because his tone is so temperate and seemingly so impartial. An officer
of his staff who was with him during that winter, and who afterwards
added an eighth book to the _Commentaries_ to complete the history of the
Gallic proconsulate, has recorded the ease and swiftness with which the
work was written. Caesar issued it under the unpretending name of
_Commentarii_--"notes"--on the events of his campaigns, which might be
useful as materials for history; but there was no exaggeration in the
splendid compliment paid it a few years later by Cicero, that no one in
his senses would think of recasting a work whose succinct, perspicuous,
and brilliant style--_pura et inlustris brevitas_--has been the model and
the despair of later historians.

The three books of _Commentaries on the Civil War_ show the same merits
in a much less marked degree. They were not published in Caesar's
lifetime, and do not seem to have received from him any close or careful
revision. The literary incompetence of the Caesarian officers into whose
hands they fell after his death, and one or more of whom must be
responsible for their publication, is sufficiently evident from their own
awkward attempts at continuing them in narratives of the Alexandrine,
African, and Spanish campaigns; and whether from the carelessness of the
original editors or from other reasons, the text is in a most deplorable
condition. Yet this is not in itself sufficient to account for many
positive misstatements. Either the editors used a very free hand in
altering the rough manuscript, or--which is not in itself unlikely, and
is borne out by other facts--Caesar's own prodigious memory and
incomparable perspicuity became impaired in those five years of all but
superhuman achievement, when, with the whole weight of the civilised
world on his shoulders, feebly served by second-rate lieutenants and
hampered at every turn by the open or passive opposition of nearly the
whole of the trained governing classes, he conquered four great Roman