damon_caesars practical prose_cj 1994

Caesar's Practical ProseAuthor(s): Cynthia DamonSource: The Classical Journal, Vol. 89, No. 2 (Dec., 1993 - Jan., 1994), pp. 183-195Published by: The Classical Association of the Middle West and SouthStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3297665 .Accessed: 18/11/2013 21:37

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Classical Association of the Middle West and South is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to The Classical Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 130.58.64.71 on Mon, 18 Nov 2013 21:37:44 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THE FORUM

CAESAR'S PRACTICAL PROSE'

Thirty years ago, when Matthias Gelzer had the opportunity of addressing an audience of teachers of Latin and ancient history, he chose for his topic "Caesar as an historian."2 He argued that Caesar was not an historian in the modern sense of the word-not objective, not dependent on inadequate sources, not university trained-but that his commentarii were, given ancient criteria for the genre, historiographi- cal texts, something to set beside Sallust for the history of the late Republic, something to put in front of Appian and Cassius Dio. In making this claim Gelzer was attempting to quell a flood of scholarship which had fastened limpet-like on the chronological problems in the Bellum Civile and on Asinius Pollio's assertion that Caesar himself would have changed many things in the commentaries if he had lived long enough to do so, scholarship that was trying to reduce the commentarii to the category of propaganda. Now propaganda is a highly inflammatory label to apply to a text, and one with the worst possible associations in the events of this century. The fact that Caesar produced in the Anticato an extended piece of invective against the republican martyr lends a sort of plausibility to the label. Anyone who can tell the sort of stories about Cato that Caesar seems to have told- besides the standard remarks about drunkenness and incest there were some more creative touches, too, such as the description of Cato's sifting through the ashes of his brother's pyre to find bits of melted gold-anyone who would say this, it is felt, or who would claim

1'An earlier version of this paper was presented in a panel entitled "Caesar: Politician, Generalissimo, Writer" at the Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association (1992, New Orleans). The panel was sponsored by the American Classical League. The present version of the paper is indebted to the helpful comments of CJs anonymous referee.

2The talk was given on 16 November 1961. It was published in Gelzer's Kleine Schriften (Wiesbaden 1963) 2.307-35, and again in D. Rasmussen, ed. Caesar. Wege der Forschung 43 (Darmstadt 1974), 438-73.

3 Pollio Asinius parum diligenter parumque integra veritate compositos putat, cum Caesar pleraque et quae per alios erant gesta temere crediderit et quae per se, vel consulto vel etiam memoria lapsus perperam ediderit; existimatque rescripturum et correcturum fuisse (Suetonius Divus Julius 56.4). This statement may have contributed to Pollio's justification for writing a history of the period himself.

The Classical Journal 89.2 (1994) 183-95


184 CYNTHIA DAMON

divine and regal ancestry for his aunt Julia, would not shrink from tinting the account of his own res gestae rose. And anyone who handles such a text without the precautions needed for other forms of radioac- tive material is liable to be viewed as contaminated. Yet we don't have to accept the alternatives proposed so far, Gelzer's black on white "history" label or the flashing red "propaganda" label; we can open the text and sample it for ourselves.

Now much of the history of Latin pedagogy is founded upon the premise that when we open our texts we will find Latin that is clear and, what is better, pure. On the one hand no sentences which weave together a seemingly infinite number of subordinate clauses which answer the listener s qualms before he has any, which concede some points, explain away other ones, which set out the conditions for the truth of what is being said, which characterize the speaker as an eminently reliable sort and his cause as a worthy one, which make use of structural elements such as anaphora, correlatives, or lists, and which use all these devices in order to achieve their goal, getting the listener to do something that the speaker assumes he is reluctant to do. Sentences like the previous one, in fact, are not present to make the students groan. On the other hand, so the style books say, the language of Caesar is pure, no atrocities of form or vocabulary allowed. When Caesar has occasion to describe a hill, for example, he doesn't do what Cato the Elder did in his Origines and call it "a wart," a verruca. Many criteria by which to measure the clarity and purity of Caesar's Latin have been found, for scholars have taken the fact that Caesar produced a grammatical treatise, the de Analogia, as a mandate for almost unlimited attention to matters of diction and style.5 But I want to argue that, despite the clarity, despite the purity, Caesar is one of the most challenging Latin authors, particularly in the Bellum Civile, the text on which I focus here.

