Hirtius makes clear in his preface to Book 8 of the Gallic War that he recognizes that his effort to complete the narrative of Caesar’s campaigns from the conclusion of the Gallic Wars through Caesar’s assassination represents only a portion of the larger narrative of the civil wars, to which he sees no end. This admission is both judicious and modest. It distances Caesar from ultimate responsibility for the course of the civil wars - the focus is on Caesar as the victim rather than the perpetrator of the conflict - and disclaims for Hirtius and the other Continuators any ambition to write a complete or thorough account of those violent and troubled years. As we have seen, such modesty is not wholly misplaced. The Continuators’ work is not only fragmented, uneven, and episodic, but literally and figuratively provincial. Its ideological simplicity and lack of sustained interest in any larger political context reflect the authors’ physical and psychological distance from Rome, and their social distance from the decision-making elite. (Even an emissary of some stature such as Hirtius was not a power in his own right.) At the same time, however, Hirtius for once is being far too modest. The Continuators’ provincialism is their strength, not their weakness. They have provided us with dispatches from the front, in which all of the paradoxes and tensions of civil war at Rome are thrown into high relief. The Continuators are not distant or removed from the central issues of civil war - they are right in the center of them.
Civil war drew Romans into the provinces in multiple ways. Prior military service as a commander resulted in important bases of political support in the provinces, which offered a source of both manpower and leverage against one’s domestic opponents. Indeed, this is exactly the role that Caesar hoped his Gallic victory would play in his conflict with Pompey. At the same time, of course, any lasting victory at Rome required overcoming one’s opponents’ parallel sources of provincial support. Juba’s support of Pompey in Africa is a prime example. The very existence of these bases of support also made the provinces an attractive refuge and center of resistance for Romans fleeing the capital, where they hoped to rely on friendly local rulers, as well as resident Romans and veterans of Roman military service, to bolster their resistance. (Pompey’s fatal reception in Egypt suggests some of the hazards of such reliance.) Finally, the larger context of civil war provided an opportunity for new conquest, as Caesar’s campaign to subjugate Egypt indicates. The author of the Alexandrian war makes clear that the Egyptians themselves well understood this: they fear that if Caesar is not defeated, Egypt will become a Roman province (Alexandrian War 3). In response, civil war also provides an opportunity for new assertions of local resistance to Roman rule, as the guerrilla warfare against Caesar in Spain as well as the war in Alexandria attests.
At the same time as it drew Romans into the provinces for a variety of political and military motives, so civil war drew the provinces deeper and deeper into the internal politics of a divided Rome. Neutrality was not an option when your territory was a potential theatre of war, your loyalty potentially so valuable to both sides. Nor was it necessarily desirable - while prior service to and patronage from a given general undoubtedly determined many of the provincial loyalties in the civil wars, unsentimental calculation of the likely ultimate victor also played a role. The cold reception Pompey got as he sought refuge throughout the formerly loyal East in the wake of his defeat at Pharsalus is particularly striking and telling in this regard. No one - Roman or foreign - wanted to be associated with the losing side, however much antagonists like Caesar might celebrate their clemency to their defeated foes. Many of the provincial players involved, such as Juba, had been around for a long time and understood the Roman political game well. But even where the players themselves were new, as in Egypt, the issue of resistance versus subjugation to Roman rule was not.
The provinces understood what the Romans involved could not explicitly admit: that while civil war was being fought over political questions at Rome - Caesar’s right to stand for the consulship, the authority of the Senate and of Pompey’s leadership of it to block that ambition - the ultimate prize was actually the Roman empire itself. Caesar certainly understood this, as his celebration of triumphs over not only Gaul, but Egypt, Africa, and Spain indicated. Indeed, he suggests as much indirectly, when he states that his goal is to leave the provinces and regions he visits free from internal discord, subject to the rule of law, and without fear of external aggression - in other words, loyal subjects of Rome (Alexandrian War 65). Moreover, the Continuators were complicit in this agenda, not only in their silence on the issue of civil war but by seeking to create a seamless continuum of campaigns from Gaul through Spain. It is also worth remembering in this context that Caesar’s next planned campaign after Spain was Parthia, which would have bracketed the civil war campaigns of 48-45 BC between the two major and openly imperial projects of conquering Gaul and Parthia. As the Egyptians’ anxiety about being made another province of the Roman empire suggests, the provinces well understood this underlying imperial agenda.
