What’s with Caesar and the Third Person in the Gallic Wars?

New England Classical Journal New England Classical Journal

Volume 48 Issue 2 Pages 1-11

12-20-2021

What’s with Caesar and the Third Person in the Gallic Wars? What’s with Caesar and the Third Person in the Gallic Wars?

Ruth Breindel

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Articles

What’s with Caesar and

the Third Person in the Gallic Wars?

Ruth L. BReindeL

Abstract: While we say that the Gallic Wars were written by Caesar, they were really

written by the scribes. The thesis of this paper is that they used the third person singular to

refer to Caesar, since they were taking down dictation and would not use “I/we,” as they

were not the ones who had done the action. This use of the third person is attested to in

Greek authors, and Caesar obviously was pleased with how it sounded; while he had the

last word on the subject, it’s the scribes who deserve the credit for style.

Keywords: Julius Caesar, Gallic War, scribes, dictation, Third person, stylistics

Who were the Scribes?

Caesari cum id nuntiatum esset eos per provinciam nostram iter facere

conari, maturat ab urbe procisci et quam maximis potest itineribus in

Galliam ulteriorem contendit et ad Genavam pervenit … ubi de eius

adventu Helvetii certiores facti sunt, legatos ad eum mittunt … (BG 1.7)

When it had been reported to Caesar that they had tried to march

through our province, he hastens to set out from the city and by forced

marches he hastens into further Gaul and arrives at Geneva … When

the Helvetians were informed about his arrival, they send envoys to him

…

This is our rst view of Caesar in the Gallic Wars; up to now, it has all been geography

and commentary on the Gauls, and especially the Helvetians. We rst meet Caesar in

the dative, as the recipient of news; Caesar then continues to be the third person singular

subject in the rest of the sentence, with maturat, contendit, pervenit. In the second

sentence, Caesar becomes eius and eum, again third person singular, not the subject but

the object.

Everyone knows that Caesar had a beautiful writing style in the Gallic Wars:

clear, concise, and full of information. There are many theories about why he uses the

third person, some quite torturous, which I will go into shortly. However, I believe this is

putting the cart before the horse; the workhorse here, the one who is deciding on the Latin

style (with Caesar’s approval, of course), is the scribe.

Caesar did decide what he wanted to say, but, as to who physically put the words

down in actual writing, and how that inuenced the choice of the words, we now turn to

scribes.

A general cannot sit and write down his thoughts; he is too busy taking care of

everything. As Caesar states in Book 2.20.1 of the Gallic Wars:

Caesari omnia uno tempore erant agenda: vexillum

proponendum, quod erat insigne, cum ad arma concurri

Breindel 2016, 253-83

https://doi.org/10.52284/NECJ.48.2.article.breindel

oporteret; signum tuba dandum; ab opere revocandi milites;

qui paulo longius aggeris petendi causa processerant arcessendi;

acies instruenda; milites cohortandi; signum dandum.

All things had to be done at one time by Caesar: the banner

had to be displayed, which was evident, when it was tting to

engage at arms; the signal had to be given by the trumpet; the

soldiers had to be recalled from their work; those who had gone

a little farther for the sake of seeking [items for the] ramparts

had to be summoned; the battle line had to be drawn up; the

soldiers had to be encouraged; the signal had to be given.

Caesar’s use of scribes is attested to both by Plutarch (Life of Caesar 17.4) and

Pliny the Elder (Natural History 7.25). Since Caesar couldn’t physically write all

this down, information was given to the scribes, who wrote it down.

Why “scribes” in the plural? Breindel (p. 257) states:

I came to this conclusion when teaching Book 1 of the Gallic

Wars. I noticed that there were great differences in the purpose

expressions being used: the subjunctive or the gerund/

gerundive. I then went through all of Book 1, nding every

example of ut / ne / qui etc. with the subjunctive as well as all

the gerunds and gerundives.

After an exhaustive search of style in Book 1 of the Gallic Wars, focusing on the

purpose clause using the subjunctive versus gerunds or gerundives, it is obvious

that there were at least two or three scribes at work. For example, in chapters

8 through 17, there is not one use of the gerund/ive, but 8 of the subjunctive.

In chapters 18 to 20, there are two uses of the gerund/ive and one of the

subjunctive. Chapters 21 to 37 do not have a single gerund/ive but instead 12

subjunctives. In chapters 38 to 42, there is equal use of both constructions (4

each). Chapters 43 to 47 have 6 gerund/ives, and not one use of the subjunctive.

