Ch. 4. Caesar’s Talkative Centurions: Anecdotal Speech, Soldierly Fides, and Contemporary History

Abstract

Caesar purports to quote brief utterances by his centurions at dramatic moments in the commentarii, who provide testimony ‘from the ranks’. These speakers demonstrate Caesar’s bond with his men and offer readers in Rome interpretations of contested events that might be indecorous for Caesar to make in his own voice, but which have persuasive power from notionally independent and unrhetorical soldiers. For non-contemporary readers these specifics were inapposite or irrelevant, however, and later writers such as Appian and Plutarch give Caesarian centurions only stock declarations of loyalty. Published in Andrew G. Scott,, ed., Studies in Contemporary Historiography (HISTOS Supplement 15), p. 65-106.