This interplay of civil war and imperial ambition offered the various antagonists multiple ideological and rhetorical opportunities. It allowed someone like Caesar to position himself as the true defender of the Roman people against the designs of his enemies and adversaries. In so doing, it allowed him to cloak his own imperial ambitions - whether he wanted to be an emperor or not, he certainly wanted to command an empire - in the guise of the defense and the expansion of the power and dignity of the Roman state. The presence of so many foreign foes and the fact that the main theatres of battle lay far outside Italy further allowed Caesar to demonize his Roman opponents by associating their actions and their cause with those of the barbarian enemy, rather than confront the less palatable truth of the fact that he was fighting barbarian enemies only because of the presence of his Roman foes in the provinces - or, in the case of Egypt, only because he sought to add its territory to the imperium romanum. Of course, Caesar’s opponents had similar if not identical rhetorical opportunities and exploited them as vigorously as he did; but in the echo chamber of Caesar’s camp such voices would have been heard rarely and easily dismissed.
The Continuators are on the front lines of these imperial and rhetorical battles. They are, of course, literally on the front lines of battle - out in the provinces in question and also in roles that offered them few protections from the dangers of the battlefield. But they are also on the front lines of these ideological tensions and selfserving rationalizations. They are the Romans being asked to identify their commander with the Roman state as a whole - no longer its duly appointed servant, but its defender and aspiring conqueror. Such an identification of commander and cause was hardly novel, of course, but the Continuators knew that the Rome on whose behalf Caesar claimed to be fighting was a center that no longer held, as their anxious references to continuing unrest there attest. Most strikingly, however, the Continuators are also the Romans being asked to see their fellow Romans as foreigners, barbarians, savages - not as the fellow citizens with whom they would celebrate their citizenship and unified civic pride in less troubled times. Their success or failure in that conceptual struggle would go a long way in determining the ultimate success or failure of the military battles in which they were engaged.
Even as they throw these tensions into high relief, the stark language of the Continuators’ narratives suggests that they had surprisingly little difficulty assimilating and internalizing such viewpoints. The reasons could be many: Caesar’s undoubted persuasive powers; the continuators’ geographical isolation and the corresponding absence of alternative viewpoints (which would only have been of Caesar’s opponents making essentially the same claims for themselves, in any case); the well-established dehumanization of the enemy that takes place during any war, civil or other; or even total cynicism about the relationship between rhetoric and reality in war, which at least some of the Continuators’ more demoralized peers must have felt. (To revisit one last time the dim view of the Continuators’ abilities held by many critics, it could even be the result of an incapacity to do anything more than parrot what they heard.) Certainly, the contrast between rhetoric and reality is particularly stark in the Continuators, whose narratives often privilege battlefield minutiae but who also regularly juxtapose Caesar’s Roman virtues and the barbarian vices of both his foreign and his Roman enemies.
The Continuators, then, are not the marginal figures many have so mercilessly pilloried. They may be living and fighting at the peripheries of empire, far removed from the power politics of the senatorial elite - or, in the case of Hirtius, closer to that elite but operating entirely under the aegis of Caesar’s patronage. And they may be writing of often unimportant and mundane details of campaign life, and doing so in Latin prose that reflects their humble station and modest literary abilities. But in the fractured politics of Rome under civil war, those peripheries became the terrain on which dominance at Rome itself was contested. It had always been so, of course - the link between military success in the provinces and political power at Rome was hardly novel by the Continuators’ time. But the prize was no longer the opportunity to further advance one’s career through even more illustrious service to Rome; it was, instead, the power to make Rome do one’s bidding, to make Rome accept the terms on which one justified one’s power. The foot soldiers in that contest were the men willing to kill their fellow Romans in that fight, and to accept - if only because of expedience and a lack of any alternative - the rationales they were given for doing so. The Continuators are our field guides and scouts to this brave new world. Their dispatches from the front are rarely elegant and often frustrating. The contrast between their clumsy narratives and Caesar’s subtlety and sophistication of expression is striking. But Caesar’s Continuators they nonetheless are, because they took his battles to the place where they would ultimately be won or lost - the front lines of empire, and of the transformation of empire Caesar sought to impose. As Hirtius recognized, the stories they had to tell, like the civil wars themselves, long outlasted Caesar’s own life. Read them and weep.
World History
