Although I said that the negative treatment of emotional political rhetoric by ‘‘Caesar’’ in Sallust’s Catiline probably reflects Sallust’s own attitude, it is highly likely that Caesar’s own approach to oratory was anti-rhetorical. He was famed for his force (comparable to Demosthenes’ celebrated shock and awe - deinotes). To obtain this forceful impact he avoided elaboration, using clarity and simplicity as tools in practice, and we can infer that he did so on principle. These two elements, combined with linguistic correctness and precision, were recommended by Theophrastus as prerequisites of formal eloquence, but they were also recognized as necessary to good sermo, that is informal talk.
Cicero, whose ideal of eloquence was copia, an abundance of rich and flowing speech, had discussed the criteria for successful rhetoric at length in his major treatise
De Oratore of 55 BC, and spoken in passing of correctness (Latinitas = Theophrastus’ virtue of Hellenismos) and clarity as elementary virtues (De Or. 3 43). This may have been the provocation for the two-volume treatise on language composed by Caesar in his moments of leisure during the next years and dedicated to Cicero (Hendrickson 1906). Caesar’s title De Analogia (‘‘On analogical formation’’ or ‘‘consistency’’) needs some explaining. The critics and editors of Alexandria, such as Aristarchus, had elaborated a theory of language which built on the existing similarities of word derivation and inflexion in Greek to argue for adopting forms and inflexions of similar words according to predominant patterns. According to their theory we ought to say and write such forms (e. g. mouses by analogy with houses). The other predominant school of grammar, based on Pergamum, and introduced to Rome by the scholar Crates, argued that language depended on general usage, and on forms sanctioned by the authority of past and present writers. At Rome Caesar’s teacher Gnipho was an ‘‘analogist.’’ He is quoted by later critics as arguing that men should write ebura and marmura (not ebora and marmora) as plurals of ebur and marmur, and Caesar seems now to have argued for similar choices.
In his dedication of this treatise to Cicero, quoted proudly at Brutus 253, Caesar speaks in terms which Cicero received as a compliment.
Ac si ut cogitata praeclare eloqui possent, non nulli studio et usu elaboraverunt cuius te paene principem copiae atque inventorem bene de nomine ac dignitate populi Romani meritum esse existimare debemus; hunc facilem et cotidianum novisse sermonem num pro relicto est habendum? (Caesar De Analogia fr.1 Funaioli)
Ifquite a few have toiled with devotion and expertise in order to utter their thoughts in a splendid form, an abundant eloquence of which you are virtual master and originator, so that we should honor you for having deserved so well of the reputation and prestige of the Roman people in giving Latin a rhetorical power to match or surpass the Greeks, does this mean we should leave aside the knowledge of this easy everyday language?
Copia is Cicero’s ideal, but contrary to Caesar’s own admiration for spare eloquence, and so implicit criticism; there is a further key to criticism in Caesar’s last question. Should easy everyday speech be taken for granted as a skill already surpassed? (So Cicero had implied in de Oratore 3.38.) John Dugan’s recent subtle analysis of the interaction between these two brilliant men has brought out the matching ambiguity of Cicero’s praise of Caesar’s Gallic commentarii (‘‘for they are bare, straight and beautiful, (like statues) with all the adornments of eloquence stripped like garments,’’ nudi enim sunt, recti et venusti, omni ornatu orationis tamquam veste detracta; Brut. 262; see Dugan 2005: 175-89). From Pliny’s address to Cicero at Natural History 7.117 we have a further compliment by Caesar to Cicero which clearly comes from the same dedicatory context: he hails Cicero as ‘‘father of eloquence and Latin writing, and as much greater than the laurel of every triumph, as it is more important to have extended so far the boundaries of the Roman intellect than of the Roman empire’’ (facundiae Latinarumque litterarum parens atque omnium triumphorum laurea maior, quanto plus est ingenii Romani terminos in tantum promovisse quam imperii). This is not just a well-turned compliment; it is highly apposite to two recent works of Cicero: his dialogue De oratore, requiring a far wider range of intellectual training for the aspiring statesman, and his speech De provinciis consularibus, on the consular provinces to be assigned in 55, with its enthusiastic encomium for Caesar’s expansion of the boundaries of Roman empire in Gaul from the Alps to the Ocean. And 16 centuries later J. J. Scaliger would use the same trope to praise the Julian calendar (see below) as ‘‘a victory in the realm of culture more lasting than any Roman victory on land or sea’’ (quoted by Feeney 2007: 193 and n.116).
