Gallic war

What Hacker News says

1. BalgairOct 2020
   To be fair, Cesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War is masterclass writing and well worth the read. The way that he writes to three audiences at once is superb and the lessons he 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

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2. staunchJul 2018
   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 else I'm excited to read. I discovered them as a teenager but still find them fascinating. I find new things to think about every time I read them.

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3. fslothOct 2014
   Not only that but sometimes the works that have been preserved the best are obvious political tools. E.g. Julius Cesar's "The Gallic war".

   Which, since we are on the topic, I absolutely must suggest as a reading for anyone who has the slightest interest in historical fact - or fiction - for that matter. Yes, the work is political boast about the campaign - but it is filled with juicy details on roman logistics, political action in the region, and so on.

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4. pjungwirOct 2013
   For more "generalship as management," you can read another classic, Caesar's Gallic War. One caveat: a lot of modern Classics scholarship would rather take this less as an example of great generalship and more as an example of great propaganda. But either way it's a treatise on how to command, containing if not quite the unvarnished truth, at least Caesar's opinions of what good management/generalship ought to look like, as well as several anti-models.
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5. JuniperMesosAug 2026
   I checked out the page on Caesar's The Gallic War and looked at its famous opening line "Gallia est omnis diuisa in partes tres , quarum unam incolunt Belgae , aliam Aquitani , tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae , nostra Galli appellantur".

   Apart from the UI around the word parsing pop-up being kind of buggy (it doesn't close readily, the scroll position seems to get saved differently depending on the word), I'm pretty sure there's an analytical error in that sentence.

   The word "nostra" is glossed as Nom Plur Neut; that is, the possessive adjective "noster", "ours", in its nominative plural neuter form. "Nostra", with a short final -a, is indeed the nominative plural neuter form of that possessive adjective. However in that sentence, the word is being used as an ablative singular feminine, with a long final -â (which is unmarked because the text as they present it doesn't seem to mark vowel length at all).

   archive.org has this (https://archive.org/details/caesarscommentar07caes/page/n11/...) 1918 out-of-copyright literal word-by-word translation of the text, which does mark vowel length, and you can see that the translator words the last clause as "the third, (those) who in (the) language of themselves are called Celtae, in ours, Gauls". nostrâ is modifying an implied linguâ there, which is a singular feminine noun in the ablative case, so nostrâ has to inflect to agree with it - nostrâ [linguâ] translates to "in ours [our language]".

   My Latin is self-taught and mediocre at best, but even I was able to spot that error. And The Gallic War is a very famous text that is routinely taught fairly early on in traditional Latin education - a lot of students of Latin over the centuries have read that exact line of Caesar's. The fact that the LatinCy neural language model for Latin, which the site claims performed the analysis, screwed this up doesn't leave me very confident about the quality of the grammatical analysis in more difficult corners of Latin grammar.

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6. nickservMay 2025
   A translation is absolutely under copyright. It is a creative process after all.

   This means a book can be in public domain for the original text, because it's very old, but not the translation because it's newer.

   For example Julius Caesar's "Gallic War" in the original latin is clearly not subject to copyright, but a recent English translation will be.

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