Conclusion

In the period 1300 to 1600 the figure of Julius Caesar arouses an interest in the Italian peninsula that amounts almost to an obsession. Between the beginning and the end of the fourteenth century, from the age of Dante to that of Petrarch, humanist scholarship reveals the reality of Caesar as a human figure, no longer just a pawn in a providential plan for a divinely ordained empire, nor a mythical founder of cities, nor the inventor of the royal plural in Latin (and hence in the Romance vernaculars). Petrarch had even read some of his letters as well as his Commentaries (though he attributed the latter to Celsus). From 1400 onwards Caesar becomes a model for rulers and condottieri, particularly in Italian court culture, as far north as Milan and Ferrara and as far south as Naples, but at the same time in the strongest republic, Florence, he becomes a bitterly contested figure, notably in the works of Bruni, Poggio, and Machiavelli, in a wider ideological debate about republicanism and empire that has no parallel in other European countries of the time. When the last Florentine republic falls in 1530, anti-Caesarian animus gives way to admiration of the historian and military tactician, but these two aspects take on a particular inflection in Italy, where Caesar’s Commentaries enjoy unparalleled popularity both in the original Latin and in the Italian vernacular.

In Renaissance Italy Julius Caesar was simply the most translated of all the ancient historians, suggesting that his appeal went far beyond those who could read Latin. As

For his role as a Latin author, Erasmus’s De ratione studendi (1512), which set the tone for many of the canonical ideas about ancient authors in the Cinquecento, ranked him as the fifth most important Latin writer overall and second only to Cicero as a model for Latin prose writing. As a model historian and writer of pure Latin, the author of the Commentaries evoked praise even from his ideological enemies such as Bruni and Poggio, but the Italian printed (and illustrated) editions throughout the sixteenth century show that his works were not just useful for learning sound Latin and ancient history: they also taught geography, military strategy and technology, architecture, and even natural history. The many editions of Italian translations of the Commentaries also testify to their wider relevance in the peninsula’s military-political plight. The sixteenth century had begun with invasions by French, Swiss, and Spanish armies, culminating in the sack of Rome in 1527, and continued with the constant threat from the Turks and with the Spanish domination of the peninsula that was to last for over two centuries. No Italian state managed to field a consistently successful army against such forces, so Italians looked to Caesar’s historical works both because they evoked an ideal past when Roman valor had reigned supreme against armies from the North and the East, and also because they sought in them practical rules for contemporaries, rules about military formations, tactics and the technology for launching and withstanding sieges: not for nothing are great architects such as Alberti and Palladio fascinated by Caesar’s text, for it was in this period that Italian architects were called upon to design fortifications. In Italy competence in humanist scholarship as much as incompetence in military matters meant that Julius Caesar and his works were always in high demand.