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.

Forged Ancient Literary Works

Many of the best-known ancient literary works in Greek and Latin, scholars now agree, have long been presented as the work of authors who did not write them.

Gradually, the findings of scholarship about ancient literature make their way toward the consciousness of the general public in the West. The findings about one ancient compilation, about which the West is particularly obsessed, make their way more quickly than all others to the public, and to wider circles of the public: those having to do with the Greek New Testament. If someone believes that all 13 of the books of the New Testament traditionally attributed to St Paul were actually written by Paul, it may come as a shock to learn that scholars now believe that Ephesians, First and Second Timothy and Titus were written by someone else, and that the authorship of Colossians and Second Thessalonians is debated.

This is less shocking for those who have a broad knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin literature, because, among the ancient "pagan" authors, such forgeries are quite common. Take the case of Homer -- well, Homer is a special case to begin with, because there is absolutely no agreement among scholars about whether a writer named Homer ever existed, or whether, if this writer did exist, he wrote the Iliad or the Odyssey or both -- however, it is almost universally agreed now that, whoever wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, the works known as the Homeric Hymns, and attributed to Homer by the time of Thucydides at the latest, were written by someone else.

No one doubts that Plato existed, or that he wrote many philosophical works centering around Socrates -- but he didn't write all of the dialogues he was once thought to have written. In the collection traditionally thought of as the work of Plato, First Alcibiades, Clitophon, Menexenus and the Epistles are now controversial as to whether or not Plato wrote them, while Second Alcibiades, Epinomis, Hipparchus, Minos, Amatores and Theages are all now generally agreed to have been written by someone else. That's a total ten of the thirty-six works traditionally attributed to Plato, and this does not count nine more works attributed to Plato which were already seen in antiquity to have been spurious: Axiochus, Definitions, Demodocus, Epigrams, Eryxias, Halcyon, On Justice, On Virtue and Sisyphus.

Vergil, on the strength of his works the Aeneid, the Georgics and the Eclogues, is considered by many to be the finest poet ever to have written in Latin. For a long time, an additional collection of poems, the Appendix Vergiliana, were thought to have been poems Vergil wrote in his youth. Now almost no-one believes that Vergil wrote them.

Julius Caesar wrote commentaries about his experiences leading Roman troops in the Gallic and Civil wars. Many editions of Caesar's work have also included commentaries on the Alexandrine, African and Iberian wars, originally presented as works by Caesars, now considered not to have been written by him.

Sallust, an historian and contemporary of Caesar's, is known for works on the Catiline and the Jugurthan War. Editions of his work also contain letters which he ostensibly wrote to Caesar, and a speech against Cicero and one by Cicero against him, which are considered to be forgeries.

An enormous amount of prose survives which was written by Cicero, whom many have called the greatest of all Latin authors. Collections of his works have also included Rhetorica ad Herennium and Commentariolum Petitionis, both almost certainly written by someone other than him.

Ovid is one of the most beloved ancient Latin authors, known for several humorous volumes of what today might be called dating advice, as well as for the Metamorphoses, an extraordinary re-telling of many traditional myths, and the Fasti, a book on Roman holidays which is better than you might think a book on Roman holidays could possibly be, and for other works. Additionally, several works not written by him have circulated along with his works: Consolatio ad Liviam, Halieutica, Nux and Somnium.

There are many, many further examples. Many of these works continue to be of great interest to Classical or biblical scholars, for one reason and another, even after they have been shown to be fakes. One is almost tempted to say that no Classical author can be considered truly great before a spurious work has attached itself to his or her oeuvre.

The authors of such spurious works are often referred to by putting the prefix "pseudo-" in front of the name of the author who is being imitated. More and more, separate editions are dedicated to the work of the forgers, rather than including them in the editions of the forged authors as a sort of afterthought.

Perhaps, as these widespread, and often well-respected forgeries become better-known, the shock of the layman at things like pseudo-Pauline epistles will become somewhat less.

Great Caesar's Ghost

I began to feel a little bit of polylinguistic sophistication when I discovered -- don't ask me when. I'm terrible when it comes to remembering when various events of my life happened. It could have been 20 years ago, it could have been 30 -- not only that "Kaiser" was the German word for "Caesar," but that the Germans, although spelling it differently, were pronouncing the name correctly, while we Anglophones, with very few eccentric exceptions, were not. It was around the same time that I learned that both the Greek Byzantine Emperors, from the 4th century until 1453, and the German Holy Roman Emperors from 800 to 1806 called themselves Caesar, as did the Austrian Emperors from 1804 to 1919, and the German Emperors -- often the only ones meant by English-speakers when they say "Kaiser" -- from 1871 to 1918.

Some time after this discovery -- do not ask me how long after -- I learned that "Tsar" was Russian for "Caesar." Still later, I learned that the rulers of Bulgaria called themselves Tsars from the 10th to the 14th century, and then again in the 20th century, and that the last reigning Tsar of Bulgaria, 80-year-old Tsar Simeon II, who ruled as a minor in the 1940's and was Bulgaria's Prime Minister from 2001 to 2005, has not yet formally renounced the title of Tsar.

After the conquest of Constantinople, the Ottoman Sultans included among their titles "Qaysar-i Rūm," "Caesar of Rome."

To be clear: all of those leaders, those of Byzantium, of the Holy Roman Empire, of medieval and 20th-century Bulgaria, of Imperial Russia, of the Ottoman Empire, and of the Austrian and German Empires of the 19th and 20th centuries, called -- and in at least one case, call -- themselves Caesar, not because they thought the named sounded cool or anything like that, but because they, and probably others of whom I am still unaware, were quite seriously claiming to be the political heirs of Julius Caesar.

Why? In this case, as with most questions to do with politics, there are few logical reasons. Julius Caesar was the sole ruler of Rome for less than 5 years. Ah, but his actions as ruler were unique? Name one. We'll wait.

Caesar's successor, his actual heir Octavianus, who changed his named to Augustus, and added Caesar to his name, beginning a long-lasting custom, was the sole ruler of Rome for over 40 years, and ruled in a much more absolute manner than Caesar had. Caesar's predecessors Sulla and Pompey each ruled longer than he did.

I think the first first part of the reason for the lasting nature of the power of Caesar's name has not to do with his rule, not to do with his life at all, but with his death. He was stabbed to death in the Senate, by Senators. Assassinations don't get much more dramatic than that. Augustus used that drama, as he so skillfully used so many things and so many people, to increase his own power. Augustus, without a doubt, ended the Roman Republic and founded the Roman Empire. It has very often been remarked that Augustus ended the Republic while constantly insisting that he was upholding it, fooling no one from his time to our own while achieving tremendous feats of change. If political titles were distributed logically, then thousands of years' worth of monarchs would have been known as Augustus -- and it's true that many of the Caesars were also called Augustus, but, with a lack of egotism quite rare among emperors, Augustus saw to it that Caesar's name was going to remain the most prominent.

Why? perhaps because, with an even greater lack of ego, Augustus saw that Caesar had been charismatic, and that he himself was not. This gave him the opportunity to enhance his own power by glorifying someone else. How many great politicians have ever been able to choose between power and glory? That choice is more one for a monk than for a politician.

But I'm just guessing, just as one has to guess whether Augustus foresaw the pax romana and valued an end to civil war over his power. Just as one has to guess so often about his motives.

There was a sphinx on Augustus' signet ring and in official portraits of him. Was this to commemorate his victory over Cleopatra? Yeah, maybe.