Speaker 1: On behalf of the Reading Odyssey and Collaborative Gain and Google, to this special presentation of Julius Caesar, one of the greatest works of all time, it's kind of fitting that we're presenting this book at Google and within the entire tech community, which puts such a big emphasis on product experience and user experience and design. These books, I met Bob Strasser, the series editor, 10 years ago when I was a reporter at Forbes. Now I'm in PR, if you will, because it was an amazing story of an entrepreneur, if you will, or someone who had retired and saw a need in the market for essentially a usable classics series. Because the books that everyone was using for almost 100 years, those Penguin editions are dense. There's maybe one map in the beginning with dozens of labels on it, no footnotes, no context. And you're just thrown into it as a student in high school. And obviously, it turns off a lot of people. And they never get back to the classics again, which is a huge loss. So Bob said, wait, I can fix that. So he took his own money and decided to design an edition that had all of that. Every page would be dripping with context. There'd be a place, a time, footnotes, side notes, pictures, maps in context. He did it all by hand, hired a few people out of the academia after getting a lot of rejections from university professors saying, you can't do this. You're an amateur. Well, that's usually the best kinds of people is the passionate amateur. So this series came out, the first edition came out almost 20 years ago, Landmark Thucydides. I caught up with Bob 10 years ago when he was just putting out a second one, Landmark Herodotus. And since then, there's been at least two more. This is the fifth, I think. And it's one of the best-selling classics series of all time. So without further ado, I won't give any much more away, because Bob will tell you the story of how it all began. And we'll hear a lot from the editor of this particular volume, Kurt, who's here as well, professor from Brown, was one of the world's experts on Caesar, to tell you the story behind the book.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Bruce. It's a pleasure to be here today. I'm proposing to spend a little further time on what landmark books are, and to explain why and how they were determined to be the way they are, and how we hope to accomplish certain things with them. And then after that, we'll talk about the challenges to landmark books that were posed by the immense amount of data that is known about Caesar and his world. We were delighted with the amount, and then we were drowned in the amount. And we had to flounder with it a while. We came up, we hope, with an optimum solution. And then if I have time, I'm going to talk about Caesar as a general, illustrate some of his skills, looking at three battles that he undertook. In each, his role is quite different. There are quite different battles. And the third one, he didn't write this narrative. It was written by an unknown author who was clearly an eyewitness, and very likely thought to be an officer in his army at that third battle. I hope we get to all of them, but I'm determined to give Kurt Rafflau, my colleague here, all of his time that he certainly well deserves. So let's talk about the landmark books that occurred to me about 30 years ago when I was doing a little teaching at a place called Simon's Rock of Bard College. And I discovered that my students had difficulty dealing with the histories. They handled Homer. They handled the poetry. They handled the plays, which were often very foreign in content. And they'd come to Herodotus and Thucydides, and you'd think, well, that's duck soup. It reads like a history, which it does, because they set the paradigm of histories. We write the way they wrote history. And I would watch with dismay as, one by one, the eyes of the students would glaze over, and you'd see that they were lost, and they couldn't keep up with it, and didn't know from where this happened and why that happened. And I decided that it was a problem of the two editions that we had for students, Modern Library and Penguin. Those are both very good translations, but in the volume they're simply black pages. As Bruce said, there are no appendices worth a damn. The maps are in the back, the little section, where pretty soon you stop going, because the names on the maps are not spelled the same way as the names in the text. And so you're never sure if this is the right place. And what's more, some of them are modern maps, and the places have moved. And in a lot of ways, they're just less help than harm. And most students, I think, just stop using them, because it's difficult to get to, and they provide little in the way of additional information. And in addition, there are things that go on in the ancient world which puzzled modern readers. Why not? What do modern readers can be expected? What can they be expected to know about a religion that has animal sacrifice? It sounds sort of primitive and brutal and nasty, and certainly foreign. Or the problems, let's say, of a very complex political system like Rome's political system in the last years of the Republic. Or the problems of running a boat with the engine being 175 people rowing it, who need to be fed and slept and all kinds of things every night. So these are difficulties that even the most astute, and I would say well-educated, but not classics-educated, modern reader is going to need help to figure out what's going on. So those gaps in knowledge, those gaps in culture, have to be somehow filled. And we determined to fill them in the landmark books. We have explanatory footnotes. Let me show you this guy here. We'll get to him in a minute. We have explanatory footnotes. We have, for real questions like what is religion in the pagan world, we have an appendix in the back. In this case, not in the back, but on the web, that the reader can go to to get as much information as he wants. We have maps that are clear and that are embedded in the text within a page or two of the relevant sections that they are supporting. So there's no going to the back. We have illustrations also embedded, not to be pretty. As you'll see, I'll show you a few of them, although some of them are pretty. But they're not adornments. They're there to emphasize the historicity of the text. This is not a Tolkien fairy tale. There were no dragons, and there were no flying elephants. These events really happened to people who fought and died and didn't know in the morning what was going to happen, just as you don't know