Now there are really two different ways of reading the Bellum Civile--one can read the text sentence by sentence and follow Caesar

4 The extant fragments are conveniently collected in the 3rd volume of A. Klotz' Teubner edition of Caesar.

5 The de Analogia was written in either 55/54 or 53/52 (while Caesar was administering assizes in Cisalpina) and was dedicated to Cicero. Cicero says that its topic was de ratione Latine loquendi, and quotes a dictum from the first book: verborum dilectum originem esse eloquentiae (Brutus 253). According to Fronto Caesar wrote de nominibus declinandis, de verborum aspirationibus et rationibus (p. 210.1- 2 van den Hout). The extant fragments deal with the usage of words such as arma, comitia, inimicitiae (always plural in form) and with the proper forms of 3rd declen- sion words. One might summarize the message of the treatise as we know it as "choose the right word and use it in the proper form."


CAESAR'S PRACTICAL PROSE 185

and his legates from Italy to Spain to Africa to Greece to Asia to Alexandria. This is as dull and as inconsequential as my string of prepositional phrases is. Caesar's narrative has none of the dramatic tension that Herodotus achieves in Books 7-8 when he describes Xerxes' forces moving slowly but inexorably towards Athens, drinking rivers dry as they pass. This first method of reading is rather like following Ariadne's thread through a labyrinth-it is gratifying to reach the end, of course, but one retains no lasting impression of the places one has been. The other method of reading the Bellum Civile aims at fashioning a net of memory and understanding by tying the knots which link episodes and characters that are found on the long strand of narrative. This method is a good deal more arduous than the first, because Caesar, writing for readers who wanted to understand and judge recent events and the actors in them, leaves a great deal of the responsibility for interpretation to his readers. In this paper I will examine four areas of reader responsibility that I find particularly fruitful, four tasks that, if exercised diligently, make the text so much more than a repository of clear sentences and pure vocabulary.

The first responsibility is to flesh out the names. Caesar's account of the first 19 months of the civil war is far richer in names than any of the histories of the parallel tradition, and each of these names was, for Caesar, a convenient abbreviation for the personality, the goals, the achievements and the connections of an individual well known to his audience. He doesn't provide character sketches, but that is not to say that Caesar refrains from characterization-not at all. His technique is rather to report his characters' words and deeds quite fully, then to rely on his readers to judge them. (By "quite fully" I mean with considerably more detail than, say, Appian or Dio or even Plutarch do in their accounts of the same events.) A glance at Caesar's treatment of Labienus in the Bellum Civile makes the point quite clear.

If you remember your Bellum Gallicum, you will know that Labienus was Caesar's most trusted legatus in Gaul, the one with responsibility for the largest number of legions and the greatest freedom for independent action. The association between the two men went back to before Caesar's tenure in Gaul, too, for they were both involved in the trial of poor old Rabirius Postumus in 63, Labienus as the prosecutor, Caesar as a iudex.6 And from Hirtius' book 8 of the Bellum Gallicum we know that Caesar had taken careful thought for Labienus' post-bellum career as well-he wanted a consulship for

6 Dio 37.26ff., Suetonius Divus Julius 12.


186 CYNTHIA DAMON

Labienus in 48.7 Now 48 was a year in which Caesar himself intended to be consul--he may have hoped that Labienus would prove more cooperative than his colleague in 59, the inimitable Marcus Bibulus. Labienus was an associate of long standing, then. Yet early on in the Bellum Civile his name is mentioned in a context which shows that he is on Pompey's side.

