Tag: Reviews

Julius Caesar’s 2,000 Year Old Tale Of Bravery

With the fighting at its height, Pullo cried: “Why do you hesitate, Vorenus? What better opportunity to prove your courage? Today shall decide between us.”

As surprising as it may sound, Julius Caesar’s firsthand account of conquering Gaul (what is now modern day France) is a thrilling read. 1

Caesar captures not just the cunning strategies he devised for conquering the Gallic tribes, but describes moments of individual heroism among his troops — and those of his enemies, to be fair.

The huge majority of Roman citizens entered military service; while for some this was no doubt due to a calling for soldiery, for most this was out of a fear of social sanction. In those times, one’s career would rarely progress far without having demonstrated courage on the field of battle.

Caesar’s relish as he relates the minutiae of war indicates how warrior-ship and selfless bravery were considered essential qualities of a Roman citizen. That he glosses over the reality of suffering makes his work an early piece of political propaganda, no doubt convenient for fuelling support for his war in the Roman senate back home.

It is 54 B.C.E. An encamped legion of six-thousand Roman soldiers are surrounded and besieged by the Nervii, a fearsome tribe of Gauls who have learned tactics from the Romans themselves and built a rampart ten feet high and a trench fifteen feet wide about the entire Roman camp, preventing entry or exit.

Caesar’s Account

On the seventh day of the siege a great gale sprang up, and the Gauls began slinging moulded bullets of red-hot clay and hurling incendiary darts at the huts in the camp, which, as is usual in Gaul, were thatched. The huts quickly caught fire, and the strong wind spread the flames throughout the camp. The enemy raised a loud cheer, as if victory were now a certainty …

[But] the Roman soldiers showed the greatest courage and coolness. They were surrounded by scorching heat and pelted with a hail of missiles, and they knew that their baggage and everything they possessed was being burned … the Gauls were crowded in a tightly packed mass at the very foot of the Roman fortifications.

In the legion were two very brave centurions named Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus, both of them nearly qualified for the first grade. They were always disputing which was the better soldier, and every year the competition for promotion set them quarrelling. When the fighting at the entrenchment was at its height, Pullo cried: “Why hesitate, Vorenus? What better opportunity do you want to prove your courage? Today shall decide between us.”

With these words he advanced outside the fortification, and rushed in to the thickest place he could see in the enemy’s line. This brought Vorenus too over the rampart, hastening after his rival for fear of what everyone would think if he lagged behind. Pullo stopped a short way from the Gauls, hurled his spear, and transfixed one of them who was running forward from the ranks. The man fainted from the wound, and his comrades covered him with their shields, at the same time showering missiles upon Pullo and preventing him from advancing further. His shield was pierced by a javelin, which stuck in his sword-belt; and as the blow knocked his scabbard out of place, he could not get his hand quickly to his sword when he tried to draw it, and was surrounded by the enemy while unable to defend himself.

Image shows a reproduction of a page from Caesar’s work. Dated 1469 AD. Unknown Illustrator [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

His rival Vorenus ran up to rescue him in his distress, and all the Gauls immediately left Pullo, who they thought mortally wounded by the javelin, and turned upon Vorenus. Vorenus drew his sword, and fighting hand to hand killed one of his assailants and drove the rest back a little; but pressing on too eagerly he stumbled down a steep slope and fell. It was now his turn to be surrounded.

But Pullo came to his aid; both of them escaped unhurt, and after killing a number of the enemy returned to camp covered with glory. Thus Fortune played with them in their struggle for pre-eminence: bitter rivals though they were, each helped and saved the other, so that it could not be decided which was more deserving of the prize of valour.

Who knew that Caesar was not only a military genius, a cunning politician and orator but also a gifted author?

  1. I have the Penguin Classics 1951 translation from the Latin, now out of print, but you can get the 1983 edition at Amazon↩

Thoughts on Leonard Cohen’s A Thousand Kisses Deep

My paternal grandparents promised to love and cherish one another until death.

Confined to sex
We pressed against
The limits of the sea
I saw there were
No oceans left
For scavengers like me
I made it to
The forward deck
I blessed the rambling fleet
And then consented
To be wrecked
A thousand kisses deep
from A Thousand Kisses Deep by Leonard Cohen

I hope they took the spirit of the full vow, because after fifty years my grandfather passed away, leaving Grandma alone.

The phrase “until death us do part” is one of the few times in Christian ritual where death is acknowledged without recourse to eternity. There is no talk of being reunited in Heaven. And although there was plenty of that at Granddad’s funeral, I hope that Grandma was beyond wanting a gauzy veil by the time he left. I don’t picture her holding Geoffrey in her mind as as an angel reborn, but as the frail, vulnerable man overtaken by death as we all are due to be.

These days we know the certainty of death, and yet a cultural imperative has arisen to say “forever”. Walt Disney and the pop music industry have a lot to answer for in my book, because we can only ever mean “for now”.

We sail beyond sight of land to the deep, blue water, with only memory as a compass, and we swim together for a while … and then we sink into our own death or we drift apart. Neither outcome need be so shocking, except we were raised with modern images of “happily ever after”.1 It’s self-indulgent and dishonest.

Granddad’s final dissolution, premature as it could only ever be, was in the eyes of pop music a betrayal. His death was, of course, an abandonment. But it was also a tender illustration of the humanity that we all loved about him in life.

Thankfully the 20th Century also gave us Leonard Cohen, poet and mystic.

I loved you when you opened
Like a lily to the heat
You see, I’m just another snowman
Standing in the rain and sleet
Who loved you with his frozen love
His second hand physique
With all he is and all he was
A thousand kisses deep

I hear their voices in the wine
That sometimes did me seek
The band is playing Auld Lang Syne
But the heart will not retreat
There’s no forsaking what you love
No existential leap
As witnessed here in time and blood
A thousand kisses deep

He rethrones contradiction as the very heart of love; he tenderises adoration’s inevitable betrayal. Rejecting smugness, he edifies the paradox of giving ourselves to a person, to love, to duty, and to the world, knowing that one day it must all be lost beyond the horizon. In doing so, he restores love to its true grandeur, beyond the sickly packaging of a Broadway song and expresses the fatal human yearning to both experience all of life and yet to escape its ending.

And now he has led the way in death, as he did in life.

In Memoriam
Leonard Cohen
1934 — 2016
~ you win a while and then it’s done, your little winning streak ~

Note: The poetic content of A Thousand Kisses Deep has changed numerous times. This video differs from the one on the album.

  1. Authentic Russian and European fairy tales end with “happily until their deaths” or “and they lived long and happily”.↩