in the morning what's going to happen, particularly. And they suffered and planned and did all the things that you do in their way. And it is a true story. It is real. It's important to impress students with that, because it's all too easy to begin to think of these foreign names and foreign places and strange goings-on. I'll just get a good exam, and I don't have to worry about it too much. That's a mistake. If you lose the sense of historicity, you've lost half of the value of these books. I think that's my personal opinion. In any case, we give all kinds of other supports. As I mentioned, the appendices, we have a glossary, we have a very rich index, and we have a strong introduction to tell you about the writer. Of course, in Caesar's case, it only can partially tell you about the writer, because there's so much you can't put it into an introductory section of a book. But we put as much into it as we can. Whenever we think there's something here that will cause somebody's brow to wrinkle up, what does that mean? We try to fix it with a footnote that explains it, a footnote that tells them where to go. Let me show you a page. You see, it's the text. There are side notes for each chapter, which explain where it took place, when it took place. You'd be amazed at how Penguin and Modern Library don't have dates for a history of a war. And then a little write-up of where it is, because people need to come back to this book and figure out where they were. Because if you've partied all weekend, as students do, or even just had to put it down for two weeks, as people do, you come back and you want to be able to find out where you were before, these things help you. These footnotes are there. You can't read them, unfortunately. Down here, you can see there's a reference to letters to his brother Quintus by Cicero. Quintus was in Caesar's army. And we learn about some of the things that were going on in Caesar's army from the things that Quintus wrote his brother. And particularly, we learn a few dates, because they're dated. Quintus wrote on the 17th of June. And so that helps us to establish the dates. Up here is one of those, a reference to Cantium, which is modern Kent, map 519. Map 519 is right around the corner. And here is a coin from Cantium, minted by a king named Tasciovanus. But we don't know anything about him except his coins. But it's there, again, to emphasize that this is real. He mentions this place. And there's some practical evidence that it exists. Now, I talked about maps. I could show you some other maps that are horrible in the Penguin and the Modern Library. These you can't really see very well. But the purpose is we have a locator map, which shows Italy, Britain, and Gaul. And in the outline is where this is taking place. So you're always oriented. You know where it is. And it shows, in effect, this is a campaign map. Caesar is divided into about 14 campaigns, more or less. And in the beginning of each one, we have a campaign map. And this one, in fact, is his first campaign in 48 BC. He comes running up, A, and you can follow the alphabetic letters, from Cisalpine Gaul, where he has his winter headquarters. B, he massacres the Tigirini crossing the river Arras. And it tells you where in the text you can find this. It says here, this is 4, 26, hard to read. It means it's in chapter 4, section 26. Bibracte, he defeats the Helvetii. Here, he catches up with them and forces their surrender. And now he goes after Ariovistus, the German. And Ariovistus is here. Caesar marches on him, encapsulating a lot, wins a victory, defeats him, and takes his army from F to G back to Byzantium for winter headquarters. That's what you're going to read in the book. And then you go ahead. There are maps within the text of the book supporting what happens in an expanded way so that there's more data, more detail. But you can always refer back to this to find out what was going to happen next or whatever. It's useful to understand. This is an easy one I picked. Some of them get pretty complicated because he tends to run all over Gaul, back and over his path. And in order not to make them look like spaghetti running back and forth, we had to do some particular tricks. And one case in book 7 where there's a great revolt and he spends a lot of time running all over Gaul, we had two campaign maps because there was no other way to show it. Here's another map that we'll explain a little bit. It's very hard for you to see, but here's Rome. Here's the coast of Italy on this map. Here's the upper Adriatic and the Adriatic on the other side. Caesar comes down from Rome and goes to Brundisium, chases Pompey out. And then later, he comes back to Brundisium and he crosses over the Adriatic to Paleste. Now, the telescoping here is to accomplish different scales so that you can show detail. If we put all these places at this scale over here on the Adriatic, it would just be a bunch of dots all together. And you'd have trouble putting the labels on. You'd have trouble reading them. You would not, in effect, have been a part of any real information. So in order to make that clear, we had a third telescope map. This is the square that shows it. And here it is. At least you now know that Puthratum is approximately 80 miles from Apollonia. And you could never meaningfully show that. So that's the kind of thing we do to try to make the maps as clear as possible. There's no extraneous stuff on these maps. It's only the labels that are shown in the text, that are described in the text. We try to keep it as simple as possible. This is a map I really love, and we'll come back to it. It's a campaign, in a way, of its own. Caesar, you won't believe this, but he suffered some serious defeats in the vicinity of Dyrrhachium. Pompey beat him badly, and he caused heavy casualties into his army. And Caesar then withdrew south, skillfully withdrew from Pompey. Pompey chased him, but couldn't catch up with him. And then Pompey turned back and went down the main road, via Egnatia, on his way to meet Scipio, who was Pompeian, and to head for Pharsalus. Caesar went south and had some adventures here with two cities, Gomphi and Metropolis, and ended at Pharsalus. So it ends up with the two of them facing each other at Pharsalus. Caesar offering battle, and Pompey refusing it. One little side thing I should mention. There was a general, a Caesarian general, with two veteran legions, which would have been very important to Caesar, who didn't know anything about that defeat. Caesar's attempts to reach him with a curry didn't get through. And he's marching