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Gaertner ( J.F. ) , Hausburg ( B.C. ) Caesar and the Bellum Alexandrinum. An Analysis of Style, Narrative Technique, and the Reception of Greek Historiography . (Hypomnemata 192.) Pp. 372, maps. Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht , 2013. Cased, [euro]89.99. ISBN: 978-3-525-25300-7 .
Reviews
Despite the value of the pseudo-Caesarian Bella as evidence for the development of Latin prose in the mid-first century b.c., these texts have received little recent critical attention. This book constitutes a welcome exception to the trend. The approach taken is analytic, and the principal theses defended are as follows: the Bellum Alexandrinum is a heterogeneous work, different parts of which were written by different authors; the individual responsible for stitching together and supplementing its various parts was Aulus Hirtius; the diction, style, narrative technique and historiographical character of paragraphs 1-21 enable those paragraphs both to be clearly distinguished from the rest of the work and to be attributed to the hand of Caesar himself (as the latter part of the novissimus imperfectus commentarius mentioned by Hirtius in the Epistula ad Balbum).
As the authors acknowledge, neither the heterogeneity thesis nor the attribution of paragraphs 1-21 to Caesar are new; both were first put forward as early as 1888 (by G. Landgraf), and both have since found further supporters. The novelty of G. and H.'s contribution to the debate is twofold: first, the linguistic and stylistic evidence is expanded (see especially pp. 55-72), and presented with a clarity and a level of detail that has not previously been matched (see also Appendices E-J); second, the authors have succeeded in incorporating new historiographical and narratological considerations into the analysis (see pp. 74-154). As a result, this book constitutes the most convincing demonstration to date of the Bellum Alexandrinum's...