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CAESAR
Tigurini on the river Arar, making no mention of his lieutenant Labienus.
Subsequently Labienus, who ultimately deserted Caesar in the Civil Wars,
claimed the credit for the victory (Plutarch, Caesar 18.1). Scholars have attempted
to find other falsifications or distortions but with more ingenuity than
success. Did Caesar, for instance, cross the Thames with an elephant — a detail
supplied by Polyaenus (8.23.5), but not mentioned by Caesar himself? Where
there is obscurity or uncertainty, it may usually be attributed to the difficulty
which Caesar will have had in finding out the facts or understanding in such
a fluid type of guerrilla warfare •what was actually going on. Also, it is easy to be
misled by the convention, which Caesar adopted from Xenophon's Anabasis,
of always referring to himself in the third person. This gives an air of objectivity
to what is a personal, autobiographical account.
The overwhelming impression of the book is its clarity and precision, a
quality which Cicero, no friend, instantly recognized when he wrote of it:
nihilestpura et inlustri brenitate dulcius' nothing is more pleasing than unaffected
and lucid brevity' (Brutus 262). He had had the same literary tutors as Cicero —
the perfectionist grammarian M. Antonius Gnipho (Suetonius, Gramm. 7) and
the most famous rhetorician of his time Molon (Plutarch, Caesar 3). The effect
is achieved in two main ways. Firstly, the style is one of great simplicity. Set
phrases are used over and over again because they do their duty adequately —
certior factus est 'he was informed', quae cum ita essent 'since this was so', his
rebus cognitis 'when this had been found out', and so on. The syntax is equally
clear-cut and formal. Whereas Livy enjoys variety of language, Caesar dispenses
with synonyms. Thus Livy uses gradum referre and pedem referre ' to
retreat' interchangeably, Caesar only uses pedem referre. Livy has ad ultimum,
ad extremum and ad postremum, all in the sense of'finally', Caesar only has ad
extremum. There are a number of comparative expressions in Latin meaning
'as if — uelut («), perinde ac («"), haud secus quant («"), tamquam si — 'which
Livy employs indiscriminately; only uelut si is found in Caesar. In the same
way Caesar only writes /lumen for 'a river', never fluuius or amnis. There is
little connotative difference between the words (amnis may carry more power
and grandeur) and Livy calls the Rhone, for instance, /lumen thirteen times,
amnis six times. Caesar chooses one word for one thing and adheres to it. His
motive is principally simplicity, but the comparison widi Livy shows that he is
also influenced by concern for purity or propriety of diction. Language had
always been a study of interest to him. During early 54 B.C. he had written two
volumes entitled De analogia which •were concerned •with purity of diction as
a counterblast to current trends, favoured by Cicero, who relished a rich and
florid vocabulary. In the first volume he states a fundamental principle: 'as the
sailor avoids the reef, so should you avoid the rare and obsolete word' (Aul.
Gellius, Noctes Atticae 1.10.4). And probably at the same period he wrote his
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