up the Via Egnatia when his scouts inform him. And there's an interesting way they do, but they're Gauls, and they run into their brother Gauls, who are scouting for Pompey. And they find out he's four hours march away from Pompey, coming down the Via Egnatia with nine legions. He has two. So that's shown how abruptly he gets out of there. And he goes south and meets Caesar at Aegeanum and on into Pharsalus. So I think it's an engagement map. And all of these notes down here, with some of which you can see, explain what's going on in the A, B, C, Ds, and Es. But here's a picture of what the Via Egnatia looks like today, a section of it. So Pompey might have been there. Domitius might have been there. Well, Pompey certainly was there. He went the whole way. So this is a way of explaining a very complex maneuver of two armies that Caesar's description is difficult to go, because it's going back, meanwhile, back at the south. And so it goes back and forth. And it takes some real analysis to figure out what's going on. Believe me, that map helps a lot. Now, here's an illustration that I think, in fact, is quite beautiful. It shows a slinger. He's not a Roman, probably, probably a Gaul, or certainly somebody in Italy, an Italian who's not Roman. Very possibly, slingers came from Numidia or from Crete. So he could be one of these. And he's about to throw. And he's surrounded with others. This one's just going to throw with his hand. And he's got his weapons there, his ammunition. And over here, it goes on to show somebody firing a scorpion. And that's the ammunition lined up for a scorpion, which is a small catapult. That's a pretty picture. This next one gives you verisimilitude and the historicity. These are two wire containers, scaled by the gentleman there. They're at Uxuladunum, the last battle that Caesar fought in Gaul. And they contain literally thousands of sling stones that were gathered from the battlefield, which is not a big area. Believe me, it wasn't as big as the campus here. And piled up just to see how many there were. And one wasn't enough. They had to get another container. And I don't think it's been counted, but there are thousands of them. And it indicates the scale of how this ammunition was used, even in what was a relatively small battle in a fairly confined space, part of a siege. So if you see this, you know that that's not a fairy tale. There they are. They were the stones that people were throwing at each other. So before I go on with this, I want to talk about the fact that the format of the landmark series ran into a tremendous amount of data about Caesar. There are five extant, ancient, contemporary, or almost contemporary sources, historians, whose work we have. And they wrote about Caesar. And there's just about nobody else in the ancient world that we have that much material on. Plus, you have all kinds of letters from Cicero to his brother, to Atticus, to various people. There are letters from Cicero to Caesar, and letters from Caesar back to Cicero. And so there's not a lot, but some. So that, again, they must be real people. They say, how is your daughter doing? I understand she was sick. Well, that's personal. And it makes it clear that these were people talking to each other and not some historic document. But we learn lots of things about Caesar from it. Cicero's letters often have gossip. Oh, I heard Caesar was at some Lutetia on the 17th. He's supposed to have suffered a bad defeat, which we know is not true. But that's what Cicero, that's the misinformation that Cicero had at that day. And those kind of things really help us to understand and see a continuity of what was happening and what it looked like in Rome. Because Cicero stayed in Rome, or at least at home, in Arpinum during all this time. This is to show you, well, I'm not going to get to this yet. Let me go back again. We had so much data, we did not know how to put it together. I knew, as Kurt came up with more and more ideas for appendices, that we were running over what we would have. I assumed, frankly, as the series editor, that we'd find a way to reduce the size, as we had done in previous editions. And so another problem is, as you're doing one of these books, you don't know how many pages you've accrued. Your 8 by 11 typescript does not at all represent how many pages you have. So it wasn't until we finished, and we had it paginated by the genius lady, Kim Llewellyn, who makes these pages work and be attractive, even. And being attractive is not trivial for a book that you want to lay readers to delve into and find, useful and interesting. So in order to have it paginated, she worked hard on it, and we came out with 1,350 to 1,400 pages. Now, a trade book, I don't have one here. I was sure one would be here. But a trade book is about this thick, and so many. About 950 to 1,000 pages is all it can accommodate. So I went to the publisher, and I said, can we do a second volume? And he said, absolutely not. And I think he's right. You're not going to get two volumes bought, which one is only essays about Caesar. So we had to come up with another solution. To make it long story short, we went to the web. It's the only place we could go. It was a brilliant solution, but the only solution possible. So some 40 appendices, now called web essays, are still an integral part of the book. You still have a footnote there that says, see, web essay L for stuff about Lucius so-and-so. And you can go to it with a few finger flicks, or you can take down the appendices and download them yourself to your own computer, or you can take them down to a disk, or you can print them out. So they're all very accessible to you, and they're even accessible to people who don't read our book and don't buy it, because it's on the web, and we're not going to try to code it and make it difficult. It's fine if they get it. Our goal is to, we're hoping if somebody does that, they'll end up buying the book, because they'll want to know where these things came from. But basically, what we have here is almost 30% of the book is not printed. It's not in the book, because of the printed medium's limitations. We couldn't get in one volume all of the material, and I was reluctant to really cut it hard, because once I read them all with that intention, they were extremely good essays. As a body, they formed a terrific amount of supplementary material for somebody who's interested in learning about Caesar and his time. And Caesar's time was one of those interesting moments. A 500-year government is breaking down, breaking apart. When we started, we didn't