The BC, we saw, was written to present the principal actor’s perspective on the events, actions, and motives that determined the outbreak, course, and outcome of the civil war of 49/8. We should thus a priori expect a less than objective narrative, even if it is told in the third rather than the first person. Caesar clearly had an agenda and wanted the reader to hear his side of the story - especially since, as Cicero's correspondence demonstrates impressively, other sides of the story were circulated widely through a steady stream of messengers, letters, and probably pamphlets, not only by Caesar’s opponents but also by his own supporters.
For example, during the Italian campaign Caesar made a huge effort to combat the widespread fear that his victory would result in a bloodbath surpassing even Sulla’s proscriptions. The policy of dementia he implemented for the first time at Corfinium (below) was designed to prove the contrary; Caesar’s agents spread the news that produced a massive swing in popular opinion (Gelzer 1968: 200-2). Yet there was also a flood of contrasting information. ‘‘You will see from the enclosed paper what sort of horrors we are reading every day,’’ Cicero wrote to Atticus (9.13.7). After Caesar’s confrontation in Rome with the tribune Metellus (p. 177 above), Cicero talked with Curio, one of Caesar’s closest aides:
Horrible! You know what he is like. He kept nothing back. ... From [Spain] Caesar and his army would go wherever Pompey was. Pompey’s death would constitute his goal. ...
He added that Caesar had been quite carried away with rage against the Tribune Metellus and had wanted to have him killed; in which case there would have been a great massacre. There were any number of people urging him that way, and as for Caesar himself, it was not by inclination or nature that he was not cruel but because he reckoned that clemency was the popular line. If he lost favour with the public he would be cruel. (Att. 10.4.8; cf. 7.19)
Not surprisingly, Caesar’s characterization of his most ardent opponents is utterly negative (below); it suffices to read his bitter and sarcastic description of their oppressive manipulation of the senate (1.1-6) or his ironic comments on the utter failure of the Pompeian officers during the Italian campaign to secure the loyalty of their troops (1.12-20). Naturally, Caesar himself speaks of the letter he wanted to be read in the senate on January 1, 49 (1.1.1) as lenissima postulata (most moderate demands, 1.5.5), while Cicero talks of minaces et acerbae litterae (a threatening and harsh letter, Fam. 16.11.2; Raaflaub 1974a: 59-64).
The question is rather whether Caesar’s partisan political perspective influenced his narrative of events as well. Following, for example, the great Eduard Meyer (1922: 293 n. 1-2), Klaus Barwick (1951) and Michel Rambaud (1966) thought so, using detailed examination of Caesar’s text to accuse him of systematic and deliberate distortion. By contrast, John Collins (1972: 942-63) found that the vast amount of contemporaneous material absorbed by the extant writings on the period permits only an ‘‘almost vanishingly small’’ amount of factual correction. He concludes that the BC ‘‘does not contain gross falsification, and sources do not exist to check its misleading tone with a confrontation of facts’’ (943). Indeed, it is the tone rather than the facts that betray Caesar’s tendentiousness.
To be sure, Caesar arranges his narrative into units, as every historian does, for greater effect and economy, and he certainly uses such arrangement to serve his interests. For example, Caesar reports the events in Rome (1.1-6), then moves to Ravenna and his decision to occupy Ariminum (1.7-8.1). The message he receives there from Pompey (1.8.2-4) prompts him to describe in one block the ensuing peace negotiations (1.9-11.3) and only then to narrate his advance beyond
Ariminum (11.4-13), news of which causes the abrupt evacuation of Rome (1.14). Chronological accuracy and precise causality seem here sacrificed at least to narrative stringency, perhaps also to the needs of self-justification.
Thus Caesar claims to have informed his soldiers of the events in Rome (including the measures reported in 1.6) while he was still in Ravenna and then to have led them to Ariminum, where he met the tribunes; at that point, he gave marching orders to his other legions, which were wintering in Transalpine Gaul (1.7-8.2). Ariminum was the first city outside his province, in Italy, but Caesar avoids mentioning that he crossed the provincial boundary (the famous Rubicon). According to later sources (at least partly based on Asinius Pollio, an eyewitness and historian of the civil war period himself), Caesar sent his army ahead, concealed his own departure from Ravenna, and addressed his soldiers when the tribunes joined them in Ariminum. This tradition, however, does not gain credibility by progressively dramatizing the crossing of the Rubicon (Gelzer 1968: 193 n. 3), and it is a priori likely that Caesar addressed his troops both before he led them into Italy and when he could present to them the tribunes, victims of his opponents’ oppression. Calculation of dates makes clear that Caesar reacted immediately after he heard of the scu and before he received notice of the events reported in 1.6 (Carter 1991: 163) - which is implied by the fact that he was already in Ariminum when the tribunes arrived. The latter part of Caesar’s statement is clearly wrong: information he provides about the dates when the legions from Gaul joined him in Italy indicates that he must have given orders weeks earlier, when adverse events in Rome (Raaflaub 1974a: 33-55) made an armed conflict much more likely (Carter 1991: 165-6; Ottmer 1979: ch. 1). He mentions this late (1.8.1), thus avoiding a contradiction with the emphasis he places on his extreme patience and hope for reconciliation (1.5.5) - but he mentions it, although he could easily have omitted it altogether.
Again, the connection the word ‘‘therefore’’ (itaque) establishes between the failure of negotiations and Caesar’s advance beyond Ariminum (1.11.4) is clearly disproved by Cicero’s correspondence. Yet it is so obviously wrong that Caesar could hardly have wanted his readers to take this literally. According to Klaus Oppermann (1933: 21-2), itaque here does not establish a chronological sequence but draws the consequence from political failure: war, after all, was inevitable. But the point was sensitive: Cicero complains bitterly about Caesar’s refusal to stop his advance while negotiations were going on (Att. 7.17.2, 18.2) - although, typically, he was in full agreement with continuing preparations by the Pompeians - and so Caesar might have been tempted to hide or obscure this fact.
Even if he did so this is about the worst degree of distortion we find in the BC, and there are not many other cases that, at least on the surface, seem to attest to deliberate falsification. At any rate, it is not such ‘‘lies’’ or errors that illuminate Caesar’s propaganda and tendentiousness. As Collins points out, ‘‘In the ‘Bellum Gallicum’ Caesar’s purpose was perfectly served by a straightforward statement of the facts. ... In the ‘Bellum Civile’ ... he was concerned throughout to show not that he was successful, but that he was in the right, that his adversaries were stupid, un-Roman, and criminal, and that his victory was the victory of the better cause’’ (1972: 946).
We now turn to the portrait Caesar draws of his opponents. Here he did not need to falsify: it was easy to base a starkly propagandistic narrative on truth, but Caesar enhanced the effect by selection, omission, emphasis, and word choice.
World History
