You can practically hear commander Julius Caesar unfurling a crisp new map and telling his senior officers: “Gaul is a whole divided in three.” That’s how Cynthia Damon, professor emerita of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, renders the famous opening sentence of Caesar’s Gallic War in her new translation for Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library. This is the almost irresistibly collectible series of handy facing-page editions—red covers for Latin, green for Greek—with the original text on one side and the English version on the other. Damon’s version will replace an older one by H.J. Edwards, the late Cambridge don whose translation is now over a hundred years old. Loebs are as standard-issue among lovers of classics as boots and helmets are among army privates, so this will become a go-to edition of a book that Latin students everywhere have been cutting their teeth on for generations.

It is a blow-by-blow account of how the author, when Rome was still a republic, won an astounding streak of victories over the captious tribes inhabiting what is now France. In 58 B.C., Caesar was granted a five-year commission, later extended, to govern Rome’s holdings in the region. At that time the Gallic territory in question amounted to two provinces on either side of the Alps, covering a strip of land in the south. The modern French region of Provence, or “Province,” gets its name from the pre-Caesar days, when the area was the base of Roman control. After Caesar, all that changed. First a skirmish at the border with one of the hostile Gallic tribes, then an intervention by an ambitious German king, brought Rome’s armies vaulting into enemy-controlled territory. So much was standard practice for defending the provinces. But once Caesar got his hooks into Gaul, he stayed there. Within five years, by 52, he had pounded every rebel alliance into dust and claimed the entirety of Gaul—almost 200,000 square miles—for Rome. He briefly established a beachhead in Britain, which often supplied the Gauls with mercenary troops, and shooed away the German aggressors who were always looking hungrily across the Rhine. By the time he had finished, not a single native tribe anywhere in Gaul could mount more than a ragtag suicide mission against Rome.

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Gallic War is a collection of field reports on these achievements, written with the general voting public in mind. It would have had the effect of transferring to the folks back home some of the enthusiasm that Caesar inspired in his soldiers. When he delegated command to senior officers, he fleshed out his own narrative with their notes—the last book, the eighth, was written entirely by one of Caesar’s high-ranking subordinates, Aulus Hirtius, to clear up some final details after Caesar’s own assassination. The whole thing is vivid with color commentary from the barracks: jokes the men told, slang terms they came up with. Soldiers in every time and place have a habit of christening their weaponry: British privates called their muskets “Brown Besses.” The pilots over Hiroshima and Nagasaki learned from their superiors to call their bombs “Fat Man” and “Little Boy.” In much the same way, Caesar’s men dug spike-filled booby traps outside their siegeworks and called them “lilies,” because they looked like deadly flowers. It’s often said that Gallic War is written in the third person, since Caesar so often refers to himself as “he,” not “I”: “at first Caesar decided to refrain from battle.” But the true grammar of the book is in the first-person plural: “our army,” “our province,” “our men stood armed and ready to attack.” The main character, the hero of the story, is us: the Roman army, of which Caesar presents himself (impersonally, but not at all impartially) as the consummate representative. It is a master class in building esprit de corps.

The Roman public had never seen anything like it. They voted to hold festival after festival of thanksgiving in Caesar’s honor. These were the achievements that made him a hero in the eyes of his men and a threat, in the eyes of his enemies, to the already wobbly balance of power in the republic. Plutarch writes of Caesar that he “wrapped his army around him like a cloak” to make himself unstoppable: that was the kind of unwavering allegiance he won from his soldiers in Gaul. The popular support inspired by that campaign made it possible for him, just a few years later in 49, to step across the Rubicon a legion at his back. In the wake of that cataclysmic event, Shakespeare imagined the assassin Cassius asking his co-conspirator Brutus, “Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed / That he is grown so great?” The answer is in Gallic War. It is an astonishing book about the making of a world-historic man.

