Laudator Temporis Acti

John Jay Chapman (1862-1933), Memories and Milestones (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1915), p. 118:

Caesar's Commentaries is the dullest book in Latin. It is like making a road to read it. It is not a book; it is a stone-crushing machine. The teacher, a two-dollar-a-day man, stands beside the machine and runs it. And this is the Classics.

Thanks to Eric Thomson for drawing my attention to a more sympathetic perspective in Christopher B. Krebs, "A Style of Choice," chapter 8 of Luca Grillo and Christopher B. Krebs (edd.), The Cambridge Companion to the Writings of Julius Caesar (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017) pp. 110-129 (at 129, footnotes omitted):

Whatever its specific immediate effect, Caesar's neat, formulaic, and seductively simple Latinity surely contributed to his elevation to classic status (obtained in the Renaissance, not since relinquished). But, just as surely, it alone cannot account for the fascination engendered in intellectuals as diverse in interests, epochs, and cultures as Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Johann Gottfried Herder. At least as important was a simplicity of a different (and more troubling) kind, effected by his rhetoric of stringency: it transforms disorderly realities on far-flung western-European grounds and largest-scale sanguinary mayhem inflicted and suffered by the hundreds of thousands into seemingly rational and ineluctable moves in a game of wits on the board of Gallia omnis. In so removing the war from the contingencies of the “there and then,” it elevates it to a timeless tale of superior power, as told in the third person by an Olympian observer by the name of Caesar, whose formulaic narrative, in plot as well as language, generates a beguiling sense of familiarity. And, to turn to the final aspect of Caesar’s classic, the rational swiftness of the writing appears but a mirror of the forceful swiftness of the warring: Caesar’s narrative "march[es] along, orderly as a legion." [F. E. Adcock Caesar as Man of Letters 1956:71]. The same mind, it seems, imposes order on the fields of battle and the accounts of battle; its style is its image.

Related post: Incurably Tedious Authors.