A Choice Selection
The Loeb reader
A Loeb Classical Library Reader
When many of us read Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic wars as children, either because we were told to or because we thought it would do us good, we often skipped the parts that were too difficult or too dull or that simply could not hold our interest. The diverting of rivers, the construction of bridges: these were often the things that were once skipped by wordy young people whose omnivorous tastes in information did not necessarily stretch to engineering.
Yet this is the section (the building of a bridge by Caesar over the Rhine) that the selectors of this little volume of bits and pieces have chosen from the commentaries. Not one of the most famous and oft-quoted parts. It’s a brave choice and, when you actually read the handful of pages in question (and they’re not in the middle of other text you’d rather be reading, or are forced to read for school), it’s clearly justified.
Alone, treated as a free-standing bit of memoir in a wider anthology, the story of Caesar’s bridge construction is vital and fascinating. Readers can sense Caesar’s own self-aggrandisement and they can also palpably feel the Roman pride in the accomplishments of their lads. Our men, is how Caesar often refers to his soldiers. And it comes through, this patriotism, this endless questing after greatness. Even if only at the behest of a man with his own ambitions, as Caesar had.
Even when Caesar’s army, having crossed the river, only devastates some of the German villages and territories of Rome’s perceived enemies, and pointedly does not fight anyone (a move that many would call cowardly, at least in Rome) — and then leaves the way it came, smashing the bridge up after — even then, this fairly grubby little episode remains strange and fascinating. It retains an odd quality, the vocabulary of something the modern world does not have: punitive expeditions, declining to give battle, foraging parties — so many of them unknown in a hundred years. At least in the Anglosphere.
This is just one episode in this uneven but enjoyable compilation. The book begins with the Greek texts, and it begins, too, with Homer — as all anthologies must. Here, the editors are on safer ground. We have the scene of Odysseus tricking Polyphemus and blinding him, having first told the cyclops that his name is ‘Nobody.’ This results in the wounded cyclops, calling out for help from his brethren, shouting ‘my friends, it is Nobody who is killing me by guile and not by force.’
At which the other cyclopeses, taking the words literally, brush it off and return to their own repose. Leaving the way clear for the Achaeans to escape, as they surely will.
Other selections here are military: we have the very beginning of Herodotus’s account of the Persian Wars; and we have the moment, in Thucydides, where the general Nicias, in trying to warn the Athenian assembly off its seeming desire to mount an expedition to Sicily, instead convinces the voters that such a thing might be difficult but possible, and winds up having himself put in command. (Not exactly to his own advantage.) And we have Xenophon, in one of the more readable sections of his Anabasis, explaining how it was that he, Xenophon, and ten thousand of his closest Greek mercenary friends came to find themselves leaderless and in the middle of a Persian empire that did not much want them all there.
Much of the rest of the book is poetic or dramatic in some way. We have selections from Euripides, whose Medea loses none of its punch even if excerpted, with Medea herself boldly answering that she will kill her own children, if it hurts her husband most. And Sophocles, whose Antigone still hits very hard. The Octavia attributed to Seneca still surprises me by its vehemence and fury, not least because, if it were written by Seneca, he must have been begging to fall out with the Emperor Nero, whose mother Agrippina he depicts coming back from Hell to tell her son (who has murdered her) that he is the foulest thing in all creation and cannot now blot out of the stain which bloodies his entire line.
Both the Platonic and Aristotelian episodes here seem a little like digressions. Even the Phaedo, a meditation on the last days of Socrates, does not rise much (in this extract at least) above the mundane. Socrates is about to be made to commit suicide, and when he is asked why he spent some time recently writing songs, Socrates says that he had for some time had dreams (dreams he took to be prophetic), which implied he ought to write songs. And since he took that as a sign from the gods, he decided to do so: just so he could say, when called before a higher court, that he had not squandered his talents entirely and ignored instructions in the form of omens and signs.
Aristotle’s contribution here is from the Poetics. It’s interesting enough, but not operating at the highest level of what that very brief work can offer. At least in my view.
I could write about Plutarch’s fawning praise of Brutus in his Parallel Lives. Or Lucian’s quite funny moment between Hermes and his goat-legged son, Pan, in Dialogues of the Gods. I could talk more about Juvenal’s satire of being out and about in Rome at constant risk of someone throwing something down upon you, or being set upon by a rich man and his bodyguards.
I enjoyed Pliny writing about Apelles, the greatest painter of his age. And I liked Livy’s account of the carrying off of the Sabine women in the early days of Rome a good deal less.
And I could say more. But that would be beside the point. What’s on offer here is but a smattering, a small but inviting selection, of what might be on offer in a lifetime of study. It is well worth browsing.