ental and partisan treatise cast in the form of a military
report is itself a piece of history like the bulletins of Napoleon,
but it is not, and was not intended to be, a historical work
in the true sense of the word; the objective form which the narrative
assumes is that of the magistrate, not that of the historian.
But in this modest character the work is masterly and finished,
more than any other in all Roman literature. The narrative
is always terse and never scanty, always simple and never careless,
always of transparent vividness and never strained or affected.
The language is completely pure from archaisms and from vulgarisms--
the type of the modern -urbanitas-. In the Books concerning
the Civil War we seem to feel that the author had desired to avoid war
and could not avoid it, and perhaps also that in Caesar's soul,
as in every other, the period of hope was a purer and fresher one
than that of fulfilment; but over the treatise on the Gallic war
there is diffused a bright serenity, a simple charm, which are
no less unique in literature than Caesar is in history.

Correspondence

Of a kindred nature were the letters interchanged between the statesmen
and literati of this period, which were carefully collected
and published in the following epoch; such as the correspondence
of Caesar himself, of Cicero, Calvus and others. They can still less
be numbered among strictly literary performances; but this literature
of correspondence was a rich store-house for historical
as for all other research, and the most faithful mirror of an epoch
in which so much of the worth of past times and so much spirit,
cleverness, and talent were evaporated and dissipated in trifling.

News-Sheet

A journalist literature in the modern sense was never formed in Rome;
literary warfare continued to be confined to the writing
of pamphlets and, along with this, to the custom generally diffused
at that time of annotating the notices destined for the public
in places of resort with the pencil or the pen. On the other hand
subordinate persons were employed to note down the events
of the day and news of the city for the absent men of quality;
and Caesar as early as his first consulship took fitting measures
for the immediate publication of an extract from the transactions
of the senate. From the private journals of those Roman penny-a-liners
and these official current reports there arose a sort of news-sheet
for the capital (-acta diu