Just finished reading this worldwide famous tale of Gaul’s conquest by Romans. The book I have features the original Latin text and also a translation in Italian. I’ve been told it’s a very easy Latin the one used, but as I do not know Latin at all I had to rely on the translation.
Julius Caesar himself wrote (in the third person) Commentarii De Bello Gallico, and as I have a passion for history I found it very intriguing.
The story is set between 58 B.C. and 51 B.C., with military campaigns and political affairs developing, season after season (war was made mainly in summer, but with some peculiar exception). A huge amount of people died in this war (a figure of one million has been estimated by many historians just for the “barbarian” faction), and many other suffered terrible injuries. Nevertheless history can fascinate you (and fascinates me) in following the description of the different “barbarian” Peoples (some of them described for the very first time in writing), the chain of conditions and events that made soldiers and civilians move from one place to another, the tricks and technical skills of Julius Caesar and his army.
The conquest determined a direct Roman influence on central Europe for four centuries. The Latin character of nowadays France and its later history is there to remind us of a very persistent effect.
History does have numbers and dates that are important, but its real essence is in cause/effect mechanisms, in getting to understand why and how something happened. Remembering how many horses or the exact day of a battle is definitely immaterial. That’s how my History teachers at school made me love it, many years ago.
