If one of the Continuators’ literary goals was to flatter Caesar by comparison, they succeeded brilliantly. Indeed, few works of Latin literature have come in for as much sustained criticism - on their own literary merits and by contrast with Caesar’s - as those of the Continuators. Even Hirtius, whose Latin prose is by far the best of the group and who wrote a draft of Caesar’s Anti-Cato cited approvingly by Cicero ( Att. 12.40, 12.41), is not exempt. Critics have described Book 8 of the Gallic War as ‘‘arguably the most boring book in the Caesarian corpus’’ for its constant emphasis on legionary maneuvers (Welch 1998), and have accused Hirtius of‘‘crudeness’’ and of replacing Caesar’s ‘‘subtle thought and narration’’ with ‘‘unrefined judgment and representation’’ in his exaggerated portrayals of anti-Roman leaders (Barlow 1998: 155, 157). Both the repetitious style of the African War and its failure to offer a full or satisfying treatment of the battle of Thapsus - a vital victory in which Caesar defeated Scipio and Pompey’s remaining Senatorial supporters - have provoked even more unflattering critical assessments. One passage in particular, which strings multiple imperfect verbs after a single subordinating conjunction, suggests the challenges that reading the African War presents to the rhetorically sophisticated reader (African War 5):
Postquam una nocte et die ad oppidum consumpta neque responsum ullum a Considio dabatur, neque et reliquae copiae succurrebant neque equitatu abundabat et ad oppidum oppugnandum non satis copiarum habebat et eas tironum neque primo adventu con-vulnerari exercitum volebat, et oppidi egregia munitio et difficilis ad oppugnandum erat ascenus et nuntiabatur auxilia magna equitatus oppidanis suppetias venire, non est visa ratio ad oppugnandum oppidum commorandi, ne, dum in ea re est Caesar occupatus, circumventus a tergo ab equitatu hostium laboraret.
After a night and day spent [outside] the town with no response from Considius, and [after] the remainder of Caesar’s forces had not come relieve him, and [after] he had neither an abundance of cavalry nor sufficient forces to attack the town - and those he did have were new recruits - and [after] he did not wish his army to suffer wounds right after their arrival - and the approach for attacking the town was difficult and the town well fortified - and [after] it was announced that large forces of cavalry were arriving to aid the townspeople, there did not seem to be a reason for waiting around to attack the town lest, while occupied with that task, Caesar end up in a difficult situation, surrounded from behind by the cavalry of the enemy.
To call such prose ‘‘ungainly’’ and ‘‘marked by a definite poverty of expression’’ seems generous (Way 1955).
Nothing, however, can compare with the critical venom directed at the Spanish War, which has been variously described as the ‘‘worst book in Latin literature’’ (Holmes 1967 [1923]), the ‘‘worst piece of Latin literature’’ (Storch 1977: 201)and ‘‘the most illiterate and exasperating book in classical literature’’ (Van Hooff 1974: 123). Part of that exasperation results from grammar that would receive a failing grade in introductory Latin. Use of the subjunctive where the indicative is called for is particularly jarring ( Spanish War 22):
Qui cum ad oppidum venissent, nostri, qui fuissent equites Romani et senatores, non sunt ausi introire in oppidum, praeter quam qui eius civitatis fuissent.
When they reached the town, our men, who had been Roman knights and senators, did not dare to enter the town, other than those who were part of the community.
No less exasperating are numerous passages of thoughtless disorganization. Seek in vain to identify, let alone appreciate, the narrative logic of the following (Spanish War 10):
Insequenti luce Arguetius ex Italia cum equitatu venit. Is signa Saguntinorum rettulit quinque, quae ab oppidanis cepit. Suo loco praeteritum est quod equites ex Italia cum Asprenate ad Caesarem venissent. Ea nocte Pompeius castra sua incendit et ad Cordu-bam versus iter facere coepit. Rex nomine Indo, qui cum equitatu suas copias adduxerat, dum cupidius agmen adversariorum insequitur, a vernaculis legionariis exceptus est et interfectus.
The next day Arguetius came with his cavalry from Italy. He brought five standards of the people of Saguntia, which he seized from its residents. I overlooked putting in its proper place that the cavalry who came to Caesar from Italy with Asprenas had arrived. That night Pompey burned his camp and set out on the journey to Corduba. A king by the name of Indo, who had led his own forces alongside the cavalry, was intercepted and killed by the local legions while pursuing the enemy column a bit too eagerly.
Great Latin prose that sure ain’t.