The topic of BC 1.15 is the open-armed reception that Caesar says his forces received in parts of Italy where one might not have expected them to be welcome. First mentioned is the territory around Picenum, that is to say, Pompey's home ground. Next he says that "even Cingulum offered support and obedience." Why the "even"? Because, he explains, Cingulum was a town that Labienus had founded and built with his own money.8 Nothing could be less demonstrative, less emotional, but the information is there for those who care to follow Labienus through the civil war. And Labienus' desertion must have cost Caesar something or the Pompeian Cicero would not have expressed himself so enthusiastically upon hearing of it: "I call Labienus a hero," he says on 23 January 49, "it is the finest political action we have seen for a long while. If he has achieved nothing else, he has made Caesar smart."9 Smarting or not, Caesar made no comment; Dio, on the other hand, chooses to guide his readers' interpretation of Labienus' desertion, saying: "The reason was that when he had acquired wealth and fame he began to conduct himself more haughtily than his rank warranted, and Caesar, seeing that he put himself on the same level with his superior, ceased to be so fond of him. And so, as Labienus could not endure this change and was at the same time afraid of coming to some harm, he transferred his allegiance" (41.4.3-4). I cite this passage not so much because the explanation is convincing, but to show that the desertion cries out for interpretation, and that Caesar provides none. Caesar's reticence is not, I think, to be ascribed to indifference, or to a fixed policy of suppressing events that revealed dissatisfaction in his own camp, however; Dio, having given his set piece on perfidia, evinces

7 T. Labienum praefecit togatae, quo maiore commendatione conciliaretur ad consulatus petitionem, BG 8.52. There are grave textual difficulties here, however. See M. Gelzer, Caesar, Politician and Statesman, tr. P. Needham (Cambridge, MA 1968) 186 note 3. 8 BC 1.15.2: etiam Cingulo, quod oppidum Labienus constituerat suaque pecunia exaedificaverat, ad eum legati veniunt, quaeque imperaverit, se cupidissime facturos pollicentur.

9 Att. 7.13.1: Labienum ijpoxx iudico. facinus iam diu nullum civile praeclarius qui, ut aliud nihil, hoc tamen profecit, dedit illi dolorem. Cf. Att. 7.12.5, where Cicero maintains that if Labienus had deserted before Pompey left Rome damnasse ... sceleris hominem amicum rei publicae causa videretur.



almost no further interest in Labienus, but Caesar brings him front and center repeatedly.10 And at each of his appearances Labienus is behaving atrociously.

"Atrociously," of course, is my word, not Caesar's-he reports events without labelling them. Which is not to say that Caesar reports the truth and the whole truth, of course not. Selective reporting is just as powerful a device of persuasion as colorful packaging. And when Caesar has Labienus make his entrance into the Bellum Civile swearing that he will not desert Pompey and will suffer whatever fate the future has in store for Pompey (BC 3.13), he may reasonably expect his readers to question the reliability of Labienus' oath." We will come back to the role of oaths in the Bellum Civile, but we are not finished with Labienus yet.

He next appears on the banks of the river Apsus, which flowed between the rival camps in Greece (3.19). The soldiers on the two sides had gotten in the habit of discussing ways and means of ending the war, making, Caesar says, limited non-aggression agreements- pactiones-to facilitate their conversations. Labienus bursts in rudely upon one such colloquium and all of a sudden there are weapons flying everywhere. Since all of the wounded are Caesarians whereas Labienus is shielded by his soldiers, there is a certain amount of pressure to conclude that it was the Pompeians who had violated the current pactio. It is Labienus, at any rate, who has the final word: "there will be no peace," he says, "until we have Caesar's head." End of scene.

