Caesar

[timons]

     We took a trip over the weekend, and finished our latest wife-reads-to-me-while-driving title, which is Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War. Except for some reason this one is retitled The Conquest of Gaul. It's the S. A. Handford translation, in the Penguin Classics edition.
          Problems with this edition:

• Crappy maps. The book is full of place names you can't find on the skimpy maps provided.
• Stupid, inconsistent naming conventions. Instead of using all modern place names, or all Roman place names, it mixes them. This means there will be no map that you can find all the names on, as used in the text. They use Switzerland, for instance, instead of Helvetia, but call the folks who live there Helvetii. Frankly, modern place names have no business in a translated ancient text, except maybe saying Rome instead of Roma.
• The title. It's stupid to give a different name to a classic work, just to be different. It confuses the unwary, and the benefit escapes me.

 
     Still, the text is Caesar, and the Commentaries, however named, is a glimpse of the past by one of its major players. Caesar gives us the problems in clear terms, and his strategies as well. We don't have that many texts about the Roman army that are actually by people who deployed legions. Priceless history.
     That I translated much of it in high school Latin class only makes it dearer to me. This is the fourth time I've been through it, and I wouldn't mind teaching it and going for five.

CBsIP:  [a thousand pages of student manuscript]
Thirsty, Kristin Bair O'Keeffe
Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson (such a slog)
McSweeney's 15