The first impression the Continuators therefore make on many readers - in Latin, certainly, but also in English translation - is that they have been misnamed. They are not Continuators at all, but Discontinuators. This impression is not wholly justified. In part, it reflects the poor state of the manuscript tradition for much of this portion of the Caesarian corpus. Book 8 of the Gallic War is included with the manuscripts of Books 1 through 7, which are more reliable and less riddled with gaps and corrupt passages than the manuscripts of the Civil War. As a result, Hirtius’ work, while still qualitatively different from Caesar’s, appears coherent and whole. The manuscripts of the Alexandrian, African, and Spanish Wars, on the other hand, are included with the much weaker and less reliable manuscripts of the Civil War. They contain more gaps, sentence fragments, and passages of uncertain meaning, and offer fewer opportunities for cross-checking and correction, than do the Gallic War narratives. The Spanish War is particularly problematic in this regard. It begins with a sentence fragment and has more than five hundred corrupt passages in its 42 paragraphs. Such a compromised textual tradition would disrupt and distort even the smoothest and most polished prose; its effect on the Continuators is to render uninspired writing often unintelligible.
Moreover, some of the apparent discontinuity between the Continuators and Caesar’s own writing also reflects the nature of the Continuators’ literary undertaking. Caesar himself was (or so he claimed) writing commentaries, which ‘‘do not pretend to be other than documentary drafts’’ preparatory to ‘‘the elaborated synthesis of a historically finished text’’ (Henderson 1996: 269-70. See Kraus, chapter 12, pp. 159-61; Raaflaub, chapter 13, pp. 179-80). The Continuators, and the authors of the African and Spanish Wars in particular, were providing the drafts of those drafts. In other words, they were offering unredacted, unpolished, often day-by-day accounts of life on the front lines which could form the raw material for later, more sophisticated narratives - particularly since, as he himself admits, Hirtius was not an eyewitness to each battle he intends to recount. Many of the weaknesses of both style and substance in the Continuators’ writing can be explained with reference to this status as rough draft, including the repetition of set phrases to establish a scene or advance the narrative, the focus on trivial detail at the expense of the broader strategic picture, and the failure to distinguish or emphasize the engagements (Thapsus in particular) of such obvious importance even in the hindsight of contemporaries. Indeed, the authors of the Alexandrian, African, and Spanish Wars may not have had literary goals at all, because they knew that they were offering not the finished product but the raw materials with which others would work. We should therefore not hold them to account for failing to achieve a literary goal they themselves would have disclaimed.
It is even possible to find merit in the stylistic discontinuity between the Continu-ators and Caesar. Certainly, as will be discussed below, there is much of sociological and political interest. Ironically, this is particularly true of the Continuators other than Hirtius, about whose career we possess some detailed knowledge. In the case of the African and Spanish Wars, and to a lesser extent the Alexandrian War, literary style serves as an early indication and persistent reminder that the various authors are not simply loyal to Caesar but clearly and unequivocally his subordinates, whose literary talents and ambitions are as modest as their military station. As a result, their prose can provide important evidence about contemporary colloquial Latin usage - including, in the case of the author of the Spanish War, a fondness for quoting the early Roman playwright Ennius - which Caesar himself would not employ. Even Cicero’s more informal and personal correspondence, reflecting as it does both his literary ability and his social station, is not comparable. This is just one of the ways in which the Continuators offer a unique contemporary voice, the value of which has often been summarily and unfairly dismissed on the basis of aesthetic criteria alone. Not all discontinuity is regrettable.
However we choose to explain it and whatever interest we are able to find in it, the fact remains that the transition from Caesar to Hirtius, and between Hirtius and the subsequent Continuators, is jarring. Moreover, it is not only stylistic, but structural. In some cases, the Continuators seek to impose continuity on discontinuous events. Book 8 of the Gallic War begins with the admission that Caesar has already conquered all of Gaul and therefore the implication that what follows will be at best an afterword to what has preceded. As a result, as one critic has noted, Hirtius commits an ‘‘unwitting disruption of his friend’s design’’ in violating the ‘‘closure’’ effected by the defeat of Vercingetorix in Book 7 (Torrigan 1998: 59). The Alexandrian War does seek to complete the narrative of the Alexandrian campaign which begins at the end of Caesar’s Civil War - but the very effort at structural continuity only serves to highlight the shift in authorship. The African War begins abruptly and without explanation with Caesar’s arrival in Lilybaeum in Sicily prior to sailing to Africa, utterly disconnected from his return to Italy at the conclusion of the Alexandrian War. Perhaps ironically, given the opprobrium it has otherwise suffered, the Spanish War does begin with a succinct summary of the previous two campaigns, ‘‘with Pharnaces defeated and Africa reduced.’’ Of course, these inconsistent transitions reflect the unfinished nature of the individual texts and of the collection as a whole, discussed above. Nonetheless, their effect in their current form is to highlight the shifting authorial voices and the status of the individual texts as discrete narrative units rather than to emphasize any deeper continuity or coherence in Caesar’s many separate campaigns and victories during the years in question.