Finally, chapters 49 to 53 are entirely subjunctive (6 uses).

From this we can

draw the conclusion that one scribe (or group) liked gerund/ives, another

preferred the subjunctive, and the last would happily use either.

Thus, the nal conclusion to that article:

… looking at the clumps of constructions, it would seem that

either a huge amount of information was written down at one

time as Caesar dictated, or that the scribe made his notes and

later went over them and wrote the text.

So, to answer the question: who wrote the Gallic Wars? I suggest it was a

collaboration between the scribes and Caesar, and not Caesar alone.

Karen Carducci, discussing the use of the supine, agrees that the scribes

made choices in the writing:

Since for purpose clauses, Caesar uses the gerundive with the

preposition ad more often than the supine, however, as a search

Breindel 2016, 260-1

Breindel 2016, 267

of the Library of Latin Texts, Series A reveals (144 instances),

a scribe might have been less likely to change the commoner

form of the gerundive to the supine, a form he encountered

less frequently in Caesar’s texts. If, on the other hand, he was

attempting to correct the text he had in front of him, he would

be more likely to change a syntactical usage from one he saw

less often to one more familiar to him. That is, the scribe would

be more likely to alter an original supine to a gerundive than

vice versa.

She goes on to elaborate:

By comparison with other kinds of purposes clauses, for example, ut

with the subjunctive, ad with the gerundive (144 instances according to

Library of Latin Texts – Series A, henceforth LLT-A), or causa with the

gerund(ive) (90 instances according to LLT-A), Caesar rarely uses the

supine.

How the Third Person Account Came About

If we accept the important role of scribes, we can easily see how the third person came to

be used by the scribes. When Caesar was dictating, for example, “When it was reported

to me…,” the scribe would naturally write “When it was reported to Caesar/him ….”

Certainly nothing was reported to the scribe! When Caesar said, “When the Helvetians

were informed about my approach,” the scribe wouldn’t write “my,” since it wasn’t his

approach, but “his,” eius, referring back to Caesar.

Even in a very emotional passage,

qua in re Caesar non solum publicas, sed etiam privatas iniurias ultus est,

quod eius soceri L. Pisonis avum, L. Pisonem legatum, Tigurini eodem

proelio quo Cassium interfecerant. (BG 1.12)

In which matter Caesar not only avenged public, but also private

injustices, because the Tigurini had killed the grandfather of his father-

in-law L Piso, L Piso the lieutenant, in the same battle in which they had

killed Cassius.

Where Caesar is avenging a private injustice, there is no deviation from the third person; it

was not “I” the scribe who took revenge, but Caesar. Pelling, on the other hand, sees this

as a distancing:

Even this early in the text—in fact, especially this early in the text,

with the narrator signaling that the ‘Caesar’ of the text is not like other

characters—we do not have to ask ‘how does the narrator know what

was in Caesar’s mind?’, because of course he knows. He has privileged

access.

I do not agree with this view; while Pelling sees several Caesars in the story, I see only one.

This is further discussed below.

Carducci 2018, 405

Carducci 2018, 406

Pelling 2013, 49; Nousek (YEAR), 230

Who were these scribes? According to Purcell,

there were four types of scribes

who worked for the Roman magistrates. In addition, these men could hire themselves out

to other people; they were trained for their specic purpose. This was also a way for men

to rise in social status, as scribes were considered important. The poet Horace, “is said to

have made his way back to a livelihood worthy of a Roman knight by buying a post as

scriba quaestorius.”

In addition,

Despite being the son of a freedman from a Samnite town, Horace

had been educated together with the offspring of the Roman elite,

which earned him the equestrian post of tribunus militum in Brutus’

army. Money, education and consequent social connections made for

impressive social climbing.

Certainly all the scribes were educated; they were often legati and came from the middle

and upper classes,

and surely had a reading knowledge of Greek in addition to their

Latin. They had studied Thucydides and Xenophon,

and knew that the use of the

third person had the authority of the Greek masters on its side. They would have seen

this as perfectly acceptable. Caesar who, we are told, spoke Greek effortlessly and was

thoroughly familiar with Greek authors, would have been ne with this, too. After all,

Hirtius, Caesar’s legatus, wrote the 8

book of the Gallic Wars! We also know that Titus

Labienus was of equestrian rank and a tribune of the plebs (tribune was the lowest rank in

the cursus honorum but denitely on the ladder). In addition, Best believes that the soldiers

in the Roman army were literate.

Riggsby actually starts down this path:

If the so-called third-person style is useful to Caesar, we may still ask

whether he found it ready for use as a genre feature or whether it

represents an innovation on his part. The direct evidence here is weak.

