Laudator Temporis Acti

Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), "Classics Revisited—XXXII: Julius Caesar," Saturday Review (July 30, 1966), p. 23:

Caesar was one of the most completely competent writers in all literature. It is impossible to doubt his meaning, if we have an ordinary grasp of the Latin language, but his style is nervous, full of surprises and deliberately odd. His syntax on the page looks like speech, but like Ernest Hemingway's, it is not talk that can be uttered. It is as formal, with its own special formulas, as that of Racine or Pope, who are also supposed to have written simply. Reading Julius Caesar, if you read Latin and have never read him as a child (a most unlikely contingency), is like riding a high-spirited horse, who for all his nerves is always completely under control. There is no prose just like his in any language, so it is hardly pablum for schoolchildren, or a "Basic Latin" introduction to Roman literature.

[....]

On every page of The Gallic War the simple, unambiguous nouns and verbs carom off each other like billiard balls. There are few adjectives and they serve mostly to fix the nouns in place. The adverbs are all active — they aim the verbs. Prose which exhibits so high a level of irritability, in the physiological sense, usually lacks unity of effect, subordination of parts to the whole — but not Caesar's. The rapid and complex movement of simple elements deploys on the page exactly as the battles it describes.

[....]

The worst thing about using Caesar as a textbook is that he is the last author in the world to be parsed and construed and read a page a day. He should be read as he wrote, at great speed. The Gallic War can be got through in two quiet evenings with port, biscuits, and a thick slice of Caerphilly, and that is the way it should be done. The Civil War can easily be read in a night.

On Caerphilly see the article by Hunter Fike in The Oxford Companion to Cheese (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 104-105.

Hat tip: Jim O'Donnell.

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