinforcements have arrived to alleviate Vercingetorix and his army. In a debate concerning what the Gauls should do without sufficient resources to survive much longer in Alesia, Critognatus argues against those who propose to break out of the town and to fight the Romans in one climactic showdown. While, he proclaims, the proposal to fight ostensibly resembles “memory of [our] virtue of old” (7.77.4), it in fact constitutes “softness of spirit (animi . . . mollitia)—not virtus—not to be able to bear want for a little while” (7.77.5). To quote Riggsby at length:

“Softness is one of the most important stereotypical characteristics of the feminine in Roman culture. . . . Thus Critognatus offers not only an alternative description of the opposing plan, but one that suggests that the justification for that plan by appeal to virtus is incoherent. Anything that is “soft” in its particular circumstance could not possible count as virtus, whatever the usual value placed on physical courage. Sometimes not fighting is more manly.”

This modification of virtus as it is traditionally conceived in Roman literature serves Caesar’s purposes well in De Bello Gallico. First, Caesar the author goes to great lengths to demonstrate how the Gauls, in accordance with their stereotypical proclivity to borrow and imitate, adopt this modified, duty-oriented conception of virtus. Most explicitly, Vercingetorix attempts to fashion for the Gauls a “Romanized” pan-Gallic force that, rather than fight constantly and impulsively, responds obediently to his scorched earth policy to win the war. In this way, the Gauls become a more formidable opponent as the war progresses, accentuating Caesar’s victory and making it more dramatic. Moreover, while Vercingetorix fails to implement this sort of virtus-inflected discipline on his own, he implicitly validates that the Gauls are more suitable than the Germans for conquest. “Because the Gauls were good imitators,” Riggsby explains, “and because the crucial war-making skills [one of which is the learned skill of virtus] are imitable, they became the long-term prize.” Second, even more plainly, De Bello Gallico’s notion of virtus corresponds directly with Caesar’s leadership abilities. Insofar as virtus requires obedience and discipline, “the virtus of troops in De Bello Gallico depends on their preparation by the commander, on his ability to impose his will on them, and in many cases on his presence, real or virtual,” Riggsby writes. “If Caesar’s troops fight well, it is because Caesar has made them truly his own.” As is often the case with De Bello Gallico, a subtle literary move from Caesar the author makes Caesar the general look even better than the narrative superficially suggests.

The final point of emphasis to which I wish to call attention pertains to just war theory and Caesar’s own justification of his conquest of Gaul. First, it should be noted that the Romans, contrary to the beliefs of some scholars who ascribe to the Romans a realpolitik attitude toward foreign affairs, did have moral complications about war, and likewise Caesar—once more, implicitly—extensively justifies the war he conducts in Gaul throughout De Bello Gallico. To establish how Romans “theorized” about war and empire, Riggsby turns to Cicero, who in various texts outlines what one may call a just war theory. “There are certain duties that must be observed even toward those by whom you have been injured,” Cicero writes (De Officiis 1.34). He argues elsewhere that war is just when: (1) it has a cause, either for preventing or avenging injuries (iniuriae); (2) it is undertaken “for the sake of its obligations to other states (pro fide) or for the sake of its well-being (pro salute)” (De civ. D. 22.6—Riggsby comments wryly that “'well-being' does not set a very high threshold for going to war”); and (3) reparations have first been sought and war has been announced and formally declared (On Duties 1.36). With respect to the Gallic War in particular, in a famous speech titled On the Consular Provinces delivered in 56 BCE, Cicero justifies the war in Gaul with reference to: (1) unavenged past wrongs that had not yet (until Caesar’s tenure) been avenged (such as Gaius Pomptinus’s short, defensive conflict against the Allobroges who had revolted in 61 BCE; this reason corresponds neatly with reason (1) mentioned above); (2) Gallic ethnic character, insofar as the Gauls are “hostile to [our] empire or faithless or . . . certainly savage and barbarous and war-like” (33; this reason corresponds with reason (2) above, i.e. for the sake of well-being); and (3) the fact that previous wars with the Gauls had not stopped their recurrent aggression—in Cicero’s words, “if matters are left rough and unfinished, however cut back now, they nonetheless gather themselves again and recoup strength to renew the war” (34; this reason also corresponds with the well-being justification).

Caesar, Riggsby points out, “follows a pattern broadly similar to that of Cicero’s speech” defending the Gallic War, yet he “also includes some elements that were not present in Cicero’s theoretical or practical discussions of war.” The additional reasons he introduces are most intriguing, so I will skip over the areas in which Cicero and Caesar overlap and skip straight to the latter’s unique justifications. First, Caesar repeatedly returns to the bad faith of the Gauls as a reason to attack them (for instance, the seizure of Roman knights justifies his campaign against the Veneti). “Although there was no universally recognized international law in antiquity,” Riggsby writes, “Greeks and Romans seem to have felt that heralds, envoys, and the like were normally sacrosanct. Hence the taking of [these representatives] can be portrayed as a violation of a general obligation.” Second, Caesar cleverly references the “habituation” of the Gauls (and the Germans, to a certain extent) as a justifiable reason to conquer them. If both groups repeatedly transgress geographic boundaries (in the case of the Germans, in particular relation to the Rhine) and metaphorical boundaries (in the case of the Gauls, who habitually break agreements with Caesar) unpunished, they will continue to do so and consequently wreak havoc on Rome’s borders. “The Romans must train the barbarian peoples to respect boundaries of both kinds,” Riggsby explains, channeling Caesar’s implicit stance in De Bello Gallico. Since northern peoples are, as noted above, stereotypically violent, unpredictable, and often nomadic, the need to check their habitual behavior is, for Caesar, utterly essential.