think there was any relevance to that to our modern day. But right now, there are people who suspect that the American government is in a situation where norms are being stretched, and things don't look like the way they did 10 or 20 years ago. And it's conceivable that, in fact, this is the part of a process that's going to end with a major change in the government. I don't know, but there are parallel items, stretches of the norms in Caesar, and going on today. So let's now turn to the maps and the battlefields. I know you can't see where it is. It's in the central, northeast of Paris. Paris is about here somewhere. And up here on the Sambre River is where Caesar has a major battle with the Nervii tribe, a major Belgian, Belgi, it's called, Gallic tribe. And it's the only instance I know of where he's taken by surprise. He's informed that the Nervii and their allies are here. He comes up here to build a camp. Everybody pitches in to build the camp, when suddenly, out of the nearby woods come the Atrabatis, the Viromandui, and the Nervii. And he writes about it, says, they came down the hill across the river and up the hill so fast it was like it all happened at once. And his Latin is probably much swifter than that. And the next part of his writing, it's an absolute, maybe one of the best, if not the best, description of an ancient battle. Because he describes what he had to do. He gives tribute to the soldiers that they didn't, if they weren't by their own unit, they fell in line in nearby units because their training was good. Some of them had no time to put their helmets on. They couldn't take the, the shields were carried in a shield cover. They couldn't take the covers off. And so they're really under assault suddenly and without preparation. And they're surprised. And they could have been overwhelmed. But being Roman soldiers, they fall into line and they start the battle. He goes to the 10th Legion, which is his favorite, and starts, as he says, and he gives them a pep talk and sends them across the river. The 11th and 8th Legion deal with, I'll show you the next slide, deal with the Viromandui. But the crisis forms here on the Roman right, where the 7th and 12th Legion are overwhelmed and almost encircled by the Nervii. Here's the 9th and 10th having defeated the Atrebates. The 11th and 8th have stabilized and held off the Viromandui. But the Nervii are getting around the 7th and threatening the 12th and entering even the half-built Roman camp. And normally, if you enter the enemy's camp, you win the battle, because the enemy soldiers don't want to stand by and watch all their belongings and their slaves or their women or their servants and their private stuff get taken away. And they go running off the line to protect that. That wouldn't be the total case here, partly because Romans were very disciplined and partly because the camp not being completed probably didn't have all of those accoutrements in it. But there still was a chance. Caesar says, when he got there, he saw men clumping together, which is a very bad thing for the kind of warfare it is. You have to have space for people to use their weapons. He saw some of them wavering and beginning to head to the rear. He saw confusion. And so many of the officers killed that there was actually a lack in some of the units of direction. And so he only did this twice, I think. He grabs a shield from a soldier. And probably with his red cloak, he's very, that's a general's cloak, he's very visible. He runs up to the front line. And he calls on the centurions, who are the sergeants of the era. And he calls them by name to come and give direction and put the lines together. And I figured out that there were eight legions in his army. And there are 60 centurions in each legion. And so we can assume he had 480 to 500 centurions, which he knew by name. And I think I read somewhere that he had a fabulous memory for things like that. And here's a case where he used that to good effect as a general. In the end, he put the 12th Legion behind the 7th. He moved it, slid it over, faced it around so it was facing this way, which was stopping the encirclement and at least protected the 7th from the rear. Labienus was on the hill here, the general of the 10th Legion. And he saw what was happening. And he sent the 10th Legion all across the battlefield here, which went to the flank of the Nervii. And these two, which were green recruit legions, had been used only to accompany the baggage. Their appearance on the scene was enough to give the Nervii pause because they were there in the flank and the rear. So basically, the battle was stabilized. The Romans, when they got a stabilized battle, they could fight the Germans and the Gauls to a finish because they had a better means of replacement and better weapons and better tactics. And so it ended up with just butchery. Caesar does say that the Nervii just kept coming. They would climb now the rampart that the dead bodies of their compatriots formed and be fighting from above with until they were killed. And then new ones stepped up until the day was over and most of them were dead. So he ends that their reputation for valor was justified. OK, that's one battle which shows him operating in an emergency. You've got to remember, this is his second year of his campaigning. He doesn't have the seven years where these guys, where he's a successful general. He's made them all rich. They're completely devoted to him. He had to really show what he could do here in order to save this situation. His main opponent was a former military genius, a Roman one, named Pompey. And here the two of them are. And as I mentioned before, at Dyrrachium, Pompey defeated Caesar rather handily. Caesar made an error here, two of them. He left open a part of a fortification, which he should have closed. He didn't blame himself, but he should have blamed himself. And then he saw an opportunity for a counterattack, which was risky. And he sent his men into it. And they got lost in the terrain. They had not really reconnoitered it well enough. And they broke down some walls, holes in walls, so they could get through. And when Pompey counterattacked and they needed to retreat, those holes in the walls became choke points. And so many of their casualties were being trampled as others fled. The cavalry also tried to get back through them. It was a disaster. And right away, Caesar had to break the siege. I think here's that map again. Caesar went sound south, avoided Pompey's pursuit, and then they went on their ways to Pharsalus. And I mentioned at