AFTER WAR, AFTER GAUL

Did a million people die in this war for Gaul? That’s the estimate of Pliny the Elder a little over a century later. A huge loss to the human race, he said, even if Caesar had no alternative. He thinks Caesar had a conscience guilty enough to keep him from mentioning casualties at all in his account of the civil wars. (In Gaul, he was not so shy.) I tried to make my own count of casualties and slaughter, and gave up in despair at the sketchy, inconsistent, and vague evidence Caesar provides. Instead, I have tried in my introductions and notes to make sure the reader attends to the corpse-heaping, blood-running, terror-shrieking battlefields that appear so matter-of-factly on these pages. In the end, the most appalling part of the story is precisely the calm, matter-of-fact treatment of episodes beyond ghastly to imagine.

Caesar brought many to their deaths, he plundered the region for its wealth, and he lived to kill again in the brutal civil war that followed. When his friends and colleagues came to kill him, it was not for his crimes but for his success and his future imagined successes. Claiming all of “Gaul” for Roman sway was self-evidently a good thing for Rome.

Caesar himself, of course, went on to batter his enemies into submission, in a war that ranged across the breadth of the Mediterranean, from Greece to Egypt to north Africa to Spain. He was consul with silent partners in 48 and 46, sole consul in 45, and then consul with Mark Antony in 44. “He doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves”—thus Shakespeare’s Cassius at the moment of plotting, not far from the truth.

Roman rhetoricians liked to train their students by making them argue famous historical decisions: Agamemnon thinks about whether to sacrifice Iphigeneia, that sort of thing. Should Caesar have been assassinated? The case in favor was powerful and obvious: he sought too much power, entailing the downfall of the established order. So he was killed and his nephew prevailed, creating a regime that was as much like the established order as possible, with new winners and new losers. Twenty centuries later the Prince in Lampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) would famously observe that “if we want things to stay the same, things will have to change.” Augustus was practicing what Italians call “gattopardismo” long before. The assassination, in short, made no difference except to ensure the killing of many and the destruction of the assassins. Stabbed to death at the foot of Pompey’s statue in the senate’s meeting place in Pompey’s theater, Caesar still prevailed. (Suetonius says that the senate decreed that it would not again meet on March 15 and ordered the assassination site walled up in perpetuity.)

And they made him a god. The “emperors” who succeeded him were in the main deified themselves, and Rome persisted. Few today would think Caesar an actual god, but his standing as the kind of larger-than-life figure to whom adverse judgments do not stick is secure. His nephew was not half the Caesar he was, but made the excellent decision to live on to a ripe old age, so far outlasting his enemies that he left a regime (57 years after he began to grasp for it) cloaked in inevitability. It is conventional to lament the decline and fall of the Roman empire; better we should be astonished it lasted so long.

Caesar holds sway still, of course, especially over these pages. It is a book cool, controlled, and calm. Even if it is sometimes more elaborate than one might expect, it leaves an impression of laconic brevity. It is notable for all that it does not say, about the political context at Rome but even among the Gallic nations, and about the logistics of the army and its hangers-on. Most of all, it presents in plain view a series of ghastly slaughters recounted with no sign of regret or bad conscience, and none but the slightest mention of the vast plunder that accompanied the slaughters. A quartermaster’s full account of the war and its ramifications would make a very different book, rich in fascinating detail we are denied.

But that choice to hold a tight, narrow focus is in the end a literary choice. Cool, focused, unhurried: the narrator of all but the last commentary is in his lofty, detached third-person voice himself the real hero of the story. We see the Gallic world through his eyes—or rather see what he wants us to see of the Gallic world—and so we all become Caesar, an audience subsumed in the self-aggrandizing statesman. It seems natural that he has been read in so many classrooms over the centuries since, natural that we are thus complicit with him. Those who refuse to read him have a point. But would it be really any better if he were banned from classrooms and read in guilty secret by rebellious students?

In the end, this book is brilliant and beautiful and a vehicle still carrying passengers on its mission of conquest and colonization in Gaul, of domination in Rome and the whole Mediterranean beyond. So, gentle reader, there is a way in which, as you put down this volume, you have become Caesar. Have a care what you make of yourself next.