But it is not long before the unnecessary cruelty to which Labienus-that is to say, Caesar's version of Labienus-gives expression here is shown in action again. In BC 3.71 Caesar describes the aftermath of Pompey's victory at Dyrrachium, allotting four sentences, and only four sentences, to the task. In the first two he reports the casualties to his side. In the third we learn that Pompey, the victor, was saluted as imperator by his troops, and that with uncharacteristic modesty he did not publicize the fact. Again, the word "uncharacteristic" is mine, not Caesar's. Caesar's reader, however, can supply the adjective, for Caesar has mentioned three

10 Dio has four passing references which show Labienus' whereabouts but little else (42.10.3, 43.2.1, 43.4.5, 43.30.4). Labienus' final appearance in Dio's text is more interesting, since it shows how Labienus was felt to be a feather in the wind. When during a battle in Spain he used a tactic which looked like a retreat, the whole Pompeian army lost heart and collapsed (43.38.2-3).

11 princeps Labienus procedit iuratque se eum non deserturum eundemque casum subiturum quemcumque ei fortuna tribuisset (3.13.3).


188 CYNTHIA DAMON

times already the boasting reports spread about by Pompey and his legates after each even minor success.12 We will come back to this point, too, but we can't leave 3.71 just yet. The fourth and longest sentence here belongs to Labienus: "with Pompey's permission Labienus ordered that the captives be turned over to him. When they were brought out into view, he called them his 'comrades in arms' and asked, most insultingly, whether veterans were in the habit of turning tail. Then he killed them."'13 Labienus' brutality towards the very men that he had led to such heady successes in Gaul is startling, the more so because of the "explanation" Caesar gives for it: "the turn- coat," he says, "was trying to persuade the Pompeians of his good faith--quo maior perfugae fides haberetur. This quiet oxymoron is as close as Caesar gets to an explicit statement about character traits in the Bellum Civile.

Labienus leaves this text just before the battle of Pharsalus, departing with a boast and yet another oath: he will return to camp a victor, he swears, or not at all (3.87.5). But although neither he nor any of the other Pompeian officers who echo his oath returns to camp, they don't they die on the field, either. Some escape only to be killed by their own men (this is how Lucius Domitius meets his end [3.99.5]), others (Brutus among them) capitulate, and still others, like Labienus, escape successfully to carry on the war in new theatres.

Cruel and unreliable, that is the way Caesar characterizes Labienus, though without using either one of those adjectives. This is not the writing of an indifferent or impartial reporter, but an eminently practical selection and arrangement of incidents to achieve an utterly damning whole.

The next reader responsibility that I'd like to illustrate for you is perhaps the most burdensome for us, though the original audience would have experienced no difficulty in filling it: it is simply to read as a Roman. To be alert, for example, to contraventions of mores that Caesar doesn't trouble to footnote for you. Help on some small points is available in Plutarch and in Appian and Dio, who were writing for audiences to whom reading as Romans did not come much more easily than it does to us. Thus when Pompey, as we saw earlier, was saluted as imperator after the battle of Dyrrachium, and yet refrained

12 2.17.4, 3.23, 3.45, cf. 3.72. 13at Labienus cum ab ea impetravisset, ut sibi captivos tradi iuberet, omnis productos

ostentationis, ut videbatur, causa, quo maior perfugae fides haberetur, commilitones appellans et magna verborum contumelia interrogans, solerentne veterani milites fugere, in omnium conspectu interfecit (3.71.4).



