Whenever our teacher gave us a passage to translate from Caesar (101 or 100–44 B.C.E.), the class broke into cheers. Caesar was a cakewalk, as far as we were concerned. And it’s true, even the slackers could get by with only a few minor errors. Our teacher too, who took delight in labyrinthine complexity, branded less difficult passages as mere “Caesar league.” No one suspected that in fact disguised beneath this apparent simplicity was the Latin language expressed in one of its highest, most perfect forms.
In his De bello Gallico, Caesar’s best-preserved work, he recounts the conquest of Gaul (58–51 B.C.E.). Or more precisely, he recounts the intentions and results and last-minute solutions of his campaign. Each of his actions falls like a domino in a well-planned strategy, winning him one victory after another—victory being nothing other than the overcoming of various difficulties. The text is composed of a series of dispatches, all in the third person, that Caesar sent to the Senate to keep them informed of his military actions. It’s possible that these dispatches were meant as a set of notes for a more polished story, to be written at the close of the war. I won’t dwell here on the work’s great ideological and propagandistic value, nor on the fact—both moving and disconcerting—that the man speaking to us is one of the most decorated in all of antiquity, describing one of the most consequential military campaigns in world history, one that would shift Rome’s power from East to West. I’ll add only this gem by Bertolt Brecht:
He had inaugurated a new era. Before him Rome had been a city with a few scattered colonies. He was the one who founded the empire. He codified the law, reformed the currency, and even modified the calendar on the basis of scientific knowledge. His Gallic campaigns, which had taken the Roman flag as far as Britain, had opened up a new continent to trade and civilization. His statue had its place with those of the gods, he had given his name to cities as well as a month in the calendar, and the monarchs attached his illustrious name to their own. The history of Rome had found its Alexander. It was already apparent that he would become the unattainable model for every dictator.1
What I’d like to focus on here is what the Latin language itself was able to accomplish through the work of Caesar. I should say right off that Caesar was not only a great writer but also an important linguistic theorist. We know from various sources that he composed a treatise entitled De analogia, though only a few fragments remain. Its dedicatee was none other than Cicero. We can get an idea of its contents: it must have offered a defense of proper Latin and in particular of the correct usage of morphology. “Analogy” is a Greek term and in ancient treatises on language it points to strict grammar, uniformity, and morphological coherence, standing in contrast to the term “anomaly,” which indicates a multitude and variety of forms. The guiding principle of analogists is simplification: no more variations, no more archaisms, no more alternating inflections. Caesar, as Brecht reminds us, altered even the Roman calendar, ridding the timekeeping method of uncertainties and imprecisions (the Julian calendar was used up until 1582, when it was substituted by the even more accurate Gregorian calendar). It can be said that he took a similarly rational approach when it came to language, with an analogous desire for containment and measure. Geography, not surprisingly, was one of his chief interests. We know from later sources that at a certain point he hired four Greeks to explore the oikumene—that is, the entire inhabited world. Clearly such an interest is also linked to his pragmatism as a military man.
Rationalism and pragmatism rear their heads in his surviving work as well. Everything has its explanation, everything can be broken down into parts and primary elements, as if the obscurity and vagueness of our deeper motives had no place here, or worse, as if they didn’t exist at all (for these one must turn to Livy and Tacitus, as we’ll see). The first sentence of the work is itself an example of disassembling: “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres …,” “The whole of Gaul is divided into three parts …” To disassemble is to calculate: hence his use of numbers and measurements. Distance, breadth, depth, and all variety of record keeping—of space and time alike—are distinctive traits throughout the work.
After all, De bello Gallico is the adventure of a language trying to re-create the world mathematically and geometrically, its sentences organized according to precise cause-and-effect relationships and set in a clearly defined time period. The theme of ends and consequences also plays a dominant role, for that which has no aim or provokes no change is not worth mentioning.
