Literary Works Formerly Ascribed to Julius Caesar

In addition to his remarkable military and political careers, Julius Caesar has been one of the most widely-read of ancient Latin authors. Many generations of upper-class European boys -- mostly upper-class and mostly boys -- read Caesar's accounts of the Gallic and the Civil War, in which Caesar led and triumphed. It was once thought that, besides the prose of Caesar's narratives being fairly easy to read, and thus well-suited to young boys, he provided an admirable example for future leaders of Europe to follow.

As time as gone on, however, scholars have found and more and more reason to doubt the veracity of Caesar's accounts, to regard them as extremely self-serving propaganda and Caesar as a propagator of genocide -- and of course, the proportion of males is no longer so overwhelming in /classical studies, or in world leadership. O tempora o mores!

Caesar continues to be very widely read, but no longer with an admiration as uncomplicated as he once received.

In addition to his commentaries on the Gallic and Civil Wars, accounts of the Alexandrian, African and Spanish Wars were written during or very close to the time of Caesar's life and circulated under his name along with the genuine war commentaries. But it has long been recognized that that attribution of these works to Caesar was false. Even readers as early as Suetonious saw clearly that these were the works of different authors. The author of the Alexandrian war is probably the same Hirtius, a personal acquaintance of Caesar's and an officer in his army, who added an eighth book to Caesar's account of the Civil War. The author of the African war is not quite as polished; and the Spanish War is simply awful. And even Hirtius' contributions, although unobjectionable from a purely literary point of view, stand out sharply from Caesar's own writing because Hirtius lacks Caesar's grasp of military matters.

The manuscripts of Caesar fall into two main groups: one of which contains only the commentary on the Gallic War, and none of which is older than the 9th century; the other group contains the entire Casarian and psuedo-Caesarian corpus, and none of this group is older than than the 10th century.

As with other ancient authors, so with Caesar, it seems to be the trend recently to print less text per volume. While as recently as Rene Dupont's 1901 Oxford edition the Civil War was printed with Hirtious' 8th book and the 3 pseudo-Caesarian texts, it appears that the newest editions from both Oxford and Teubner contain only the 7 books actually written by Caesar. O tempora o mores! (You realize, I hope, that I realize that there are reasons for changes in publishing habits, that I exclaim O tempora o mores! ironically, and do not wish for a return of good old days.) The pseudo-Caesarian works can still be had, in older second-hand volumes of the Civil War, and in newer separate editions.