His disciplined application of a terse, bracing style is both readable and simulates something of the experience of the original audience. “No one has come close to capturing Caesar’s verbal celerity in anything like the way James O’Donnell has. As James O’Donnell so strikingly puts it, ‘as you put down this volume, you have become Caesar.' " -Steven Saylor, author of The Throne of Caesar The introduction and notes provide rich context, penetrating insight, and grim wit, making clear that Caesar aims not merely to inform but to seduce. "This book invites us to rethink Caesar’s war commentaries not as epic history or grand adventure, but as highly political presentations.
In replicating the economy and sweep of Caesar’s narrative, O’Donnell’s version wins hands down.” -James M. James O’Donnell’s version of The War for Gaul is much more successful than others in rendering Caesar’s taut, forceful prose in English. “Most translations of Caesar give the impression that his style is weighty, ponderous, and, frankly, boring, but nothing could be further from the truth. While letting Caesar tell his battle stories in his own way, distinguished classicist James O’Donnell also fills in the rest of the story in a substantial introduction and notes that together explain why Gaul is the “best bad man’s book ever written”-a great book in which a genuinely bad person offers a bald-faced, amoral description of just how bad he has been.Ĭomplete with a chronology, a map of Gaul, suggestions for further reading, and an index, this feature-rich edition captures the forceful austerity of a troubling yet magnificent classic-a book that, as O’Donnell says, “gets war exactly right and morals exactly wrong.” This remarkable new translation of Caesar’s famous but underappreciated War for Gaul captures, like never before in English, the gripping and powerfully concise style of the future emperor’s dispatches from the front lines in what are today France, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. Could such a campaign autobiography ever be a great work of literature-perhaps even one of the greatest? It would be easy to think not, but such a book exists-and it helped transform Julius Caesar from a politician on the make into the Caesar of legend. Imagine a book about an unnecessary war written by the ruthless general of an occupying army-a vivid and dramatic propaganda piece that forces the reader to identify with the conquerors and that is designed, like the war itself, to fuel the limitless political ambitions of the author.
A new translation that captures the gripping power of one of the greatest war stories ever told-Julius Caesar’s pitiless account of his brutal campaign to conquer Gaul
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