SOURCE: “XPDNC / Writing Caesar,” in Classical Antiquity, Vol. 15, No. 2, October, 1996, pp. 261-88.

In the following essay, Henderson explores how the act of writing helped to create the image of Caesar that he wanted to project of himself.

Whereupon Henderson rose, in his place, to speak his motion (surrexit sententiae suae loco dicendae). And moved (pro sententia sua hoc censuit):¹

that: Caesar's Caesar tells, undecidably, of a peace-keeping war² which didn't have to be, yet had to be, fought over the “self-regard” the world owed him and his Caesar self (dignitas)—“not status for Caesar but something approaching self-respect” (his apologist might aver) “and knowledge of his actual worth and the offices it entitled him to seek, meaning more to him than life itself.”³ From the horse's mouth, what a Caesar is worth, is.

—that: the monological, even monomaniacal, myth of Caesar's writing puts De Bello Ciuili in denial...