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It’s also a perfect starter book for students when they’re ready to begin reading ancient authors in the original. Caesar’s Latin is as controlled, economical, and muscular as an elite centurion. Cicero, who was known for his more florid and polished sentences, called Caesar’s speeches nudi, recti, et venusti: “Naked, upright, and appealing, stripped of every rhetorical embellishment like a body stripped of its clothing.” If that rather seductive description leaves the reader feeling unexpectedly flustered, well, so does Caesar’s prose. It’s easy, at first, to mistake his simplicity for artlessness. But refraining from adornment is as much a stylistic choice as indulging in it. Caesar’s pared-down diction makes his stories all the more bracing and accessible. Inexperienced readers can still follow them today with relative ease, which means Gallic War has become a worldwide exemplar of clean and correct Latin style. This would have pleased Caesar intensely. He meant his language, like his bearing in the field of battle and his actions in the political arena, to set a new standard by which all else would be measured ever after. For Caesar used words the way he used everything else: as a tool of conquest.

Take that first sentence: “Gaul is a whole divided in three.” This might have come as news to the Gauls. A glance at the maps in the back of Damon’s volume will make clear that Gaul was neither very obviously a whole, nor self-evidently divided in three. It was a war zone, crisscrossed by ever-shifting allegiances and menaced at all times by opportunistic warlords. Two tribes, the Aedui and the Arverni, had been squaring off in rival federations for years, until the Arverni called in German mercenaries to shift the balance of power in their favor. The resulting situation was one of general disarray when Caesar arrived. He was able, by pressing on pain points in the local networks of allegiance, to bring them crashing down and put his own power structures in place. He would do something not too dissimilar in Rome a few years later, slicing through a Gordian knot of intractable sectarian conflict to make room for something totally new.

In Gaul, the first step was to redraw the map. Students and even some professional translators are tempted to make Caesar say that “all Gaul is divided into three parts.” But a better way to say that would be Gallia omnis divisa est, not Gallia est omnis divisa. Word order is freer in Latin than in English, but it still matters, and Caesar attended to it closely. Gallia omnis means “all of Gaul.” Gallia est omnis means something more like “Gaul is one.” Caesar meant to assert, first, that the whole stretch of land from the Rhine to the Pyrenees was rightfully a unit. Second, whatever petty tribal skirmishes and entanglements might currently be in progress, these little peoples could fundamentally be grouped into three broad racial and geographic blocs, from north to south: Belgians, Celts, and Aquitani. However they understood themselves, that was how Caesar understood them for tactical purposes. So that, in his book, was how they were.

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Language is, among other things, a way of organizing the world. If you doubt this, ask your neighbor whether the recently assassinated political organizer Charlie Kirk belonged on the “far Right,” or whether he was a “centrist.” We arrange words like boxes to put things in, and then we fight over what goes in which box, sometimes with dire consequences. Caesar was a master at forcing things into his preferred boxes. The map he imposed onto Gaul wasn’t cut from whole cloth, but it was one among a number of ways to see things: his way. Then he made his way, the way. It was said of Apple founder Steve Jobs that he had a “reality distortion field”—that he could make you believe in his outlandish vision, at least while he was in the room. Caesar, thanks in part to the surgical precision of his language, had a reality creation field. He carved up Gaul in speech so that his soldiers could carve it up with swords.

Language is also a vehicle of culture, and Caesar knew that too. Romans had always been a bit self-conscious about their own language and culture, at least as compared with those of the Greeks. The literati of Caesar’s day admired Greek orators like Demosthenes as paragons of rhetoric; they fussed and debated over how best to attain Atticism, the cultivated eloquence of Athens. Cicero sometimes talked as if the only place to go from true Atticism was down, into the florid squalor and verbal excess of Asia. Asianism was supposedly what happened when Greeks comingled with the overwrought sycophants of the eastern courts and, in Cicero’s words, “lost all that wholesomeness—that flush of good health, if you like—that Greek speech possesses.” Others, more dogmatic still, felt that even the slightest flourish or tint of purple was a sign of degenerate Asiatic luxury. Caesar probably agreed. He felt strongly enough about the subject to write a whole book, De Analogia, on the right rules for “everyday speech” (sermo cotidianus). It’s mostly lost, but from quotations that survive it’s clear enough that Caesar thought Roman austerity demanded plainspoken, straight-talking clarity. Anything else was less than perfect Latin.

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Some would say this made Caesar an Atticist. He was certainly no Asianist. But really, he was neither. As always, he intended to sweep away all the old options and stake a claim for something altogether new—something neither Greek nor Asian but purely and definitively Roman. The best word for what he was aiming at is Latinitas, the distinctive character of “Latin-ness” that gives the language its lapidary intensity. Proper Latin, Caesar thought, should be like a proper Roman: simple, straightforward, and strong. He had an instinctive feel for the sound and structure of the language, the characteristics that set Roman speech apart from Greek.

