Was Caesar a Crook?

Generations of boredom with the Latin and Greek classics have resulted in their virtual disappearance from the U.S. curriculum. Gilbert Highet, Anthon professor of Latin at Columbia University and a popular author (The Classical Tradition, The Art of Teaching) as well as a classical scholar, thinks that dull and stylized teaching is responsible for the students' indifference. This week, talking to the New York Classical Club, Highet explained his criticism. Teaching classics as "perfect books by perfect men," he said, "[will] make them inhuman and impossible for the young."

Julius Caesar's Commentaries, the primer of classical scholarship, said Highet, is a case in point. "I happen to think that Caesar is a crook and a traitor.* The reason I think so is that he trained a personal army in order to assassinate democracy in his own country. His book is full of evasions and alterations of facts. It's really a propaganda document, but most students are given the impression that Caesar was merely setting down the facts."

Cicero could be considered "a conniving lawyer" as well as a great statesman: "Many of his works represent professional law at its very highest. But it's rather unfair to ask a professional lawyer to present the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because that isn't what he is supposed to do . . ." Homer suffers equally from misrepresentation. "He's really very witty," said Highet, "but has he been taught that way? He's always presented straight-faced."

Concluded Highet: "I want us to teach that even these 'classic' men were subject to human conflicts and pressures. I don't want to debunk them . . . I don't believe in the late-'20s school of showing Jefferson as a bungling dilettante, or Washington as an ignorant country squire. That's all nonsense. These were all great men, greater than you or I. But I want to keep them from being statues. That's what they've become from bad teaching."

* Caesar's contemporaries often used even stronger language. In I, Claudius, Author Robert Graves reproduces the mood, if not the exact language of a song Caesar's legions sang returning from Gaul: "Home we bring the bald whoremonger;/Romans, lock your wives away."

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