from broadcasting the title, Dio explains to his 3rd-century Greek- speaking audience that "Pompey was unwilling to show exultation over the downfall of citizens" (41.52.1). Appian, an historian of the 2nd century, helps us put two other salutations in context. When the Caesarian Curio first landed his two legions in Africa, he arrived near Utica before the country dwellers had finished conveying their goods into the walled city. The commander of the Pompeian forces inside the city sent some 600 Numidian horsemen and 400 footsoldiers to the defense of these hapless folk. But Curio's men forced the Pompeians to withdraw leaving some 120 dead on the field. As a result of this engagement Curio was saluted as imperator universi exercitus concla- matione. Caesar leaves the account at that, but Appian supplies his readers with a cultural context: "The title of imperator is an honor conferred upon generals by their soldiers, who thus testify that they consider them worthy to be their commanders. It used to be that the general accepted this honor only for the greatest exploits. At present I understand that the distinction is limited to cases where at least 10, 000 of the enemy have been killed" (2.7.44). Appian's figure of 10,000 may be too high, but it is abundantly clear that Curio's forces are over- enthusiastic about this rather minor scuffle. The event does not reflect poorly on Curio, since Caesar does not suggest that he elicited the salutation, but it is an oddity that a Roman reader would have queried. Why were these troops so eager to show their approval of Curio? Our examination of Labienus' activities allows us to suggest an explanation, for it emerges later in the narrative of Curio's African debacle that the 2 legions he had with him were troops that Caesar had taken from Domitius at Corfinium. Perhaps these ex-Pompeians, like the ex-Caesarian Labienus, were under some pressure to give public and irrevocable proof of their enthusiasm for their new "friends." Readers who had just lived through a civil war would have been alert to the difficulty of their situation. But I said that Appian helps us with two salutations, so let us move on to the other.

Paragraph 31 of Book 3 begins with the name Scipio. Caesar does not tell us that the man's full name was Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio, or that he was Pompey's father-in-law and a remarkably arrogant individual, but we are expected to know these facts and apply them to our reading of the event. Caesar reports that Scipio suffered some losses in his province of Syria, and had himself saluted as imperator. He doesn't expostulate here the way Cicero does at some of Verres' more innovative extortions, but then Caesar was not writing for an audience that would have to pronounce judgment within hours after hearing the narrative of events, but rather for readers who


190 CYNTHIA DAMON

wanted to inform themselves about the origins of the Civil war and about Caesar as a participant therein. Caesar's audience had time to savor the irony palpable in the modest little sentence which begins with the ablative absolute detrimentis ... acceptis and ends with the main clause imperatorem se appellaverat.

Now in fleshing out the names of Caesar's characters and in reading with Roman eyes the modern reader has to work much harder than the Roman reader, and with less hope of fully understanding the narrative. Reader responsibilities numbers 3 and 4, on the other hand, require the same effort from both types of reader and produce the same rewards for them.

Let me try to give you a taste of some of those rewards. Respon- sibility #3 is paying attention to recurrent events. This is where we come back to those oaths. We have already seen Labienus attempting to strengthen Pompeian resolve by instigating extraordinary oaths of loyalty on two occasions. (By extraordinary I mean something other than the soldier's regular sacramentum pledging obedience to his general.) It turns out that Caesar shows similar oath-takings on other occasions, too, and that the oath-takers are always Pompeian.'4 One might suppose that Caesar's supporters never needed such artificial aids to loyalty. And one certainly should suppose that Caesar is creating this impression deliberately, for neither Dio nor Appian nor Plutarch nor Suetonius mentions any of the oaths.'5

Other recurrent events that Caesar uses in aid of his characterization without adjectives are refusals to send help when one's own supporters are in difficulties--this is naturally another Pompeian trait- as are the arming of slaves, boastful reports, cruelty to captives and plundering temples. By contrast Caesar is repeatedly shown guaranteeing the safety of those of the enemy who come into his hands, winning races for strategic points, weighing alternatives rationally, and so on. Each reading of the Bellum Civile brings more to light.