The grammar of Greek requires words to take on ornate new forms and extra prefixes. Conjugated verbs curl and grow outward from their roots like grapevines. Latin words are more like blocks of concrete, compact units that can be squared up side by side to build hardy sentence structures. For example: the Greek word for “I win,” nikaō, becomes enikēsa, “I won,” in the past tense. Latin’s vinco becomes simply vici. So when Plutarch, writing Caesar’s biography in Greek, reports how Caesar described one of his momentous victories, he has to write ēlthon, eidon, enikēsa. It’s Suetonius who records the Latin version that has thundered across the ages ever since: veni, vidi, vici. I came, I saw, I conquered. The Greek has to trail off into extra syllables at the end. But the ponderous density and neat symmetry of classical Latin give it power. It’s a language for making decrees and putting a period on things. That’s what Caesar was born to do.

Maybe he was fit to rule because he was shaped by the Latin language, or maybe Latin became the language of rule because of how Caesar spoke it. Maybe it was a little bit of both. Ever since the fall of the republic, the man who became Rome’s “dictator for life” has been loved and hated, profiled and puzzled over. To some he was a lawless warlord, recklessly bulldozing Rome’s civic institutions to feed his insatiable ego. To others he was a hero and a savior, restoring confidence to a once-proud people on the brink of anarchy. To others still, he was simply the inevitable product of a moment when factional violence and populist fury demanded a strong man to control the mob. “It was not the mere accident of Caesar’s existence that destroyed the Republic,” wrote G.W.F. Hegel in his lectures on Philosophy of History, “it was Necessity.” Even if that’s true, though, only a man like Caesar could have taken the reins.

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Others had tried and failed: Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, the brothers whose land redistribution programs got them killed by the monied gentry; Marius and Sulla, the rival generals whose escalating political purges made Rome’s streets run red. Caesar was different. He had both the might and the mass appeal to command broad assent to his most daring maneuvers—in the eyes of his soldiers, he had more legitimacy than the feckless and ineffectual Senate. This, of course, is what made him dangerous.

Abraham Lincoln observed that Caesar hailed from “the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle,” which “distains a beaten path” and “seeks regions hitherto unexplored.” Whatever else he was, he was unprecedented—the first man to recognize and fully accept that Rome, after stretching its borders outward for generations, had become something other than the tight-knit republican community it once was. It had become an empire. To be Roman now meant, as Virgil would soon write, “to spare the conquered and beat down the proud.” In other words, to take over the world.

Caesar was spectacularly equipped to do so, which he proved beyond all doubt in Gaul. That was what made his victory there such an earthquake. In Joseph Addison’s Cato, the play about Caesar’s defiant adversary that inspired the American revolutionaries at Valley Forge, Cato the Younger’s friend Lucius tells him that “[t]he virtues of humanity are Caesar’s.” Cato replies: “Curse on his virtues! They’ve undone his country.” But they rallied his country, too. The charisma that inspired his soldiers, the implacability that terrified his enemies, the absolute resolve that won him Gaul and then more: it was all undeniably and essentially Roman, through and through. He embodied his nation at that crucial phase in its history, and he spoke the language of his people in tones they recognized as entirely their own. In the last book of Gallic War, when Aulus Hirtius takes over the narrative, he confesses that he can’t hope to match Caesar’s style: “For others know the quality and polish of the finished work, but we know how easily and quickly he finished it. For Caesar both wrote with the utmost ease and elegance and knew exactly how to explain his plans.” As much as anything else, that was what made him Caesar.

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Cynthia Damon sees very clearly what Caesar is up to in Gallic War. But she doesn’t seem very happy about it. For the most part, she does an excellent job matching the book’s deadpan register in English. She understands that Caesar’s rhetoric feels so authoritative because it is so matter-of-fact. In her introduction she writes that “[p]ast translations, perhaps under the influence of admiration for Caesar and the Romans more generally, often sound more military, more colorful, more partisan, more serious, and more imperialistic than Caesar himself.” She includes in this indictment the work of her predecessor, H.J. Edwards. Damon takes pains to signal that she does not admire Caesar, or his adventures in colonialism, very much. “Caesar’s Gallic War contributed powerfully to the rhetoric of imperialism,” she writes. “Its tone is famously dispassionate,” which is part of how Caesar “normalized and sanitized” the horrors of subjugation. Damon grudgingly concedes that her opinion on these subjects doesn’t actually have anything to do with her task as a translator, though it’s a near-run thing: “[O]ne might make a case for reproducing Caesar’s rhetoric rather than resisting it. But it’s unsettling work.”

