Customer Reviews

Caesar Against The Celts

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I had no thought of reading this wonderful little book until I chanced upon the two highly negative reviews below. Despite their somewhat silly attempts at erudition, the authors of those reviews evince a wholly unpleasant snobbery that seems to want to deprive popular audiences of the fun and fascination of the study of classical history and literature. Such, I am convinced, is the mark of the true ignoramus. As a long-time teacher of ancient Greek and Latin, I am all too aware that most students today will never experience the joy of "hearing Caesar's voice" in his native tongue (and that others will never even muddle through a translation). What then is so wrong with a popular account of Caesar's campaigns, particularly such a delightful one as this? As one who has devoted my career (however humble) to promoting classical scholarship, I am proud to recommend this book to both the hobbyists so despised by the reviewer below, and to any newcomers who may be inspired to learn more about the stories and languages of antiquity. Come. Read. Enjoy. And for the Visigoths among us--lighten up, okay?

For those who prefer a color commentary on Caesar's exploits in Gaul, look for "Caesar Against the Celts" by Ramon Jimenez -- a great read on this topic. Not only does Jimenez add character depth to Caesar's accounts, but he brings to light likely points of exhageration and ommission on Caesar's part.

This book also provides a background for The Civil War. I thought I understood the conflict between Pompey and Caesar, but after reading this book, I see their dynamic in a whole new light. Read this book BEFORE you read The Civil War and AFTER you have read The Conquest of Gaul.

The man most know as Julius Caesar left behind a gripping account of his campaigns against the wild men of Europe, the Celts, and their fearsome neighbors, the Germans. The author paints a vivid picture of Caesar's courageous and risky campaign, particularly the startlingly succesful conquest of Britain. The reader is practically treated to a war correspendent's view of a Classical war. The author also provides some juicy tidbits on Caesar's early career, including how he might have earned the alias Queen of Bythnia. Overall, an excellent fleshing out of what was arguably Caesar's greatest achievement, with some much needed "fill in the blanks" of Caesar's personal accounts.

Excellent little introduction to our old friend Julius Caesar, the role model for Napoleon and many another big risk-taker. Much superior to reading Caesar's work itself unless you want to wade through a lot of political self-promotion. Books like this one do a lot to rescue ancient history from the dank cellar of its earlier scholarship.

Caesar and the celts is a book of contradictions for me. It is a pretty good history of Caesar's encounters both in England and Gaul, but for some reason it really didn't ring the chimes.

Maybe it was the pace, but it didn't seem bad, maybe the presentation but it didn't seem choppy. Whatever the reason I kept turning down chances to keep reading it. In fact if my wife hadn't had a stay in the ER that took up a few hours I likely would not have bothered to pick it up and finish it when I did. It just didn't turn the pages for me.

Maybe it was due the sheer reference. When you get to the end of the book the sheer amount of references is amazing. There are more books and articles used as references than their are pages in the book. Perhaps that affected the composition, perhaps not but the end result was that It took me a year to finish it simply because I wasn't interested.

One part that was interesting was the focus on modern attempts to place the locations of Caesar's actions in England and the attempt through history to find them. It added a lot to the book's appeal near the end. I think it would have been better to mix more of that in the story proper.

One other thing worth citing is the respect for ancient sources. I don't have the disdain for them that many others have after all they were a whole lot closer to the action than we are.

I suspect you might enjoy the book more than I did. Maybe I need to read it again to give it another chance, but for now it seems an average telling of an incredible story.

Caesar Against the Celts tells the story of Julius Caesar's rocky career as the military commander in the Roman province of Gaul and the tribal difficulties he encountered - and sometimes created - during the 50s bc. Generally following the track laid down in The Gallic Wars, Ramon Jimenez adds political and social backgrounds to Caesar's compelling account, interpreting them all within the results of modern archaeological and linguistic studies. Because Jimenez is a layman driven primarily by love of the story, the account is as readable as Caesar's own writings, but because he is not carrying Caesar's political baggage - Caesar was writing political tracts as much as he was writing history - Jimenez is able to create an account that is more objective than Caesar's own.