Christopher Krebs also agrees:

But the greatest facilitator of misreading the commentaries is the third-

person narrator; no one would have categorized them as history if they

had been written in the rst person, such as: “When these developments

were reported to me, I decided. . .”

I have continued down this path to its end, stating that since the scribes wrote in the third

person, and Caesar found it useful for so many reasons (perhaps as genre as Riggsby says,

or to give historical accuracy, as Krebs believes), the direct evidence goes back to the work

of the scribes. Certainly nothing would happen without Caesar’s later agreement.

Purcell 2001, 649

Hartman 2020, 107. Here he quotes Suetonius, Horace 24.

Hartman 2020, 112

Best 1966, 126-7, where the eques is given the job of reading the tessera with the password or commands:

“When we then hear of a centurion and standard-bearer actually reading letters and poetry as a matter of

course, the case for the literate Roman soldier is indeed strong from the time of Polybius.”

Grillo 2011, 266

Best 1966, 122

Riggsby 2006, 67

Krebs 2019, 211

How About Other Aspects of Caesar’s Style?

Much has been written about Caesar’s clear, concise writing. He was a skilled orator who

was praised by many contemporaries. For example:

Cicero, in the Brutus, written in 46 BCe, twice discussed Caesar’s oratorical style

and concluded that Caesar was a great orator and didn’t use an elaborate style.

Sallust, also a contemporary, said about Caesar – and Catiline – that Caesar was

a great orator and quite smart.

Quintilian, who wrote his Institutiones in the rst century Ce, made two

comments: rst, that Caesar was a ery speaker, just as he was a ery general, and second,

that his energy was remarkable.

Tacitus (late 1st – early 2nd century Ce), who was a sharp commentator, stated

in his Dialogue that he did not think Caesar’s speeches were wonderful, but they were

better than his poetry (that is so Tacitean – damning with faint praise). But he did agree

with others that Caesar was brilliant, in both the Dialogue and Annales.

Pliny the Younger, Tacitus’ contemporary, stated that Caesar belonged among

the best orators.

Suetonius, a purveyor of gossip who never found a rumor he didn’t repeat, a

contemporary of Tacitus and Pliny, quoting Cicero, agreed that Caesar was brilliant.

Plutarch, the Greek contemporary of the above three writers, who was not

interested in gossip, believed that Caesar could have been a great orator had he not desired

politics above all.

Aulus Gellius, who wrote slightly later than the above group, commented in his

Attic Nights that Caesar was brilliant.

Finally, Apuleius, a contemporary of Gellius, in his Apology, stated that Caesar’s

style showed warmth, not an attribute that we ordinarily attribute to Caesar.

Thus, according to the ancient authors, Caesar was a wonderful orator with

brilliance and an exceptional style. He used a clear method of communication, which the

scribes obviously followed carefully.

Modern commentators agree with this, and by using the fragments of Caesar’s

De Analogia, they view his style as a combination of various authors along with his own

desire to be absolutely straight-forward. From the quote below, you can see that Caesar

honored his predecessors, especially the Greeks as mentioned above, and therefore the style

of writing which would use the 3

person singular in a report.

… Caesar seems to Romanize the suggestions that may have come to

him from Philodemus and interpret the ‘natural’ element of style as the

language and ethical qualities of the Scipionic age, a generation that

helped to forge the identity of the Roman people. At the same time …

he is aware of language change and proposes a communicative system

that is not archaizing but based on what he says are the most essential

features of the Latin language, correctness and clarity.

This is exactly Karen Carducci’s point mentioned above: that the scribe would use the

most common and natural forms, not something abstruse.

How about voice or agency in Caesar? Daniel Libatique denes it thus:

Possessing agency means that one’s actions or words are not circumscribed

by external limitations … The agent does something, rather than allowing

the status quo to remain static or waiting passively to be swept up into the

Garcea 2012, 124

action of others. An agent has autonomy, exhibits control of his or her own

actions, and executes those actions with intentionality.

When looking at the rst book of BG, the issue of voice or agency is obvious – it’s Caesar

all the time! At least 89 times he is in the nominative or implied nominative (as Caesar

or as the continued subject of the verbs that follow), as the person in charge to whom

information is brought (at least 9 times) and as the subject of the indirect statement (at

least 11 times). Caesar is active and in command.

Who is We?

Sometimes, but rarely, the scribes got carried away by the action and used the form

diximus.

