Caesar’s description of these campaigns in the seven volumes of his Commentaries on the Gallic War, an edited version of his official annual dispatches from the front line sent back to Rome, starts with its famous, clinical opener, ‘Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres’ (‘The whole of Gaul is divided into three parts’). It ranks alongside Xenophon’s description (the Anabasis, or Going Up) of his exploits with a Greek mercenary army, written in the fourth century BCE, as the only detailed eyewitness account of any ancient warfare to survive.