Paying attention to these recurrent events greatly facilitates the exercise of reader responsibility number 4, noticing when similar situations give rise to different outcomes. This is perhaps the richest source of those connecting knots that make the Bellum Civile into such

14 1.76.2-3, 2.18.5. is And even the prevention of oath-taking can illustrate the different levels of

partisan enthusiasm on the two sides: Caesar requires as one of the conditions for peace in Spain that no one be made to take an oath against his will: nequis invitus sacramentum dicere cogetur a Caesare cavetur (1.86.3).



an effective fabric of representation. I said earlier that the arming of slaves was one of the recurrent events which contributed to the negative characterization of the Pompeians. Yet Caesar reports that his own supporters, the citizens of the Greek city of Salonae, did the same thing, once (3.9.3). Why would he make such a damaging admission? Precisely, I think, to give his reader a standard by which to judge Pompeian actions. The people of Salonae resort to this extremum auxilium only in the direst of straits, under siege. Too few even at the outset to defend their walls properly, they saw their situation deteriorate as the continued fighting reduced the number of effective defenders. The freeing and arming of slaves of military age was as much an index of their peril as was the fact that the only material available for the manufacture of the rope they needed was their wives' hair. Among Caesar's supporters, then, desperate straits give rise to desperate measures such as the arming of ex-slaves. Yet the Pompeians, according to Caesar anyway, armed slaves even as a precautionary measure: in January of 49, when Lentulus and Pompey, consul and proconsul respectively, that is to say officials with an almost unlimited authority for legitimate conscriptions, are holding a dilectus of all Italy, they also arm slaves.16 Of Pompey's involvement Caesar allows himself the wry remark: "He armed slaves and herdsmen and gave them horses. In this way he created some 300 cavalrymen."17 Caesar doesn't draw attention to the contrast in situations, but it is there for the reader to see.

Book 2 of the Bellum Civile provides a contrast on a larger scale, a contrast between Pompeian and Caesarian legati. As we saw in the case of Labienus, some of Caesar's most effective writing is devoted to character portrayal. His interest in giving the reader the materials with which to judge the various actions and actors of Rome's civil war is not shared by Appian and Dio, who devote much of their narratives to standard civil war topoi-the powerful emotions aroused in combatants and non-combatants alike, the paradoxical situations that occur in civil wars, and so on. Dio's interest in Labienus, you remember, was almost exclusively in his capacity as an illustration of perfidia. Appian mentions Labienus just once. A similar disparity is to be found in the attention devoted to Marcus Terentius Varro.

Varro, the polymath author of nearly 500 books of Latin prose, the friend of Cicero and Atticus, subsequently the author of plans for Caesar's enormous new libraries, is an important figure in Roman

161.14, 1.24. 17124: servos pastores armat atque iis equos attribuit. ex his circiter CCC equites confecit.


192 CYNTHIA DAMON

literary history. He was less important in the history of the civil war, for all that he was Pompey's legate in further Spain, and Dio accordingly allots him a scant half-sentence reference, reporting that some of the troops that Caesar won over in Spain were from Varro's legions (41.23.2). Neither Appian nor Plutarch has any interest in the fellow whatsoever. The campaign in further Spain was a very minor affair which was won without a single battle and which delayed Caesar for only a short time before he set out for Marseilles. Caesar, however, lavishes on Varro the attention that his literary merits deserve, although, as we shall see, Varro was probably not particularly grateful for the favor.

For 5 long chapters near the beginning of Book 2 Caesar focuses on Varro's timorous tergiversations-though he doesn't call them tergiversations, nor label them timorous (2.17-21). There was not in this case, as there had been in the depiction of Labienus, any prior wrong to avenge, so one may well wonder, why the fuss? By the end of Book 2 the reader has the answer, for Varro's drifting loyalties serve as foil for the steadfastness with which Caesar endows his character Curio, the story of whose end is told in living color in the final panel of the book. And this contrasting pair itself provides a background against which to measure the behavior of Marcus Bibulus in Book 3.

