The virile, even clipped approach works: ‘Gaul is divided, all in three parts: Belgians live in one, Aquitanians in another, and people called Celts in a third (we call them Gauls)’. And thirdly, there’s the translation itself. Secondly, each commentary has a short introduction on what was really going on in the campaign itself and the politics at home that directed Caesar’s approach. Caesar was never chatty or helpful, and I’ve tried to emulate him’. He uses fewer words than most to try and capture the unadorned narrative drive: ‘I translate … it in a way that brings over into English the force, effectiveness, and conciseness of what he said.

First, there is a lengthy introduction introducing us to the republic from about 90 BC the nature of Gaul and Caesar’s war there Caesar himself and his motivations O’D.’s approach to producing a new translation.

The book, like all Gaul, is divided into three parts. has no compunction about expressing his personal dislike. bringing to the table with a new translation of The Gallic Wars? Perhaps, along with the translation, a fresh Caesar, a revisionist account of the man and his actions? The answer is a bad man doing bad things to perfectly decent people for the worst of possible reasons. Yet I still could not expunge that image, drawn from a ‘60s American Dell comic (it would be called a ‘graphic novel’ now) of Caesar in full cry, red cloak afloat behind him, heading for the crisis point at Alesia, with troops in the background mouthing something like ‘Jeepers, there goes the boss. The establishment was still clinging to him as exemplary of all that was right about colonialism, and our duty as superior beings to bring civilisation to the less fortunate, less knowledgeable and probably more hairy.īut when a few years later I ended my working life back in school, he was, of course, nowhere to be seen. But for many of us baby boomers, Caesar was part of the scholastic furniture, and certainly, in a boys’ grammar school like mine, the remove was Caesar’s year. Iconic, of course, is (or isn’t) the word, and Adrian Goldsworthy’s fine biography is an option for this generation’s readers. One wonders what millennials know and make of Julius Caesar and his career.

Julius caesar adrian goldsworthy