However, as several other reviewers have noted, this is a book by a layman and contains a number of errors and questionable assumptions, which seem to increase the further one gets from Caesar's actions. One example, though by no means the only one or the most serious one, comes from his blowoff treatment of Sir William Flinders-Petrie's studied conclusion - since taken up by a number of other historians - that Tysilio's Chronicle may be the certain 'very ancient book' that Geoffrey of Monmouth translated for Walter of Oxford. While ignoring all of Flinders-Petrie's points in its favor, including the fact that Tysilio comes with Walter's own colophon, Jimenez concludes (pp.234-5), "It has been shown that the earliest-known manuscript of the Brut Tysilio was produced after Geoffrey's Historia, thus it appears the borrowing was in the opposite direction." That simplistic assumption - that the first manuscript we have must be the first created - if applied to Caesar himself would make him a 10th-Century authority. Obviously, it's a bad assumption and not one a trained historian is likely to make.

Caesar Against the Celts is a history told in the grand style of a master story teller, and as such holds the reader's attention while including much that Caesar left out on purpose. But given its peripheral shortcomings, it should be read merely as an entertaining and informative overview of the man and his Gallic campaigns, and not necessarily as a study of Celtic culture in late antiquity.

This book by Ramon Jimenez is limited to Caesar and his campaigns in Gaul which he led under an extraordinary command lasting from 58 B.C. to 50 B.C. Although the book may at first appear to be informative about Roman history and Caesar, it contains too many serious errors and missassumptions to be anything more than a crude guide to military facts that Caesar himself more adequately and eloquently describes to the average reader already! Ramon Jimenez has absolutely no credentials in classical studies, history, or anthropology of any sort. His background is solely as a civil servant in California. Mr. Jimenez didn't even begin to undertake any studies in antiquity until recently in which his inquiries amounted to nothing more than his personal pursuit of a non-chalant hobby. He has neither a Master's or Ph.D. in anything remotedly related to anthropology, archeology, or classical studies. There's also no indication that Mr. Jimenez has any background in Ancient Greek or Latin which would be prerequisites to presenting one's self as any sort of established authority in the field of classical studies. Even disregarding his lack of academic qualifications to present any thesis, dissertation, or even lecture on Roman history, his poor knowledge as to the Late Roman Republic is made plainly obvious by his cursory summaries of Roman society and politics that are nothing but misleading oversimplifications at best. Mr. Jimenez' obvious lack of knowledge results in his work focusing on Julius Caesar far too narrowly giving the reader overly general, if not misleading, information as to the society, culture, and political environment Julius Caesar lived in. Mr. Jimenez' study is essentially in a complete void of in terms of historical context and much of the information he does provide is misleading at best. One cannot understand Julius Caesar without knowing much about the Roman Republic and its agents any more than one could understand Alexander The Great without knowing any significant details about Ancient Greece, Macedonia, and Persia. This book is therefore fundamentally unreliable as an authority on the Roman Republic or even Caesar specifically.

