Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

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Robert Strassler started the "Landmark" series on ancient historians two decades ago with a volume on Thucydides, and it was a revelation. The series provides rich contextual material that makes following sometimes terse ancient historical narratives much more pleasant. The books include embedded maps every few pages, photographs of extant ruins and equipment, and a running timeline in the margins helping a reader to follow the passage of time. All these features combine to orient the reader and make the "action" significantly more legible.

I awaited the Landmark Caesar with great anticipation and it does not disappoint. Added to the usual excellent "Landmark" features, the book also includes numerous scholarly appendices, so numerous they were broken out into a separate tranche of "web essays" on various specialized topics that couldn't be accommodated in the physical book. It also features a new original translation of the source text, with textual notes for the philologists among us.

In short, it's hard to imagine a better edition of Caesar's works for students, lay readers, or indeed even for readers with a classics background. Committed scholars or translators may want a more developed apparatus criticus, but I suspect the Landmark Caesar will be a standard text for a generation.

As to the text of the Gallic War itself, this is my fifth reading of Caesar's Gallic War (including significant extracts in Latin). The benefits of the Landmark edition made this an unusually enriching reading, bringing things to the surface that have never been apparent to me from the text.

The first and most significant change in my reading was a sense of the enormous spatial scope of the campaigns. Caesar will often describe fighting actions against multiple Gallic peoples in quick succession, eliding or hand-waving away the passage of time. It wasn't until I was reading the Gallic War with a labeled map and a calendar in front of me that it became clear how widely separated many of those actions were geographically and how rapidly Caesar managed to move his legions. Indeed, it gave me a renewed appreciation for Caesar's proverbial celeritas.

Another point concerns the authorship of the eighth book. While I knew, intellectually, that the eighth book was written by Aulus Hirtius rather than Caesar, it was not clear to me how genuinely distinct the style and presentation of the eighth book were. I'm uncertain whether other translations I've read consciously "Caesarized" Hirtius's style or if this translation played up the contrasts, but the voice of the eighth book is starkly different. And it's not just a matter of style: the eighth book narrates embarrassing events with very little compunction, notwithstanding that he was a friend and partisan of Caesar's.

Hirtius rattles through a botched assassination, a series of failed military operations, and astounding brutality at the siege of Uxellodunum. Caesar tends to either omit these kind of details, discuss them in coded language, or carefully build them up as the fault of specific individuals (other than himself). Hirtius just lays them out with, at most, a few sentences of justification. While it's possible the last year of the war went less smoothly than the prior seven, it's more likely that Hirtius is showing us how unreliable of a narrator Caesar actually was all along.

This book will enrich anyone's understanding of ancient history. Recommended to anyone at all.