Julius Caesar was one of the most versatile of great men. Not only was he a deadly general, he was also a brilliant politician, a distinguished orator, and a superb literary stylist. He wrote poetry, letters, rhetorical analysis, speeches, and a political pamphlet. With the exception of a few letters and a few tidbits preserved as quotations in other writers, none of it survives except his two famous war commentaries: the Gallic War and the Civil War.

Commentaries were a general’s report from the field. In republican Rome, generals were also politicians, and Caesar was the most ambitious man of his generation. It is no surprise, then, that Caesar’s commentaries are highly self-serving. Though based on fact, they are not history. Caesar wrote them to justify himself to the citizens of Rome and to posterity. He wrote them brilliantly. They are impressively concise, dramatic, and at times profound. Caesar’s words are chiseled in stone; yet sometimes they seem like polished diamonds, sometimes carved in ice, as the author casually recounts the slaughter and ruin unleashed by his legions. He always refers to himself in the third person, which lends a (false) air of objectivity. Speed was Caesar’s hallmark as a general, and the words of his commentaries rush the reader along as if in the path of a military force. What was later said of Churchill, that he mobilized the language and sent it into battle, could be applied earlier to Caesar. One thinks of Cicero’s