The Complete Works of Julius Caesar

"He had the talent and he had extraordinary stamina. He had people who helped him, secretaries and copiers. Some of his adjutants were effectively people helping him with his writing. One of the things they all said about him was that he had this gift for what we might now call multi-tasking. He could dictate six or seven letters, write a speech and watch where the enemy was going all at the same time. This was probably massively exaggerated but, clearly, then as now, some people are much better at that than others. Exactly. And I think if you’ve got that skill and other people don’t, it’s useful to play it up because it does make you seem somewhat superhuman, even if actually you’re doing something that lots of ordinary people can do as well. We all know people who can only concentrate on one thing and people who can do four or five things at once. If one of those skills is elegant, clear writing, that is a rare and very useful gift. “‘Et tu, Brute?’ was one of Shakespeare’s many contributions.” One of the reasons why Caesar’s Gallic Wars became a set text for generations and generations of British, German, French and American schoolboys was not just because it showed a hero in his own voice—if you thought of Caesar as a hero—but it also had this extraordinarily disciplined, economical and beautiful use of language. He was an extraordinary writer and I don’t think Five Books on Julius Caesar would be complete without the Complete Works . These include the famous Gallic Wars but also books for the period covered by Shaw’s play, the so-called Alexandrian War, the time when he was fighting to get Cleopatra established in Egypt. This one was probably written by admirers of Caesar, the so-called ‘continuators’, who fought with him in Gaul and other war zones and who finished the books off after he died. And you really can tell the difference in style between the books that Caesar wrote himself and the rest. The continuators keep the character of Caesar going but are unable to match Caesar’s Latin. The Commentaries absolutely served a political purpose, which is one of the reasons why they’re so clear and focused. He was fighting away from Rome for years and years at a time. But he still needed the support of the Romans and so he wanted them to know what he was doing, just like MacArthur, following him, did. So the Commentaries on every year of the war in Gaul found their way, pretty deliberately, back to Rome and they were copied and people talked about them and said, ‘Isn’t Caesar doing fantastically well?’ And that’s where the assassins really got it so wrong, because the people knew that Caesar was doing all these great things, the soldiers knew that he was doing these great things. By modern standards, he was a genocidal egomaniac but on their terms he was doing very well by Rome. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . That view was much advanced by the image of Caesar that Caesar had created himself. The Commentaries were a very important part of projecting that image, as it were over the top of the Senate, to the Roman people. Again, it’s that kind of language you get from Trump and other populists : you can bypass the elite and somehow get your message straight to the ordinary people. Although we don’t know a lot about the publication of Caesar’s work, it is pretty clear that people in Rome had a very good idea of what he had achieved and these Commentaries were his way of making sure they did. To some extent. But they were more extensive and connected than that. They were more like newsreels, really. They were long and described every battle, or rather every battle he wanted you to know about. Any battle that he lost or nearly lost could be deemed not a battle at all and quietly edited out. But he was judicious. Not everything went well for him. When it came to Britain he wrote an account of his two attempts to conquer Britain, both of which were failures. He found reasons to explain that. He didn’t pretend that everything was absolutely wonderful which, of course, probably in itself improved the credibility of what he did say. No, there is no sense of what he was doing at night. That would have been unusual. I don’t think that meant that Caesar was particularly secretive. It’s just not the particular style of that particular book, any more than Douglas MacArthur, when he was relaying his exploits back home, would have told you about the mistress in his hotel bedroom. You do get an impression of someone who was swift, decisive, successful and brutal when he had to be. His writings also stress strongly his capacity for clemency, a virtue that was very important to Caesar but also would shame and irritate some of those who became his assassins."