Ethnography in Caesar's Gallic War and Its Implications for Composition

Bibliographic Data

ID9664870
AuthorsTyler Creer (University of Virginia, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume69
Issue1
Pages246-263
Publication date2019-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Classical Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0009-8388 • E-ISSN: 1471-6844
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0009838819000405
OpenAlexW2963629969
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited25

After long neglect, in English-language scholarship at least, the question of how Julius Caesar wrote and disseminated his Gallic War —as a single work? in multi-year chunks? year by year?—was revived by T.P. Wiseman in 1998, who argued anew for serial composition. This paper endeavours to provide further evidence for that conclusion by examining how Caesar depicts the non-Roman peoples he fights. Caesar's ethnographic passages, and their authorship, have been a point of contention among German scholars for over a century, but reading them and the rest of the text with eyes unclouded by the exhausted debate about possible interpolation reveals details that bear upon wider questions of composition. In these passages Caesar devised an ethnographic framework in order to rank against one another the levels of threat posed by different barbarian peoples, downplaying the relative ferocity of the Gauls in contrast to other groups in an effort to magnify the peril the others posed to Rome and the glory to be obtained from their defeat. This ethnographic framework is significant for understanding Caesar's method both because it provides insight into Caesar's reasons for including the ethnographic passages and because it implies that the Gallic War was composed in, at a minimum, four stages: Books 1–2, where the framework is first developed and used, by 56 b.c. ; Books 3–4 and 5–6, where it is elaborated and extended, by 54 and 52 b.c. respectively; and finally Book 7, after 52 b.c. , when Caesar, in recounting the campaign against Vercingetorix, was forced to abandon and contradict the ethnographic framework in a fashion that suggests that the earlier books were already in circulation, preventing him from adjusting them to the new circumstances of the campaign of that year

Archaeology · Art · Composition (language · Ethnography · Glory · Linguistics · Literature · Order (exchange · Politics · Reading (process · Scholarship · Throne · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Law · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy

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