Book
51 BCE
The Gallic War
Julius Caesar
Caesar's own dispatches from nine years of campaigning in Gaul, written in the third person as calm factual report — and also a carefully shaped political document justifying the conquest to Rome.
Read itHow it opens
All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in ours Gauls, the third.
The opening of the work itself, so you can judge the prose rather than our description of it.
Where it is now wrong
Caesar's numbers are propaganda. The casualty and population figures — over a million Gauls killed, as many enslaved — are his own claims in his own dispatch, written to be read in Rome by people deciding his future, and no modern historian takes them at face value.
Before you start
- This translation
- H. J. Edwards's Loeb translation, via LacusCurtius. The previous link here served the Latin text, which is a different proposition entirely.
Filed under Ancient Rome in History.