Language, then, for Caesar, is an account of something that occurs in a particular moment, for a particular reason, in view of a particular aim, and with particular consequences. Here’s a characteristic passage:
His rebus gestis, Labieno in continenti cum tribus legionibus et equitum milibus duobus relicto, ut portus tueretur et rem frumentariam provideret, quaeque in Gallia gererentur cognosceret consiliumque pro tempore et pro re caperet, ipse cum quinque legionibus et pari numero equitum, quem in continenti reliquerat, ad solis occasum naves solvit … (De bello Gallico, V.8)
With these things done, and having left Labenius behind on land—with three legions and two thousand horses, to guard the ports and restock the granaries, and to familiarize himself with the situation in Gaul and make decisions according to need and occasion—he [Caesar], with five legions and as many horses, which he’d left on land, set sail toward the west …
This passage is a perfect ensemble, seasoned with precision and arithmetic; one might even call it a true work of grammatical architecture. That Caesar holds a passion for the art of construction is no surprise, and it’s precisely in those passages where he’s describing certain structures that he achieves his highest mastery of Latin prose: the bridge over the Rhine (IV.17), erected in just ten days (efficiency is one of Caesar’s foremost talents), which allowed the Roman troops to cross from Gaul into Germany, only to be dismantled eighteen days later when Caesar marched back into Gaul (VII.23); and Venetian ships (III.13). Numbers abound in these passages: distances and dimensions. His is a language under pressure: in the fewest words possible he must lay out how the structure develops, how its various parts interact, and how they correspond to form a whole.
Let’s look now at his description of the bridge over the Rhine, a particularly illuminating passage in that it describes not a complete work but one in progress, as demonstrated by the many verbs in the imperfect:
Rationem pontis hanc instituit. Tigna bina sesquipedalia paulum ab imo praeacuta dimensa ad altitudinem flu-minis intervallo pedum duorum inter se iungebat. Haec cum machinationibus immissa in flumen defixerat fistucisque adegerat, non sublicae modo derecte ad perpendiculum, sed prone ac fastigate, ut secundum naturam fluminis procumberent, iis item contraria duo ad eundem modum iuncta intervallo pedum quadragenum ab inferiore parte contra vim atque impetum fluminis conversa statuebat. Haec utraque insuper bipedalibus trabibus immissis, quantum eorum tignorum iunctura distabat, binis utrimque fibulis ab extrema parte distinebantur; quibus disclusis atque in contrariam partem revinctis, tanta erat operis firmitudo atque ea rerum natura ut, quo maior vis aquae se incitavisset, hoc artius inligata tenerentur … (De bello Gallico, IV.17)
Here was his plan for the bridge. First he took pairs of one-and-a-half-foot pilings, cut to equal length—to match the depth of the river—and tapered to a point, and trellised them together, setting a pair every two feet along the waterline. Having stood the pilings in the river with an engine, he rammed them into the riverbed—not upright like posts, but leaning slightly into the current; about forty feet downstream, he drove in more of these same pilings, doubled up in the same way, but stood them leaning upstream, against the current. Between each pair he wedged two-foot-wide girders (to span the distance between the double timber pilings), and trussed them up at either end with pairs of braces. With the pilings thus linked and held apart, and leaning in toward one another, the structure was so strong, and the interplay between its parts so balanced, that the greater the force of the water beating against it, the greater the system’s resilience.
The passage opens, we notice, with the term ratio (from which we get the English “reason”): plane, form, rule. Then comes the parade of technical terms, which occupies the remainder of the paragraph.
What renders such a passage extraordinary is not simply that it describes the engineering with exactitude and concision, but that it puts the labor of language itself on display: the process of linking one piece to another to form a solid, enduring structure. Language, Caesar shows us, is a bridge, a wall, a ship: it conjoins, contains, transports. It is, in other words, syntax: a group of necessary components assembled according to a given function, which, for Caesar, in this particular case, is to inform and explain, surveying and conquering every inch of the expressible.