Commentarii de bello gallico
by Julius Caesar · first published 1838
20% recommend77% neutral3% critical
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Yes! I recall reading "Commentaries on the Gallic Wars" (Commentarii de Bello Gallico) in Julius Caesar's original Latin in high school and being thrilled to be able to actually understand his account nearly 2000 years after he wrote it. 56 years after encountering it in Miss Shaw's Latin…
on “The Odyssey – Alexander Pope translation (1725)” ↗Commentarii de Bello Gallico by Julius Caesar By far my favorite example of any individual human's mental (and often physical) toughness. There's a thousand examples where he displayed herculean mental strength in the face over…
on “Ask HN: Which are some of the best books on Mental Toughness?” ↗I've read Caesar's Gallic War (Commentarii de Bello Gallico) and Civil War (Commentarii de Bello Civili) probably ~300 times but I don't have an exact count. They're relatively short texts. I've re-read them non-stop for ~20 years any time I don't have something…
on “Ask HN: Which book have you re-read the most times? how many times?” ↗…politics. As long as you pay notice to fact that they are mostly recording either hearsay, or propaganda, you should be fine. In that course I would recommend Twelve Caesars by Suetonius (hearsay) and Commentarii de Bello Gallico by Caesar (propaganda). It's not always true, but it gives you a good idea of how they were thinking, what was their morality like and their values.
on “The Life of a Lawyer in the Late Roman Republic” ↗De Bello Gallico is much more intimidating than it is difficult. Caesar wrote using pretty simple language. Once you learn the main geographic and military terms it's a fun read!
on “Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?” ↗In no particular order: What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness 1984 Farenheit 541 Foundation (all saga) The Hobbit The Lord of the Rings (all saga) The Prince De Bello Gallico and Other Commentaries The Design of Everyday Things The Riverworld (an entire saga of 5 books) On the Good Life Treatises on Friendship and Old Age Asimov On Numbers Asimov on Chemistry The Roman…
on “Ask HN: Which books changed your life?” ↗…tries to impart are solid gold. It's a very rare and very useful look into the mind of one of the most famous people in history. Try to search for a good translation though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentarii_de_Bello_Gallico
on “Everything I know about elite America I learned from Fresh Prince and West Wing” ↗…Renaissance writers were writing in a foreign language, their native language was grammatically closer to yours, and the result is that their Latin is incredibly straightforward. In contrast, Caesar's De Bello Gallico is known for the clarity of the prose, but it is nevertheless infinitely more complex (for a modern reader), because Caesar was writing in his own native tongue.
on “Today is Esperanto Day – here’s why I learned it” ↗If you actually read the de bello gallico you would have a quite different opinion. Julius Caesar avoided battle and military confrontation as much as he could and usually the armies he had available for his campaigns were a fraction of the size…
on “Julius Caesar battlefield unearthed in southern Netherlands” ↗It's quite probable that Caesar exaggerated the German menace to justify the invasion of Gaul. Interestingly, it's never very clear in De Bello Gallico what's the difference between Germans and Celts, but that the Celts can be civilized, and the Germans can not.
on “The Battle That Created Germany” ↗On the other hand, according to Julius Caesar in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico [1]: [The Germani] do not pay much attention to agriculture, and a large portion of their food consists in milk, cheese, and flesh. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_peoples#Collision_wit...
on “The History of Greco-Roman Vegetarianism (2010)” ↗…Latin. It is common for Caesar’s Gallic War to be assigned early on, but students working through it with the support of a tailor-made glossary and commentary is not a particularly impressive achievement. De bello gallico (like Xenophon’s Anabasis in Greek) is assigned precisely because it is an extremely easy text, and it is not very representative of Latin literature in general. If your school expected you to read Livy,…
on “Finland’s weekly news show in Latin cancelled after run of 30 years” ↗…How have you dealt with this so far? The world has not changed. (Maybe our awareness of it has.) Immorality and deflection is and old problem in philosophy. The oldest Caesar's shameless propaganda in de Bello Gallico. I think there are different ways to tackle this. The first one is to accept the inability of people to take responsibility as part of the worlds we live in. Accept the issue as human nature, just like…
on “Ask HN: How do you deal with the human ability to never take responsibility” ↗> Before that media was written text and everyone knows anyone can make up anything they want in that domain. From what I gather, Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico was pretty much fanfiction (had somebody write?) about himself. This problem may be older than I thought.
on “India ruling party's IT cell used AI to show smile on arrested protesters' faces” ↗Much of my writing style comes from Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico ;)
on “Loving Latin at the End of the World” ↗