Varro's position as Pompey's legate in further Spain is mentioned briefly at 1.38.1, but he has no part to play in Caesar's rather detailed account of his own struggles against the legates of hither Spain, Afranius and Petreius. It is not until 2.17 that Varro moves into the limelight. When he does, he is revealed disheartened by Pompey's withdrawal from Italy, and is speaking amicissime about Caesar. On every possible occasion and to anyone who cared to listen, says Caesar, Varro states that, though as legate he has a duty to Pompey, his personal ties with Caesar are no less strong. He claims, too, that his responsibilities as legate, which he calls a fiduciaria opera, oblige him to know the temper of his province, and this, he says, is altogether favorable to Caesar. However, when the future looks more promising for the Pompeians, Varro reacts by strengthening his military position with new levies, new stockpiles of grain, new ships, new monetary requisitions. He commits himself further by putting a dependent of the Pompeian Lucius Domitius in charge of Cadiz, where Varro is concentrating his forces. (This, incidentally, is another case where reader responsibility number two is fruitful-the new commander, Gaius Gallonius, had come to Spain to watch over Domitius' interest in the execution of a will-with legal expertise and equestrian status he was in no way qualified to command six cohorts and to have the



charge of arma omnia publica ac privata which Varro gives him.) Var- ro makes his choice of sides the clearer by arranging assemblies in which he announces that he has heard from the best authorities that Caesar has suffered numerous reverses. Here, Caesar's readers are inclined to suppose that Varro is either credulous or mendacious, for Caesar has just said that the reports on which Varro relied were letters from Afranius about his meagre successes in hither Spain, letters whose tone was elatius atque inflatius (2.17.4). The balance turns in favor of judging the man credulous when we read that Varro-whose provincial administration is exceedingly harsh-reserves particularly harsh treatment for cities and individuals who favor Caesar. Varro is at his most Pompeian (in both loyalty and behavior) when he compels the entire province to swear an oath in sua et Pompei verba (2.18.5). However, things get sticky when Caesar turns his attention to further Spain. The provincials respond with the enthusiasm that Varro himself had noticed earlier. As had happened in Italy before and would be happening soon in Greece (at least as Caesar tells the story), town after town closed its gates to the Pompeians in order to welcome Caesar the better. Not only that, but troops, too, including half of those under the out-of-place Gallonius, declare for Caesar. Humiliation of humiliations, one of Varro's own legions offers its services to Caesar while its commander looks on, helpless to stop the desertion.'8 Whereupon Varro, for all his talk about the province being a fiduciaria opera, promptly hands his other legion over to Caesar and informs him of the whereabouts of the grain, ships and money that he had amassed. All in all, it is not a flattering portrait. And it becomes even less so when set beside that of Curio.

The Curio episode is a fascinating and much studied narrative, filled with enticing incidents-sneaky Pompeian commanders urging Curio's troops to change allegiance, an assassination attempt by a courageous man from the ranks-and endowed with considerable stylistic variety, too-long speeches reported in oratio recta, for example. But for now I will ignore all of these distracting riches and focus on one sentence, the one in which Caesar reports Curio's final words. When his last tactical manoeuvre fails, Curio is urged by a staff officer to save himself. But Curio, says Caesar, insisted that, having lost the army which Caesar had entrusted to his keeping, he would never face Caesar again.19 He then plunges into the battle and dies

18 This legion, incidentally, was called the legio vernacula, as having been based on the Pompeian muster of slaves.

192.42.4: at Curio numquam se amisso exercitu quem a Caesar suae fidei commissum acceperit in eius conspectum reversurum confirmat.


194 CYNTHIA DAMON

fighting. As do his men: milites ad unum omnes interficiuntur. The contrast with Varro's easy abandonment of the army and province entrusted to him is unavoidable. (And one may assume that Var- ro did not share Curio's scruples about facing the commander he had failed, since we know that he proceeded from Spain to Pompey's camp at Dyrrachium.20) There is also a contrast to draw here between Curio and Lucius Domitius, the Pompeian commander who had abandoned troops and whole regions that were under his care not once but twice, at Corfinium and at Marseilles, but I have stressed the contrast with Varro because his story was so patently told for its thematic rather than its historical importance.