Atuatuci, de quibus supra diximus …(BG 2.29)

The Atuatuci, about whom we have spoken above …

Here they are putting themselves into the action (another thing Caesar does very rarely)

and reminding the reader that information had already been given – “we told you about

this before.” Certainly they would not say, “I told you about this before” – the scribe is,

after all, the low man on the totem pole and would not put himself forward in any way.

Riggsby does not think that this “we” form is particularly important:

In both cases [use of “we” in 5.13.4 and 7.25.1] there is an ambiguity

between two more or less idiomatic uses of “we” in Latin. On the one

hand, it can stand in for the rst-person singular (under circumstances

that are not well understood,) and in fact the narrator does identify

himself as “we” several times. If that is the case in either of these

passages, then the narrator locates himself rmly as one of the Romans,

Caesar being a prime candidate. On the other hand, Latin writing is

ethnocentric enough that “we” can mean simply “the Romans …”

He continues in this vein: “There are several back-references to earlier segments of the text

as well; all are brief and of forms like “as was said before” and “as we showed above.”

Pelling takes a different tact with Avaricum:

In Bellum Gallicum we have the remarkable passage when we are told

of an incident at Avaricum (BG 7.25.1) which happened as we watched:

we have taken the view that it was memorable and should not be passed

over in silence. ‘We’ rather than ‘I’, so the watching could have been

done by any eye-witness (we will nd something similar in Xenophon

47); but the ‘we’ who have thought this worth recording are surely a

‘we’ of authorship, so that we-Caesarians as providers of the material

and we-Caesar as writer are melded together as constructors of the

narrative.

Libatique 2020, 2

Riggsby 2006, 150

Riggsby 2006, 154

Pelling 2013, 54

I think that Riggsby is closer to the mark, in that the “we” is not especially important. On

the other hand, as for Avaricum, the scribe was presumably there at the battle too, if we

accept, as most do, that the book was written at the time of action, and not years later.

Another example, which I think is more to the point of Caesar and his scribes

experiencing things together: “and there then occurred, before our very eyes, something

which, being worth remembering, we believed should not be passed over” (accidit

inspectantibus nobis, quod dignum memoria uisum praetereundum non existimauimus,

BG VII.25)

Caesar’s Audience

Caesar’s audience, according to various scholars, was both the educated elite

of his group

and the people who looked at public readings as entertainment.

How did Caesar reach the Roman People? Here we have to bear in mind a

remarkable fact. In late-republican Rome historical narrative was popular entertainment.

In addition, “the audience for a history expected a largely third-person narrative

relating or extolling deeds and words.”

Riggsby agrees:

In the Republic, the annual and collegial character of the magistracies

would have made the rst-person records not only impolitic but hardly

comprehensible (amidst a sea of different “I’s”).

That, of course, is another reason not to say “I” – would the person reading this aloud

want people to think that he had done what Caesar did? Surely not!

How could one keep

the various “I” people apart? Well, give it Caesar’s name right then and there.

Historically, “the Roman victory texts customarily presented the general in the

third person singular, naming his role as consul or imperator as a way of marking that

victory had been accomplished in the name of Rome.”

Modesty is always useful!

The Various Caesars

One of the major discussions about Caesar’s style with the third-person hinges on Caesar as

narrator as well as Caesar as author or character. Here are the summaries, in chronological

order, with a critique. This paper is only referencing the rst 7 books of the Bellum

Gallicum, not the Bellum Civile.

P. T. Eden

in 1962 had posited three “Caesars”:

But Caesar is simultaneously the writer, the observer and the

commander-in-chief; his own name opens the long period [BG II.25.1-

2] and the whole narrative of the turmoil hangs on the signicant thread:

Caesar … vidit … vidit … processit … iussit.

Hall 2009, 24. “But the remarkable fact is that in Caesar’s close circle, most of the men we encounter are of free,

indeed elevated, status, mostly politically active or prominent or ambitious in their own right, with, moreover,

their own intellectual interests, or claims or pretensions to literary merit or fame…”

Wiseman 2009, Kimborough 2014, 13

Marincola 1997, 79

Riggsby 2006, 153

See my critique of Pelling below.

Östenberg 2013, 827

Eden 1962, 110

He later goes on to state: “This suited Caesar’s needs exactly: he would be his own most

detached judge and expositor.”

Andrew Riggsby sees two different Caesars: “The rst person is used to refer to

the narrator, but the general is always in the third person.”