In relation to just war theory, I wish to call attention to just one more observation that Riggsby keenly makes. Riggsby points out that for Cicero, unlike for Greek Stoics such as Panaetius, a just war need not be motivationally “pure” (i.e. for a just cause), and instead can be (simply) circumstantially just. In other words, even if one wanted to acquire more territory to add to one’s empire, this would not preclude a war from being just, so long as the circumstances surrounding that prospective conflict aligned with the requirements of Cicero’s “theory” outlined earlier. Riggsby accounts for this difference with reference to what he calls “a different meta-ethical context.” He explains that “traditional Stoic ethics had a strong internal component; truly correct action depended on intention. Such action had, by definition, to be taken for the right reason.” For Cicero, however, because a so-called just cause “is not a motivational requirement,” not dependent on any “internal [ethical] component,” “it made sense to fight a ‘just’ war for the sake of empire, so long as justification happened to exist independently.” Riggsby’s conjecture about the difference between traditional Stoic and Ciceronian attitudes toward just war is, I think, downright brilliant, and accentuates the “external” meta-ethical perspective that helps clarify Roman imperialism.

To reiterate a point made above, the ideas and arguments summarized here are mere fragments of the complex scholarly mosaic Riggsby meticulously crafts in Caesar in Gaul and Rome. His command on Caesar, ancient literature, postcolonial and linguistic theory, and even philosophy is magisterial. Riggsby never settles for easy answers to difficult questions, and as he unearths concepts and arguments not manifestly obvious in De Bello Gallico—carefully and with extraordinary nuance—one feels as if the scales have fallen from one’s eyes in relation to the text. He makes clear that despite appearances—how many times has one read how De Bello Gallico is a clumsy work of propaganda masquerading as history? —embedded within Caesar’s commentarii are sophisticated literary moves that would have affected his Roman readers and potentially changed their attitude toward him and his war. If we really want to understand the impact of De Bello Gallico as it was published throughout the 50’s BCE, if we really seek to most fully appreciate the text as the rich literary artifact that it is, we must read it as a Roman might have read it more than two millennia ago. Andrew Riggsby helps us do just that.

[Pedro Ceneme · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book in making you question the context something is written: what’s the culture and norms the author is inserted? What’s his agenda? What is his political camp and who’s is his competing against? Often, we avoid questioning ourselves this deeply to understand the context in which a piece has been written, more so if the work is considered a “classic”.

Throughout the book, Mr. Riggsby will slowly unravel Caesar’s context in writing his book on the conquest of Gaul. The author relies much on comparative readings, extensively quoting and comparing both passages of the “Gallic War” of Caesar and other works, contemporaneous or not, that explore the context of the war and the societies and cultures that engaged in it. Through such analysis, it becomes quite clear how Caesar had a special talent for narrating the currents of the war he was leading. Far from reducing the uniqueness of his military success, it seems that he certainly bolstered his achievements by subtle, well-constructed arguments that one could very well match with propaganda. Some of the most interesting insights derived from Caesar’s arguments in my view are:

I - A physical understanding and framing of Gaul as a place to be occupied and divided, along the lines of land allotment the Romans understood, since the beginning of the war, by extensive use of terms in from that context

II – Occupation, of course, would be very beneficial to Ceasar, by increasing his popularity and material wealth, both through sacking and by vastly increasing his client network among the Gallic nobility.

III - The balancing act between showing that the Gauls were dangerous and posed a threat to Rome if left alone, (so required extensive and decisive action now), that they were backward and could be defeated rather easily but were also a complex enough society that could be absorbed into the empire.

IV - Along these lines, Caesar also argues extensively trying to differentiate between Gauls and Germans to cement his reputation as the vanquisher of an entire people, thus meriting a triumph, something that’s quite supported both by textual and material evidence.

V - Using the organization of Gallic society both culturally and politically as an argument for power concentration he would pursue in Rome: Gallic society was weak and prone to conflict due to a lack of hierarchy and extreme lack of discipline and cohesiveness of its leaders and people. This extends even to examples in the Roman military, usually used as a reference of hierarchy and discipline, but with Caesar emphasizing that his eventual failures came from officers deviating from his orders, in a clear breach of “Roman values”.

While this is a very niche subject, which may interest very few, there are many insights one can apply for anything he’s reading here. The advantage of analyzing an argument so far removed from our reality is that there’s virtually no bias for or against a particular proposition, something which is virtually impossible in our day to day lives. This makes one think how much many of the ideas we guard so rabidly may actually be nonsense, or worse, deliberate constructed as arguments to sway opinion in this or that direction. While this book is in no way an exhaustive list, it provides numerous examples as how discourse can be artfully crafted to influence opinion at large.

[Dany Cruz · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars, used this as evidence for my long term paper accusing Julius Caesar of the crime of genocide

[Bonnie_blu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riggsby has written an excellent and very in depth examination of Caesar's motives and actions by peforming a thorough exegisis of Caesar's written material. Riggsby compares Caesar's works to many others in the ancient Roman/Greek world. He makes an excellent case that Caesar redefined the relationship between the common legionaries and the commander, and then extended this relationship to include all of the people of the Roman empire to the leader of the empire. Caesar's words hint strongly that he foresaw that Rome had expanded to such an extent that the old Republic institutions could no longer function. Rome needed a supreme leader; one for which Caesar was superbly suited. Riggsby uses case studies of key topics, such as, spatial representation, ethnography, virtus and technology, genre, and the just war to make his case.

[Vasile · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good read