However, I don't want to leave you with the false impression that steadfastness was unknown in the Pompeian camp. Caesar's narrative does not cover the period of Cato's defense of Utica, but he does allow Marcus Bibulus a loyal death. Given the history of bad relations between the men who had been colleagues in the consulship of 59, however, the reader might expect to find plenty of hidden barbs.21 Again, I'll mention just one. It is a barb whose sharpness is better perceived by readers who keep in mind the contrasting behaviors of Varro and Curio. In 49, Bibulus' charge was oversight of all the ships that Pompey had mustered for the defense of Greece. Things did not go well: not only did Caesar thumb his nose at Bibulus' 110 ships and bring a good portion of his army over to Greece successfully, but once there he proceeded to keep the Pompeian ships from coming to land to resupply. Bibulus himself falls sick on board ship, where there is no medical attention to be had. Loath to give up the task he had undertaken, he stays put, and dies. Even from this brief paraphrase of the passage, you can see that Caesar makes Bibulus' behavior look less like loyalty to a cause or fidelity to Pompey and more like the same misguided and ultimately ineffective stubbornness that characterized his opposition to Caesar in 59.

Varro, Curio, Bibulus-they are offered by Caesar to the reader for judgment, as, ultimately, are the rivals about whom these lesser planets orbit.

Well, I hope I have given you a sense of why I keep coming back to the Bellum Civile. When I said that what I wanted to do was show how difficult, really, it is to read Caesar, I meant that not as a deterrent, but as a challenge, and even as lure. It is precisely because the text is

20 Cic. Div. 1.68, 2.114. 21 In Book 3 Caesar makes numerous references to Bibulus's activities: 5.4, 7.1-2,

8.3, 14.2, 15-18, 31.3.



difficult that it is always fresh, always yields something new to the reader. The more one knows about things Roman, the more exciting a text the Bellum Civile becomes, so although the practical-minded Caesar abandoned his commentary because he despaired of its achieving the effect he intended it to have, we can make Caesar's practical prose work for us as a cord which will raise a curtain on the spectacle of Rome at the end the Republic. The reason it is such a good text to teach is that it allows the students the satisfaction of reading the Latin with a fair degree of success, and allows class time to be spent on the fun stuff, on helping the students read the text as a story, as political rhetoric, as autobiography, as a social document, as history.22

CYNTHIA DAMON Harvard University

22 Teaching the Bellum Civile is more attractive than ever now, in view of the publication of a new commentary on Books 1-2: J. M. Carter, Julius Caesar, The Civil War Books I & II (Warminster 1991). A companion volume on Book 3 is promised.


Article Contentsp. [183]p. 184p. 185p. 186p. 187p. 188p. 189p. 190p. 191p. 192p. 193p. 194p. 195

Issue Table of ContentsThe Classical Journal, Vol. 89, No. 2 (Dec., 1993 - Jan., 1994), pp. 113-224Front Matter [pp. 130-196]Xenia in Sophocles' Philoctetes [pp. 113-129]The Way up and down: Tracehorse and Turning Imagery in the Orestes Plays [pp. 131-148]Choral and Prophetic Discourse in the First Stasimon of the Agamemnon [pp. 149-162]The Prodikean "Choice of Herakles" a Reshaping of Myth [pp. 163-181]The ForumCaesar's Practical Prose [pp. 183-195]

Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 197-199]Review: untitled [pp. 200-204]Review: untitled [pp. 205-207]Review: untitled [pp. 207-209]Review: untitled [pp. 210-214]Review: untitled [pp. 215-217]

Books Received [pp. 223-224]Back Matter [pp. 218-222]

damon_caesars practical prose_cj 1994

Documents

classical association

topic caesar

jstor terms

jstor archive

classical journal

terms conditions of

american classical league

pmall use subject