Christopher Pelling

neatly sums up these various “Caesars”:

… an air of impersonality, perhaps, or objectivity, or monumentality;

the suggestion that this is the sort of thing that anyone can and should

say about Caesar’s achievement, not just the achiever himself, thus

conveying ‘a denitive account in the manner of a historian’; an

impression of narratorial omniscience, masking any distinction between

events that Caesar witnessed and those that he did not; a minimizing of

his individuality and a ‘bolstering of his role as Rome’s agent’; or Peter

Wiseman has suggested that others might be delivering Caesar’s text in

and around Rome and Italy, naturally then talking of what Caesar has

done in the third person.

Pelling does not like Wiseman’s idea, although of course that is one of this paper’s

points, stating in footnote 33 that,

Wiseman (1998: 8 n.27): if the commentaries were written to be delivered

by a speaker at a public meeting, narrating Caesar’s exploits to the

people, the third-person form was unavoidable. “Unavoidable” put this

too strongly. If the deliverer was seen simply as an intermediary, a rst-

person form would have seemed as natural as, say, the use of the rst

person in a governor’s letter that was being read out.

In this paper, I disagree with Pelling’s criticism; as mentioned above, the reason for the

third person was just that it was not the reader at the meeting who had done the deeds, but

Caesar.

Pelling goes on to distinguish between 2 Caesars:

Let us begin with motive-statements: the way that Caesar the writer —

I-Caesar — so frequently sets out an intention or motive of Caesar the

general, he-Caesar.

Later in the same paper Pelling downplays the third person aspect:

So in this rst panel of the text we immediately see that this is only a

sort-of third-person narrative, a rst-person-masquerading-as-third-

person. There is no room here for a Reader B, innocently unaware of

who was wielding the pen. The manner will be different when he-Caesar

was not present, for instance, when the narrative of BG 3 describes

the doings of Ser. Galba or Titurius Sabinus or P. Crassus (BG 3.1–6,

17–19, 20–26).

Eden 1962, 94

Riggsby 2006, 273

Pelling 2013, 48

Pelling 2013, 51

However, you can’t have it both ways; either Caesar is doing a rst person, by putting

himself into the story, or a third person.

Hanson, in his MA Thesis, agrees with the concept of different Caesars:

Caesar the author makes a distinction between the narrator of the text

and Caesar the character. The narrator makes asides (such as the ever-

present “as we mentioned above”) in the rst-person, while Caesar the

character is referred to in the third-person.

Again, since the scribe is the one writing this, the “we,” as I stated above, can include the

scribe.

Kurt Raaaub and Cynthia Damon give the most measured view of the

various Caesars:

“… the way Caesar distances himself from “Caesar” writing about

himself in the third person. This is not a strategy of dissociation – Caesar

wants full credit for “Caesar’s” achievements – but aims, rather, to

give the reader the impression of seeing Caesar’s achievements from the

outside and not the inside, and against a backdrop of other characters

rather than as the work’s only “I.” It is as though the author, and

through him the reader, has achieved the kind of perspective on his

achievements that permits evaluation against the parameters of collective

and individual virtue discussed above. Both the title [Commentarii] and

the third-person narrative have sometimes been taken as deliberately

deceptive ctions. That they are ctions is true, but only in the sense that

all writing, as verbal artifact, is ctional. That they were deliberately

chosen seems certain [and not deceptive].”

A somewhat nuanced view is mentioned by Ida Östenberg:

Now, as has been discussed by Batstone and Damon, Caesar by using

the third person in his commentarii paradoxically manages to shape

an intimate feeling of shared values that transmits a sense of ‘us’ to his

readers. The recurrent character Caesar appears as an impersonal and

distanced actor in the eld, who ghts for the good of Rome, and whose

deeds appear as objective facts. This is an image of Caesar, omnipresent

and highly successful, but still in the midst of equals.

Here Caesar is present not in various personae (character, narrator, author), but more as

the prime mover.

Conclusion

This view of several Caesars - as narrator, as author, as character - seems too complicated

to me. Employing Occam’s Razor, it is not necessary to break it down so much; it’s so

much simpler to understand that the scribe wrote in the third person, Caesar thought

that was ne (whether because he wanted to be like the Greeks or to give more weight to

history), and that’s the end of the matter! Even the rst-person usage can be attributed to

a scribe who was present at the action. Giving credit to the scribes is bringing to the fore

Hanson 2015, 9

Damon 2019, xlviii – xlix

Östenberg 2013, 825-6

a group that has never gotten enough notice or honor for its work. Let’s change that now

and grant the scribes recognition for their role in preserving history.

emerita Moses Brown School

[email protected]

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