But how was Caesar’s praise of Cicero’s rich language to be reconciled with the prescriptive attitude of the ‘‘analogists’’? Caesar also said with equal emphasis in this proem that one should avoid an unfamiliar word as sailors shun a reef (Gell. 1.10.4), and it is clear from Caesar’s own writings that he did avoid archaic or recondite vocabulary and even unusual case inflexions. Although we might expect any regularizing innovations to be lost from the manuscript tradition of the Gallic War commen-tarii which Caesar was engaged on at this time, Oldfather and Bloom (1927) investigated the manuscripts of the Bellum Gallicum for traces of such forms, and found no support for the idea that Caesar actually followed his own principles. (For example, Caesar recommended that one should write the dative of fourth declension nouns like exercitus in - u, not ui, and the genitive of fifth declension nouns like dies in -e not - ei, but Gellius (4.16.8, 9.14.25) notes only one or two rare examples in Caesar’s writings. But it is fairly clear that there were very few word forms argued for by the theorists that had not been in actual use; even the most purist grammarians were in fact relying to some extent on the familiarity of past usage, in poets like Lucilius. According to another discussion reported by Gellius (6.9.15), both Caesar and Cicero actually used forms of reduplicated perfect constructed by analogy with the Greek perfect, writing memordi, pepugi, spepondi.
The inflexion of Greek names was another problem: this was not just a matter of using Greek or Latin case endings, but stem formation. Quintilian notes that Caesar recommended the Latinizing form Calypsonem as accusative of Calypso. But was this not perhaps under the influence of Rome’s oldest schoolbook, the third-century Odysseia of Livius Andronicus, who wrote apud nympham Atlantis filiam Calypsonem? As in any language, poetry and poetic tags in common speech preserved or revived archaic forms, and could make purely invented forms acceptable. So when the whole topic was taken up and argued on both sides by Varro ten years later in the eighth and ninth books of De Lingua Latina (also dedicated to Cicero), Varro concluded that orators could not be expected to introduce regularization with analogical forms that went against the usage of the common people; only poets had that license, and it would be the task of poets to make new analogically formed words acceptable.
Any writer finds himself called upon to make decisions based on his own concept of what is correct and desirable in language. Even while recognizing that both casual speech and written texts of the younger generation increasingly resort to new turns of phrase the writer may judge them to be careless or crude. He has the option of reshaping his thought so as to avoid forms he does not approve of without inflicting obvious pedantries on his readers. While Oxford and Cambridge University Presses disagree on how to write the possessive form of Brutus (Brutus’ or Brutus’s?) we can usually substitute ‘‘of Brutus.’’ This is, I think, how Caesar handled his own linguistic principles.
A more significant aspect of Caesar’s language use in the commentarii is his preference for choosing and using one word from a group of synonyms, such as flumen rather than fluvius or amnis for ‘‘river’’, and sticking to it even at the cost of repetition. In his detailed study of Caesar’s diction Eden (1962) suggests that Caesar began his work as a sort of logbook, indifferent to stylistic refinement. This is borne out by the monotonous reuse of certain adverbial phrases and legalistic repetitions of an antecedent noun in subordinate relative clauses.
Was Caesar’s deliberate limitation of vocabulary intended to make his work easier for an ordinary Roman to understand when it was read or recited? Peter Wiseman has argued (in Powell and Welch 1998) that rather than composing his accounts as official dispatches to the Senate, Caesar wanted to write and circulate the reports of his achievements so that they would be accessible to people in the Roman street. This would also, perhaps, explain his constant concern to give the motives for his military initiatives, justifying what his enemies might represent as unwarranted aggression. It might also explain an increasing resort to imaginative reported speeches by Caesar’s adversaries or by common soldiers, which climaxes in book 7. Most memorable, and rhetorically effective, are the speeches of self-sacrifice by the centurion Petronius (7.50), and the extraordinary advocacy of carrying resistance to Rome to the point of cannibalism (7.77.12) by Critognatus of the Arverni, an extremist not mentioned elsewhere. The commentarii had begun as records, but they were soon infused with Caesar’s own command of rhetoric and loaded argument.
World History