Pharsalus, for a few days there, we don't know how many days, Caesar would offer battle and Pompey wouldn't accept it. Pompey knew that his troops would not stand up to Caesar's, even though Pompey had twice as many. He had Roman recruits and Greek recruits. And Caesar had real veterans who'd been through eight, nine years of heavy warfare. So Pompey didn't want to fight. But his men misjudged the nature of their victory at Dyrrhachium. They thought they had won it by how much? Zero. OK, quickly, they thought they had won it with great skill and Caesar was finished. And so they wanted the battle. Pompey accepted it with a special plan that he was going to use his cavalry, which he had 7,000 to about 1,000 of Caesar's, to overwhelm Caesar's cavalry and attack the Caesar in the rear. Caesar's counter plan was to bring a fourth line up by calling on cohorts from his third line. And that worked just right. They attacked Pompey's cavalry from the flank. They threw them out. And then they, that is the fourth line, walked past Pompey's flank and attacked the rear. Caesar sent his third line in and Pompey's troops broke. And it was a major victory. Here, I just say he's a major tactician. He foresaw what was going to happen. He organized his troops to successful counter. His role was just to set it in motion and watch what happened, at least as he describes it. And it happened pretty much according to his plan. But I want to show you one last picture. It's a map. I don't know if you can see it. Down here is Egypt. Up there is northeastern Turkey. Here's Thessaly, where Pharsalus was. Here's the Adriatic. Here's Italy. Here's Africa, Spain, and Gaul. Caesar fought battles everywhere. In his 14 years, he was a general whose chessboard was the entire Mediterranean. And I leave you with that thought and this image. And I turn it over to my colleague, Professor Rafflaub. Thank you. I'll get to you right now.

Speaker 3: Good afternoon. I'm Kurt Rafflaub. I'm the editor of this work. But I want to start. I will build on Bob's presentation. But before I start, I want to just say that this volume is really the result of teamwork, of very rare and high-quality teamwork. Bob has assembled a group of very devoted specialists. And he himself has shown throughout the process an incredible commitment to producing this volume. I spent lots of time on it. But he spent nearly as much time on it, spending hours and hours talking with the cartographers, designing the maps himself. I corrected them, sent them back. He sent them back. And when we both were convinced this is what it is, he went to his freelance cartographers, who then produced these beautiful maps. And the negotiations behind this, I just know that they happened. But then illustrations and everything else. And these specialists are high-quality people who are really committed to producing these volumes. So I could not have done anything like this on my own. And I'm very grateful to Bob and his team that they showed this commitment and produced this, which I think, a very useful volume. I thought I would start by showing you the difficulties. Bob talked about the difficulties that the Cesar posed. He wrote his what was called Commentarii, which is a report on these Gallic wars, on his own wars. But he had literary ambitions. And he didn't want to write a general's report. Generals give dates and distances and routes and so on. Historians don't. And Cesar knew Thucydides very well. And so he knew that historians don't go into these details. They show the big outlines and the dramatic episodes and so on. And that's what Cesar wanted to do. So for us modern scholars, to reconstruct the way that Cesar fought this war in Gaul, based on his very limited information that he gives in this respect, was sometimes quite difficult. And I want to illustrate this for you with two episodes, both the landings in Britain, in 55 and in 54. In 55, he tells us that he landed three days before a full moon night. During that night, a storm combined with a spring tide heavily damaged the anchored fleet. Now, we know, because scientists have calculated this and we know the dates of full moons and new moons and equinoxes back to Cesar's time and farther back. So we know that full moon nights in the late summer of 55 were three, July 31, August 30, and September 28. And Cesar tells us he returned to the mainland before the equinox, the fall equinox, which was on September 26. So the date for the full moon of September 28 is too late. If we add up, as we did, all the time Cesar must have consumed for his trips before he came to the start-off point for the expedition to Britain, you don't see the ocean lines. This is very unfortunate, but that's what it is. Here, Porto Sittio's modern Boulogne-sur-Mer. And here is Cesar's departure for Britain. Before he arrived there, he did various things, crossing Gaul from west to east and back. And so it's just barely enough time for him to reach the departure point and to get to Britain. So we can say that the July 31 date is absolutely too early. It cannot have been that. That leaves one date, and that is August 27, the full moon and the spring tide of that date, which helps us state precisely when Cesar actually landed in Britain. Now, the second case of the landing in 54 is more interesting and more complicated. Cesar writes, he sets sail around sunset. He's carried by a southwest wind. Around midnight, the wind stops. The current drives him far to the east. You see that on the map with the arrow there. And then around dawn, he sees far to the left the coast of Britain. And then the current changes and carries him back. And when he uses the roads and he finds the landing beach and is able to land. The second night after his landing, there is another huge storm. And that, again, damages his fleet very heavily. The whole army works for 10 days to repair as many of the ships as possible. So that's what Cesar tells us himself. Scholars naturally connect this storm with a full moon as it was in the previous year. I don't think this could be because Cesar knew that full moons are dangerous. And so he would have taken special precautions. But anyway, that's what scholars tend to do. Now, Bob mentioned the correspondence between the subcommander, the deputy commander, Quintus Cicero, who was a legate subcommander in Cesar's army at the time, and his brother, the famous orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tully in early American language, in Rome. From this correspondence, we can derive with absolute certainty that August 2nd or 3rd in the Roman calendar