But he spent much less time there than he did north of his province, ranging widely from the Cévennes to the Rhine and beyond, twice venturing across the Channel to Kent and Essex. Caesar was assigned a five-year tenure of Gaul and Illyricum, which in this period meant the north Italian plain, from the Apennines to the Alps, a bit of Slovenia, the Croatian coastline, a sliver of Languedoc and all of Provence. It would be more than a hundred years before it came to mean what we mean by ‘province’. The word provincia could mean a place, but it could also mean a sphere of activity – a particular war, for example, or supervision of the grain supply. After exercising their year’s duties, consuls were assigned provinces in which they would exercise command as proconsuls. He had been one of the two consuls – republican Rome’s highest magistrates – in what we call 59 BC (the Romans, who reckoned time according to their eponymous magistracies, called it the consulship of Caesar and Bibulus). The Gaul through which Caesar hacked his way was not where he was meant to have been. O’Donnell’s translation is the first truly to embrace this approach – he calls it ‘the best bad man’s book ever written’. The linguistic turn and the rise of critical theory accentuated these suspicious readings, and the advent of postcolonialism cemented them as the new normal. It was really only in the mid-20th century that doubts began to creep in: the seeming transparency of the language conceals as much as it discloses, the superficial verisimilitude is a déformation historique, and casual slaughter was at the centre of Caesar’s campaign in Gaul.
GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR ASTERIX MANUAL
So successful is Caesar’s narrative strategy that readers have for centuries turned to the Gallic Wars – The War for Gaul, in this new translation by James O’Donnell – as a leadership manual and strategic primer, as well as a model of Latin prose. He tells us so himself, in a brilliantly structured third-person narrative that makes mass slaughter and the enslavement of whole populations seem mundane. If we leave aside the question of who precisely covets these sadistic tableaux, they get one thing right: Julius Caesar was the first génocidaire in European history.
GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR ASTERIX SERIES
One recent series of figurines featured the scourging of a Gallic prisoner, the crucifixion of a tribal chieftain, and a grim-faced centurion overseeing the punishment detail.
Even today, Caesar’s legionaries and their colourful Gallic foes are bread and butter for companies that sell expensive toy soldiers to middle-aged schoolboys. C onsider the many things that would not exist without Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars: Asterix and Obelix The Wicker Man Gauloises cigarettes the little Airfix Romans and Britons that many of us grew up with.
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