This combination of stylistic and structural discontinuity has consequences for more than our ease and aesthetic pleasure as readers. For one thing, it serves to periodize our understanding of the events the Continuators recount. That is, in offering a series of self-contained, structurally and stylistically discontinuous narratives, the Continuators lead us to consider each campaign primarily as an independent, distinct event or sequence of events rather than as part of a larger whole. (This is true even of Book 8 of the Gallic War, which presents 51 BC as a distinct ‘‘transitional year’’ between the conclusion of hostilities in Gaul and the outbreak of hostilities in Italy as much as it offers a ‘‘completion’’ of the Gallic campaign.) Moreover, because of the progressive decline in literary quality from Caesar to Hirtius to the authors of the African War and, in particular, the Spanish War, this periodization further suggests a relative importance for the events in question, with Caesar’s own writings dealing with the most important events and the Continuators merely tying up successively less important loose ends after him. In other words, the Continuators don’t just produce second-rate writing; they write about second-rate events.
Periodization is a useful and probably inevitable tool of historical analysis, offering as it does a convenient and chronologically precise means of ordering complex chains of events. Nevertheless, we are justified in asking at least two questions about periodization in the Continuators. Is it historically accurate, or at least justifiable? Do the Continuators’ accounts contain any other qualities or perspectives which work to counteract the perception of discontinuity their individual works convey?
The first question can be addressed from multiple perspectives. First, the divisions between the Continuators’ works, and between their works and Caesar’s, reflect a natural ordering of Caesar’s campaigns of the late 50s and 40s BC. Each of the wars the Continuators recount took place in a geographically distinct area, at a chronologically distinct time, against individually distinct Roman and foreign enemies. Even the discontinuity of Book 8 of the Gallic War represents a distinct and final phase of the Gallic campaign, when the major foes were defeated and only residual operations remained. Moreover, to the extent that the Continuators leave the impression that the battles they deal with are secondary in importance to the ones Caesar himself narrates, that impression is justified by the identity of the enemies Caesar faces: Vercingetorix and Pompey in Caesar’s own works, versus scattered Gallic holdouts and surviving Pompeian loyalists in the Continuators. The defeats of Vercingetorix and of Pompey were not merely symbolic; they were substantive as well, virtually eliminating the opposition to Caesar in one case and arguably fatally weakening it in the other.
On the other hand, the Continuators’ works might reflect more accurately the importance of the events they describe were they more inclusive or more judicious in their selection of material. Book 8 of the Gallic War, while setting the stage for the outbreak of civil war in 49 BC, does little to explain the relationship between Caesar’s victory in Gaul, his future political ambitions, and the reaction they provoked at Rome. The Alexandrian War is entirely silent about Caesar’s relationship with
Cleopatra, thereby preserving the reticence initiated by Caesar in Book 3 of the Civil War but also effacing one of the most significant and memorable players in both Caesar’s life and the course of events in Egypt. The African War expresses the expected outrage at Scipio’s subordination to Juba’s non-Roman leadership and concomitant betrayal of his illustrious ancestry, but provides more details about comparatively trivial events, such as an order of battle for a battle that never takes place, than it does about the battle of Thapsus, where Caesar ultimately defeated Scipio. Similarly, the Spanish War devotes considerable attention to trivial details while failing entirely to convey any sense of the symbolic importance of the defeat of Pompey’s sons Gnaeus and Sextus at Munda in 45 BC, or even simply the non-trivial fact that Caesar’s victory there completed his final military campaign of the civil war.
In other words, many events are more significant than the treatment (or lack of treatment) they receive from the Continuators might suggest. Indeed, even if we acknowledge the generic limitations of campaign narratives, which are primarily expository rather than analytical, the years 51-50 and 47-45 BC have a military importance which the Continuators convey imperfectly at best. A pacified Gaul ensured not only that Caesar’s own attention would not be diverted from his political ambitions at Rome, but that his army would be available to support him if needed. After Pharsalus, the continuing resistance to Caesar was serious, substantial, and well organized. More generally - and most importantly - a civil war was being waged. Hirtius had no illusions about the nature of the conflict, as his declaration of despair at the endlessness of civil discord indicates ( Gallic War 8). However, as we shall see, overt reference to civil war is virtually absent from the Continuators. It is the brutal truth their discrete, discreet narratives avoid, the underlying continuity their discontinuities obscure. It is a truth, moreover, that the Continuators were not alone in avoiding - indeed, their silence on the subject is not only one component of their loyalty to Caesar but also a key to the important insights the Continuators offer into the relationship between civil war and imperial conquest at Rome.
World History