system was the latest possible date for Cesar's landing in Britain. Hence, the full moon of August 14th is too late. But there was a new moon on the night of July 30, 31st. And we know that new moon and full moon are equally likely to produce spring tides, so on. So now, the pattern that Cesar describes for what happened to him when he crossed over, studying these patterns over a long period of time, have found applies only to the days shortly before a full moon or a new moon. So here is what they sent us. We wrote to the National Oceanographic Institute in Liverpool and found an interested person who sent us these illustrations. And you see that exactly what Cesar describes happens in these schemes, current to the Northeast, current to the Southwest, after 5 AM. And this is Cesar. So we know it had to be just before a full moon or a new moon. And so that helps us, because Cesar says two days before this, he landed. Must have been July 29th. And again, if we add all the activities of Cesar before then, it couldn't have been an earlier date. So that helps us. And this is actually completely new, with certainty to date the second landing on the 29th of July. Right? Yes. So now, Cesar is a fascinating personality. He came from a family that was very old, went back to the beginnings of Rome, or even to the goddess Venus, as ancestors of the family. It had lost much of its luster over time. There were no famous immediate ancestors to Cesar. But he belonged to the highest aristocracy, and he took that very seriously. He had his aunt was the wife of the famous war hero, Gaius Marius. And Gaius Marius was a populist politician in Rome. In the 80s, there were civil wars between, you may have heard the name of Sulla and Marius. And Sulla was a very conservative right-wing politician, who, when he was in power, ordered Cesar to divorce his wife, who was the daughter of the heir of Marius. And Cesar refused, putting himself into a very dangerous situation. He survived it. But this prompted him to become, really, a convinced populist against this entrenched aristocracy in the Senate that were the heirs of Sulla. And he was also a very ambitious man. He was a gambler. He loved to play at high stakes. And he was always in debt, and had to be bailed out even before he could leave for an earlier provincial command by the richest man in Rome, Marcus Crassus. And all that combined to make a lot of enemies. The entrenched aristocracy didn't like Cesar. And so they put all the obstacles in his way that they could. And he knew that he would not secure an election to the consulship, the highest office, unless he had powerful allies. And so he formed this triple alliance with Pompey, mentioned before, and Crassus, who both had their reasons to be at the odds with the Senate. And they secured Cesar's consulship. He did favors to them. And they did the favor that they secured for him a big provincial command in Gaul. Because in the meantime, earlier, Pompey had done great conquests in the east, fighting the famous Mithridates, and had added provinces and territories to the Roman Empire. He had raised the bar. If one wanted to be the greatest Roman, one had to be better than Pompey. And Cesar was extremely ambitious. And he, therefore, secured these commands, and then hoped that there would be an opportunity to create a war and start a war. And the Helvetians, in the first year, gave him the opportunity. And out of this developed this entire war, which he then described, not only in his reports to the Senate, but in these elaborated commentaries, reports that we now have and can read. And they give us so many insights into how a leading Roman of the time perceived his role, perceived the role of the army, the role of a general, as Bob described it, the role of a leader. And I just put in a few possible focuses one could talk about in this context, the perfect Roman, the perfect general, which is very important for Roman cultural history. He was an extremely talented author, as we shall see in a moment, I hope. And at the end, I would just like to briefly talk about what is the dark side of this whole story, namely the brutality of imperial conquest, the masses of losses that it caused in Gaul. And balance this by looking at Cesar as the clement victor, because Cesar was very innovative in this way as well. So I will see how far I get with all this. This is Cesar, the organizer and improviser. Imagine for a moment that this is a war that is fought in an unknown country. Cesar didn't know where he was going. He didn't have maps. There were no maps. And there was no developed good road network. So Cesar had to balance this shortcoming by building up an extensive network of intelligence, questioning all kinds of people about where he was going and where the goals were that he was aiming at, highly developed system of logistics, bringing the supplies for an increasing number of legions, tens of thousands of soldiers who needed to be fed and supported with boots and so on, reliance on a group of favored allies who helped him with difficulties that he might have in these supplies, storage, increasing number of hostages that were given by the defeated peoples. And that needed to be somewhere. Cesar couldn't take them all along on his campaigns. So he relied on some of these allies to take care of these hostages. He needed to be extremely versatile in mastering the challenges of naval and siege warfare, engineering. I'll show you an example in a moment. And in short, his inventiveness was called for, circumspection, his ability to think outside the box of finding solutions that were unusual, understanding the conditions under which his army fought, both from the enemy's side and from his own side. Cesar, for example, never led his army into a fight before he knew that they were rested enough and they had eaten before they went into battle. One of his subcommanders at some point ignored these elementary rules and promptly suffered very bad defeat. Using even deception, systematically and frequently, but always based on the psychological assessment of the enemy, how far he could go, how he could trick them. And he did that as much as he could. But let me show you here another aspect we tend to forget, namely that Cesar's army was on its own. And he needed the specialists in his army, the engineers, who would train the soldiers to do the works. So they knew what they had to do. The engineers provided the blueprint. This is going to be a bridge with 20 feet long timber crossing the Rhine in 54. A bridge built across the Rhine 400 meters wide and 12 feet