Caesar the 'Litterator'

Abstract

Luca Grillo, Amherst College Christopher Krebs, Harvard University Andrew Riggsby, University of Texas at Austin

“But tell me the truth, without hiding anything from me: what did Caesar really think of my poetry?” (QF 2.16.5). So Cicero asked his brother Quintus, who was accompanying Caesar in Gaul and Britain. It was 54 B.C.E., and Quintus’ appointment as a lieutenant sanctioned Cicero’s rapprochement with Caesar. But in this particular correspondence Cicero was not concerned with the Roman general as much as the connoisseur in literary matters, in whose judgment of his poetry he took a keen interest. This may strike modern readers as unlikely – but wrongly so. For Caesar was, in fact, a recognized intellectual and man of letters, an orator (Suet. DJ 55) and writer, whose speeches and works gained the highest admiration of his fellow Romans (e.g. Cic. Brut. 261-2; Hirtius Preface BG 8; Suet. DJ 56). The purpose of this panel is to rediscover Caesar’s intellectual contributions and accomplishments and the cultural value of his writings.

Despite his acknowledged talents, Caesar’s writings and orations suffered a harsh fate. On the one hand, only a handful of fragments remains from his speeches, poems, tragedies, sayings, treatises and pamphlets; and the praise of Cicero (e.g. Att. 9.6.a and 9.16.2, Brut. 261; cf. Suet. DJ 55), Tacitus (Dial. 21) and Quintilian (10.1.114), among others, attest to the tremendous nature of this loss. On the other hand, the Commentarii have long been treated either as works of propaganda (Barwick 1951 and Rambaud 1952) or as samples of pure prose for convenient use in classrooms. Hence Caesar’s phrases fill the pages of grammars and dictionaries, but rarely make their way out of these.

Only most recent scholarship has started to re-evaluate the Commentarii, following a more general trend in classical historiography which acknowledges the indissoluble unity of literary form and content in ancient historians’ works. For instance, Batstone and Damon treat the BC as “an unfinished masterpiece” (2006); Riggsby concentrates on Caesar’s De Bello Gallico as a text interacting with multiple discourses (2006); Krebs and Shadee (2006 and 2008) consider Caesar’s rhetorical strategies of constructing geography in the BG; Osgood argues that Caesar’s campaign in Gaul intersected with his writings (2009); and Woodman, who has repeatedly called attention to the rhetorical nature of classical historiography, recently stated that style does not “take a second place to the ‘real business’ of historiography, which is content… style and content are indivisible” (2007 142).

The panel intends to explore the literary and cultural value of Caesar’s survived and lost works, with regard to his intellectual interests and contributions.