It’s not just that one “might make a case” for reproducing Caesar’s rhetoric. It’s that there’s no defensible case for doing anything else. Reproducing Caesar’s rhetoric is the translator’s whole job. “Resisting it”—i.e., willfully undercutting Caesar’s style to soothe modern anxieties—would be scholarly malpractice of the highest order. Contemporary translators often do indulge in just this sort of editorial intervention (Emily Wilson, celebrity translator of Homer, springs to mind—see “Homer Without Heroes,” Winter 2023/24). But just because it’s common practice doesn’t make it less outrageous that Damon openly contemplates bowdlerizing Caesar in the introduction to his own book.

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Mercifully, she decides against it. Her version is more compact and slightly more affordable, though necessarily less richly annotated, than Kurt A. Raaflaub’s Landmark Julius Caesar (2019). Like Caesar’s Latin, Damon’s English is blunt and unembellished. Sometimes it could be said to veer a little too far in that direction and cross over into the territory of the bland: take for instance Caesar’s quotable aphorisms and asides, which he drops ever so sparingly into the action. “In extreme danger fear generally has no capacity for compassion,” writes Damon, and “Men’s thoughts are most acutely troubled by things that are not present.” I might have suggested “fear knows no compassion” and “things that aren’t happening” for just a little more punch. On the whole, though, Damon’s Loeb reads smoothly and clearly. After making known her objections to the source material, she does the most important thing of all for a translator: she gets out of the way.

So what was the point of announcing her disapproval of Caesar to begin with—especially in such a way as to call her good faith as a translator needlessly into question? Apparently, the current political atmosphere in academia makes it necessary to offer a disclaimer that accurately reproducing Caesar’s language isn’t the same thing as endorsing everything he says or does. That should be obvious, especially since moral certainty about the past is so much less illuminating than amazement and curiosity about it. Of course Caesar did ruthless and shocking things to subdue Gaul and take over Rome. He was and remains an intensely polarizing figure, one whose very name became an imperial title. He was also a world-builder who brought order in places where lawless bloodshed had been reigning for generations. France is a nation today because he declared that Gaul was a whole. If the techniques he used to make it so leave us queasy, how should we feel about the life of subsistence farming and ancestral feuding that so many Gauls lived before him? If we blame Caesar for overthrowing the republic, does that mean we would have preferred for it to spiral ever deeper into civil war?

Perhaps a different man could have found a different way—could have treated the Gauls more gently or saved Rome’s republican government. It’s hard to see how, but anything’s possible when you deal in counterfactuals. When you deal in history, you get the Caesar you get: austere, calculating, magnetic, irresistible. He destroyed the old systems that were crumbling before him; he also laid the groundwork for what would become the nations of Europe. For hundreds of years, the Latin language he helped refine served as the common currency of the civilized world he helped create.

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Today, Latin instruction is falling out of favor in many of the same places where Western nations are falling under fire for their allegedly unmatched sins of conquest and cruelty. In the torrid summer of 2020, after George Floyd’s death, Princeton University’s Classics Department lamented that “[c]lassical antiquity has been used to justify countless morally repellent and harmful ideas and practices.” The next year, it was announced that classics students at Princeton would no longer be required to learn Greek and Latin. The two things are related, as Caesar would surely have recognized. Why go to the painful effort of memorizing all that vocabulary, all those grammatical tables, if they are but instruments of villainy?

Of course, they are much more than that. Language is many things: a way of organizing the world, a vehicle for culture, a tool for thought. To speak and write clearly is to think clearly; to gain mastery of a language is to take ownership of a tradition. To study Caesar’s crisp and carefully honed Latin, as schoolchildren across the West used to do, is to know the mind that did more than almost any other to give our civilization its form. Even despite her disdain for that mind and her ambivalence about that civilization, Cynthia Damon’s translation will serve its purpose well enough. But nothing can replace or diminish the original Caesar. There was not then, and there has never been since, anyone like him.