Pure Well of Latin Undefiled

PURE WELL OF LATIN UNDEFILED WILLIAM HARDY ALEXANDER IN a recent article in this QUARTERLY,! while discussing the cIassi- , cal authors read by Montaigne, I ventured at one point to express myself as follows in connection with the great essayist's _ profound respect for Caesar: . It is not wi thout interest that ,so understanding a critic of Roman literature as Mackail should likewise have felt, as some othe.t:s of us are not ashamed to feel, that Julius Caesar_stands side by side in Latin prose with Lucretius in poetry as exhibiting at the peak what the Latin language could achieve by itself, without richness and beauty gathered from -alien sources; the appreciation of Caesar's Bellum Gal/hum is the appreciatio!,! of latine loqui on the prose side. A subsequent reviewer of my article, Professor Gilbert Norwood, quem honoris causa nomino, speaks of it, as arousing his «wrathful amazement with a sudden paean in praise of Caesar's' 'style''';2 the reference must be to the quotation above. This drives me back to consider once again what I actually said about Caesar's writing, -and also leads me to enquire what it may have been that excited in my reviewer indignation and surprise. Beyond that I should like to set out as dispassionately as I can, without any paeans, my reasons' for rega~ding Julins Caesar as quite unique on his litera~y side. It would seem from Professor Norwood's phrase that his wrathful amazement was provoked by the suggestion that Caesar has style. As I shall presently show, however, that is no't what I said about him, but 1 should not have been at all -ashamed to have sug- .gested it. There is,' after all, a certain satisfaction and sense of security in erring with Plato, and if I attribute style to Caesar, I derive the ,most respectable authority for doing so, from antiquity itself. 'Cicero's comments 'in the Brutus3 should suffice to convince us that Cicero -regarded Caesar as the greatest of contemporaneous Latin' orators-next to himself, and Cicero would never have awarded even second place to a styleless performer ,in a field whiCh he had himself so conspicuouslyadorned.4 Quintilian too ,in his lXI, October, 1941, 84. 2.XI, April, 1942, 329. -liThe whole passage from 248 to 261 inclusive abounds in almost unqualified praise of Caesar for possessing all diose' things that go to make style in oratory. 4The late Professor Sihler thought, however, that Cicero was at the time under pretty heavy obligation to Caesar and stepped up his praise accordingly. See his Annals of CaeJar (New York, 1911),263-4. . 415 ; \ 416 THE UNIVERS1TY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY i Education, of the Orator,"" after commenting 'on Caesar's ,practical success in oratory as measured by the getting of result~, adds very 'significantly: "but 'all these (achievements) of his are'graced with a marvellous power of selectivity in vocabulary, t{) which he ,devoted much thought." Now in any worth-while style the choice of 'the mot justc ranks high. It is improbable that Tacitus is just idly repeati~g a current opinion when he writes of Caesar as a rnatc~ for 'the best orators of his time,S and Suetonius must have had plenty of authority for saying that "after his prosecution of Dolabell,a he \~ was 'unquestionably numbered among the leading legal orators, of his day."7 The ancients evidently thought that in oratory Caesar had style. ' , ' If, however, it is urged that it would be sounder to discu'ss Caesar's possession of style in a branch of literature in which we, have a fair amount of his actual material availabl~ whereon to form a judgment of our own, I feel bound to ask on what basis it is proposed to measp.re'style." Is it to be regarded as fair that we should return to pass judgment on the ancients by employing modern ideas of style? Let no one be in haste to concur in that view unless ..,he is willing to have some of his personal idols banged uncer~;noni~usly , abput; there are highly sensitive and soundly educated moderns who regard Aeschylus as a pompous...