Wednesday, February 6, 2008

I need some ideas of texts Julius Caesar would keep. So far I've thought of a superstition list and a poem about Rome but I need more.

Luckily, a great deal of information has been preserved about Roman education in general and Julius Caesar in particular. This means that rather than simply speculating about Caesar's reading habits, you can actually research them.


The first thing to note is that much of Roman education in Caesar's period was based on a Greek, rather than native Roman, cultural tradition. Upper class Romans were bilingual in Greek and Latin, and Roman schools taught the Greek classics.


The foundation of Roman schooling for the upper classes was the study of the seven liberal arts, grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, music, astronomy, geometry, and arithmetic. Literature was studied under the area of "grammar", and normally included the Alexandrian canon of Greek literature, namely the Homeric and Hesiodic epics, the three tragic playwrights, Greek comedy, and such poets as Pindar. The ten Attic orators, most particularly Demosthenes, were the center of rhetorical education, and would have been studied by Caesar. As well as Greek literature, Caesar would have read the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence, and the Greek historians Thucydides, Herodotus, and Polybius.


Caesar corresponded with Cicero, the greatest of Roman orators, and despite their fraught relationship, would probably have owned some of his orations. As well, he would have maintained extensive records of his own correspondence and letters written to him. 

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