deep on average in 10 days, once the lumber started to come in. A major achievement, and Cesar tells about it very proudly because he was aware that he had accomplished something very extraordinary here. Or the ability to improvise and surprise the enemy, his famous speed. The speed is one of the most frequent words that he uses, his caleritas. And as an example, I give you here his effort to get back to his army when the big rebellion of 52, led by Werzingatorix, had broken out. He came to the province here in the south. Here is the province. And he had to get up here where his legions were in winter quarters. And this was all enemy infested rebellious territory. And the enemy was convinced that Cesar couldn't reach his legions because they were in control of the territory. So what Cesar did was he started a diversionary attack across a mountain range, the Sevennes Mountains, in winter. There were 10 feet high walls of snow and ice. And his army cut through and made a path for him. He led a part of his army into the territory of the Arverni, which was the tribe, the nation, of his enemy leader, general. And he started to devastate the country. The Werzingatorix was operating up here. He was called back by his people to defend his own country. Cesar then himself went back to the Rhone Valley, joined a cavalry escort that was well-rested here, and then in four days and nights dashed up to meet his legions and reunite his army before the enemy even knew what was going on. That is an example of his inventiveness, of his speed, of his ability to surprise and reach success. Here, another aspect I want to bring out, which is his leadership. It's not the same as his generalship. His ability to bond with his soldiers, to create an army that was in deep loyalty tied to him and of which he could expect total effort, but he had to create this bond. And he was extremely good in doing that. During a very difficult siege at Avaricum, in winter, where the food supply was interrupted because the enemy was using a scorched earth strategy, Cesar offered to his soldiers to give up. If this is too hard for you, let's go. We can do it. Try something else. And the soldiers said, no. We never give up. We never gave up. We never betray you. So let's finish this up. But showing this compassion, even sleeping out with his soldiers on guard during the night so that they knew he was part of the enterprise and he was not somewhere in a warm bunker, but he was right there where the action was taking place. This is a hypothetical reconstruction on the left of these siege works at Avaricum, an 80-foot high siege ramp, a tower, and covered galleries. And on the right, I just showed you the Masada with whether the Roman siege ramp is still visible here. And so that is also a very steep ramp on which a tower was then moved up so it could shoot across the wall and defeat the enemies. You see the Roman camps here and here. And there's one down here as well. So this gives us an idea of what was going on in Avaricum. Just very briefly, other aspects of leadership. Bob mentioned this, exposing himself to danger, taking the shield, rushing to the front, encouraging his soldiers. And through his presence, giving courage to the soldiers who always, in the presence of the general, tried to excel and show, and of course, hope for rewards. But this was very crucial to stabilize the situation and actually, as I say, steal victory out of the jaws of defeat. Then other aspects, caring for his soldiers' lives. These are often, several times at least, forfeited a certain victory or an easy victory because he wanted to avoid the losses this would cause to his soldiers. He was very generous in rewarding outstanding performances of soldiers and officers. He shared the hardships. He was able to build up a very deep sense of loyalty. He says at some point during the Civil War when two officers, Gallic officers, deserted to the enemy, that this was the first time ever that this has happened. While constantly, there was a flow of deserters from the enemy to his camp in all his campaigns. And he gives us an example of an officer who was captured and who was offered his life and monetary rewards if he fought against Caesar with his enemies. And he not only refused to do that, but he offered the commander of the enemy an opportunity to see what the enemy was he was fighting against. He said, give me 10 men of my own, and I will fight against the whole company of your troops. And you will see against whom you are fighting. And then, of course, he was immediately executed. But the story is told by one of his officers as an example of this loyalty. And then my favorite episode. Caesar was impatient. He departed for the African War in 46 before his army had completely assembled. And then there was a storm, and his whole flotilla was dispersed. He arrived with just a few couple of thousand soldiers and a few hundred cavalry. And for two days, the others didn't show up. So he put soldiers on ships in the harbor and waited during the night. He didn't tell his soldiers what he had in mind, because he knew that there was communication across the front, and he didn't want his plan to be betrayed. And then the soldiers were very despondent. They knew there were few. They were inexperienced. They were new recruits, and so on. And this is what this author writes. It's, again, the officer that writes this, not Caesar himself. These soldiers sitting on the ships could not find any kind of comfort in their present circumstance. All they could do was look to their general's face, which was full of heartiness and unbelievably good spirits. His courage was like a standard. He carried straight up high, right in front of him. This calmed down the men. And trusting his expertise and planning, they all hoped that everything would turn out well for them. Imagine, this is the way that they saw their general, these soldiers. That's part of the secret of Caesar's success. Now, I'm not going to talk about this. Caesar was also a very talented author and intellectual of the highest rank. He could hold his own in discussions with philosophers. And he was one of the great orators. He only gave speeches at the beginning of his career, but these made such an impression that Cicero said he was ranking among the highest, the best orators that Rome ever had. He was an expert in style. He wrote his historical works, his commentaries, with the intention that anybody could read them, uneducated, educated persons. And so he created a very simple, straightforward, clear style that conveyed clearly what he wanted to convey. And he wrote the work on good style, good Latin style. And he dictated this work while he was traveling on horseback across the Alps to rejoin his army. Very unusual. And then, of course, he also wrote these commentaries, and they were praised very highly. I only give you the second quote by Hirtius, who wrote the eighth book of the Gallic War. The universal judgment is that other writers, despite their painstaking efforts, have produced nothing that is not outdone by the refined elegance of Caesar's commentaries. They have been received with unanimous approval. Yet we may feel greater admiration than all others, for they know how well and faultlessly he wrote, while we also know with what ease and speed he completed the work. So these are the intellectual. Let me just, for the end, turn briefly to what I call the dark side. Of course, this conquest of Gaul caused enormous losses. Here you have the tally, the casualty count. 