De Bello Gallico | Page 8

meant to offer the records of his Gallic and British campaigns, simply as notes, or memoranda, afterwards to be worked up by regular historians; but, as Cicero observes, their merit was such in the eyes of the discerning that all judicious writers shrank from the attempt to alter them. In another instance of his literary labours he showed a very just sense of true dignity. Rightly conceiving that everything patriotic was dignified, and that to illustrate or polish his native language was a service of real and paramount patriotism, he composed a work on the grammar and orthoepy of the Latin language. Cicero and himself were the only Romans of distinction in that age who applied themselves with true patriotism to the task of purifying and ennobling their mother tongue. Both were aware of a transcendent value in the Grecian literature as it then stood; but that splendour did not depress their hopes of raising their own to something of the same level. As respected the natural wealth of the two languages, it was the private opinion of Cicero that the Latin had the advantage; and, if Caesar did not accompany him to that length--which, perhaps, under some limitations he ought to have done--he yet felt that it was but the more necessary to draw forth any special or exceptional advantage which it really had.
Was Caesar, upon the whole, the greatest of men? We restrict the question, of course, to the classes of men great in _action_: great by the extent of their influence over their social contemporaries; great by throwing open avenues to extended powers that previously had been closed; great by making obstacles once vast to become trivial, or prizes that once were trivial to be glorified by expansion. I (said Augustus Caesar) found Rome built of brick; but I left it built of marble. Well, my man, we reply, for a wondrously little chap, you did what in Westmoreland they call a good darroch (day's work); and, if navvies had been wanted in those days, you should have had our vote to a certainty. But Caius Julius, even under such a limitation of the comparison, did a thing as much transcending this as it was greater to project Rome across the Alps and the Pyrenees,--expanding the grand Republic into crowning provinces of i. France (_Gallia_), 2. Belgium, 3. Holland (_Batavia_), 4. England (_Britannia_), 5. Savoy (_Allobroges_), 6. Switzerland (_Helvetia_), 7. Spain (_Hispania_),--than to decorate a street or to found an amphitheatre. Dr. Beattie once observed that, if that question as to the greatest man in action upon the rolls of History were left to be collected from the suffrages already expressed in books and scattered throughout the literature of all nations, the scale would be found to have turned prodigiously in Caesar's favour as against any single competitor; and there is no doubt whatsoever that even amongst his own countrymen, and his own contemporaries, the same verdict would have been returned, had it been collected upon the famous principle of Themistocles, that he should be reputed the first whom the greatest number of rival voices had pronounced to be the second.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
_Works_: Latin folio, Rome, 1469; Venice, 1471; Florence, 1514; London, 1585. De Bello Gallico, Esslingen (?), 1473. Translations by John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester (John Rastell), of Julius Caesar's Commentaries-"newly translated into Englyshe ... as much as concerneth thys realme of England"--1530 folio; by Arthur Goldinge, The Eyght Bookes of C. Julius Caesar, London, 1563, 1565, 1578, 1590; by Chapman, London, 1604 folio; by Clem. Edmonds, London, 1609; the same, with Hirtius, 1655, 1670, 1695 folio with commendatory verses by Camden, Daniel, and Ben Johnson (_sic_). Works: Translated by W. Duncan, 1753, 1755; by M. Bladen, 8th ed., 1770; MacDevitt, Bohn's Library, 1848. De Bello Gallico, translated by R. Mongan, Dublin, 1850; by J.B. Owgan and C.W. Bateman, 1882. Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War, translated by T. Rice Holmes, London, 1908 (see also Holmes' Caesar's Conquest of Gaul, 1911). Caesar's Gallic War, translated by Rev. F.P. Long, Oxford, 1911; Books IV. and V. translated by C.H. Prichard, Cambridge, 1912. For Latin text of De Bello Gallico see Bell's Illustrated Classical Series; Dent's Temple Series of Classical Texts, 1902; Macmillan and Co., 1905; and Blackie's Latin Texts, 1905-7.
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CONTENTS
THE WAR IN GAUL
THE CIVIL WAR

THE COMMENTARIES OF CAIUS JULIUS CAESAR
THE WAR IN GAUL
BOOK I
I.--All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in ours Gauls, the third. All these differ from each other in language, customs and laws. The river Garonne separates the Gauls from the Aquitani; the Marne and the Seine separate them from the Belgae. Of all these, the Belgae are the bravest, because they are farthest