1 million Celts dead, 1 million enslaved. This is what ancient authors tell us. Out of the population of 8 to 12 million, reasonable estimates, 1 fourth to 1 sixth of the total population died in these conquests. In his triumph, in his great victory celebration of 46, Caesar listed the total number of casualties, enemy casualties, in his battles, not just in Gaul, but all over the place, 1,192,000. These are staggering figures. And if you read Caesar's story, when enemy swore an oath of capitulation and then broke the oath and started to fight again, punishment was absolutely brutal, either execution or enslavement. This is from Trajan's column, where you see a scene like that. The Gallic War is beautifully illustrated by this spiral column in Rome, which is, of course, almost 200 years later. But the army didn't change much in the meantime. And it, therefore, gives us a good idea. And I just give you two examples of where the label of genocide that has sometimes been used for Caesar actually would apply. One is a campaign in 55, where Caesar massacred two German nations that had crossed over into Gaul, and that he distrusted deeply. He wanted them out. And since they didn't react quickly enough, he just massacred children, women, everybody. And he gives the number as 430,000, probably vastly exaggerated. But still, this was a campaign of elimination. And that is very bad. And then there was one enemy leader, a leader of a Gallic nation. His name was Ambiorix. He had been a friend of Caesar's. He had served in his army. And then he attacked one of his winter camps and tricked Caesar's subcommanders into leaving the camp, and then ambushed and annihilated one and a half legions. And Caesar pursued this man with deep hatred after that. And not only the man himself, but his nation. And it was his goal to eradicate this nation, so that if Ambiorix ever came back to his nation, he would not find anybody whom he could rely on. That was a campaign of revenge and eradication that is, again, quite radical. On the other hand, there's a balance to this. Caesar is, to my knowledge, the first, perhaps the only, ancient general who made clemency his watchword, who declared it to be his goal and his default action. And did it whenever he could. If an enemy capitulated before fighting broke out, they could expect to suffer no harm. And I give you two quotes from the Gallic War. He said to a tribe named the Atuatoki, he would spare their nation more because it was his habit than because they deserved it, if they surrendered before the battering ram touched their wall. And in the last year of the war, in Uxelodunum, which was mentioned by Bob, he had to set an example because he wanted this constant rebelling to stop. He knew his command was coming to an end. He wanted to leave a pacified and quiet country. And so he punished, when they capitulated, he punished the defenders, the men who had been fighting, by cutting off their hands, letting them leave, but cutting off their hands. And he writes, Caesar was aware that his merciful disposition was known to everyone. And he did not need to be afraid that if he acted more harshly than usual, it would be ascribed to his cruel character. But then in the civil war, both Pompey and Caesar were expected to behave like Sulla had, with relentless persecution of their opponents. And after his first victory, when a large number of elite Romans fell into his hands, he let them sensationally go unharmed. And that brought a big turn in public opinion. And in a letter that was disseminated throughout Italy, and Cicero has a copy, and in his letters we can read that copy, he made this programmatic statement to two of his supporters. I'm glad that you approve of what happened at Corfinium. That's the place. I had already decided on a policy to demonstrate as much leniency as possible. Let's try whether in this way we can regain the goodwill of all people and achieve lasting victory, because others have not been able by cruelty to escape hatred and to hold on to victory for any length of time, except only for Sulla, whom I'm not going to imitate. Let this be our new way of conquering, to protect ourselves by mercy and generosity. I find this one of the very impressive statements in history. In an earlier episode in the civil war, Caesar had trapped an enemy army, had immobilized them, and his own army was sensing easy victory and demanding the command to attack, and Caesar refused. And he writes, he had come to hope that he could finish this business without a battle and without exposing any of his men to injury. Why, he thought, should he risk losing some of his men, even in a successful battle? Why should he accept that soldiers who had served him with supreme loyalty would be wounded? He was also moved by pity for his fellow citizens on the other side, who he knew would have to be killed. He preferred to achieve his objective while they were safe and unharmed. And so he forced them to capitulate by starving them out. So the idea, the propagation of clemency as a general's and ruler's cardinal virtue is Caesar's merit. And Augustus was the first who, after the victory in the civil wars, was given by the Senate a golden shield inscribed by what became the four cardinal virtues, virtue, clemency, justice, and piety. And we have the inscription. We have copies of it. We have it illustrated on coins. So Augustus was the first to actually express these cardinal virtues. But they go back to Caesar's initiative. And I think that is worth recording and mentioning, because that also helps to balance that dark picture which I drew earlier. Thank you very much. Thank you.