A perfect example of Mr. Jimenez' poor scholarship is his explanation of human sacrifice in antiquity that he makes on page 38, ' 4. He recites multiple examples of ritualistic killings in Celtic culture (that are verifiable based on literary and archeological evidence) and then suggests that even Rome itself was equally barbaric in that it didn't ban human sacrifice until the 1st century B.C.: suggesting the conclusion that Rome either previously tolerated such acts or passed such a ban to prevent Romans from performing human sacrifice. It is obvious here that Mr. Jimenez is ignorant as to the context of this ban because it had nothing to do with preventing human sacrifice by Romans nor was it an indication that Romans previously tolerated human sacrifice. The sources Mr. Jimenez relied on to make this argument could only be derived from the histories of Pliny and Plutarch as to a law that was proposed by Publius Crassus (father of Marcus Licinius Crassus, the triumvir) while Consul and approved by the Senate at the beginning of the 1st century B.C. which he put into execution as governor of Further Spain (Pliny, HN 30.12; Plut. Quaest Rom. 83.) If Mr. Jimenez would have done some simple research, he would have found that this law applied only to Rome's Celtic province of Spain to prevent Celts of that region (Lusitanians/Portuguese in particular) from continuing their rampant practice of human sacrifice. No law was passed before that time because Rome had not yet come into extended contacts with Celtic tribes that extensively practiced human sacrifice (not all Celts practiced human sacrifice.) Even worse is that Mr. Jimenez fails to recognize that Caesar himself in his Commentaries remarked with some perplexity and disgust as to Gallic druids stuffing victims into a wickerman to burn them alive. Mr. Jimenez then compounds his ignorance by stating, "[T]he heads of defeated enemies [were still]...presented to the Emperor Trajan as late as the second century [A.D.]" id. Severed heads of executed tribal chieftains and their retinues after a battle don't meet the parameters of a ritualistic killing which involves clear religious ceremonies or institutions that seek to appease gods or natural forces with human victims (e.g. the Celts, Aztecs or other Meso-American civilizations.) Roman legionaires bringing severed heads of enemies to the emperor isn't human sacrifice, it's simply an exemplary execution and the head is brought as proof of victory to the emperor or displayed to other enemies as a deterrent. Such acts were purely political and military in purpose and had no religious significance: they simply entailed the army showing its victory and allegiance to the emperor or it carrying out a brutal but effective diplomacy in the name of Rome. Although there are perhaps one or two identifiable incidents of actual ritualistic killings to appease the gods in the Early Roman Republic up to the Third Punic War (a span of several centuries!), they were anomalies that were not universally accepted by Roman contemporaries and that occurred in extremely desperate situations. By the time of the Late Republic, all Romans clearly considered the practice of human sacrifice as barbaric in the true sense of the word (i.e. foreign and uncivilized.) What is amusing is that, after citing all of the wrong examples as evidence of ritualistic killings in Rome, Mr. Jimenez fails to address the universally known Roman institution of gladiatorial spectacles that obviously came the closest to human sacrifice: even that however is somewhat debatable as it is a more distinctive category of blood sports which are primarily secular but have quasi-religious overtones as well but I digress and will leave it at that. In sum, as in other parts of his work, Mr. Jimenez here took pieces of information on Roman society out of context because he is plainly ignorant of the context in the first place and, therefore, not qualified to render a scholarly opinion on the subject.

Mr. Jimenez' poor understanding of Roman society and political structures is also evident when he states that freedmen couldn't vote (page 13, ' 3) which is unequivocally false. Unlike other civilizations of the time, Rome had very liberal policies regarding manumission and historical evidence is simply overwhelming in showing that freedmen (libertini) were given political suffrage as they were allocated among the four urban voting blocks (tribes) out of the total 35 voting blocks. The only political difference between freedmen and commoners(plebeians)was that they couldn't hold political offices or official priesthoods. How Mr. Jimenez could have come to an opposite conclusion is simply beyond my comprehension because not even a beginning student of Roman history would make such a blatant mistake. Mr. Jimenez also makes errors as to the types of foods that existed at the time as well as the alimentary regiment for Roman legions. He claims that the common food for Roman legions was lentils and beans on page 128, ' 2. Beans are typically understood as the New World crop variety that didn't come to Europe until more than 1500 years after Julius Caesar. Contrary to Mr. Jimenez' claim, the common diet for the Roman soldier consisted of lentils and corn (generally all edible cereals except for maize which also came from the Americas), not beans. If "beans" were at all included in the military diet, they were restricted to field/string beans: something which Mr. Jimenez fails to specify. Lentils and corn were the staple rations of the Roman legions because they were highly nutritious, light to carry, and not as perishable as other foods such as string or field beans. In these two examples, Mr. Jimenez again demonstrates his ignorance of the underlying culture, institutions, and history of ancient Rome to the detriment of the uninformed reader and historical truth.

These types of incomplete summaries and false facts are rampant throughout the book and clearly indicate the author's lack of knowledge as to his subject. Mr. Jimenez' poor research is indicative of a tunnel-vision approach to only a very limited segment of Roman history that is inevitably dependent on a thourough and broad understanding of the Roman Republic specifically and antiquity in general: an understanding that Mr. Jimenez clearly lacks and results in his painfully evident demonstration of poor scholarship. I have no credentials in classical studies either and even I can see the gross inaccuracies in this work. The difference with me is that I wouldn't be so arrogant as to publish a book claiming to be authoritative when it's based only on loose knowledge I obtained on my spare time as a hobbyist. This book should be shunned as an authoritative text as to anything dealing with Rome: the only thing it's clearly authoritative on is its author's ignorance of the subject matter. Indeed, this book does a gross disservice to all true scholars who have committed years of schooling and dilligent work to the study of antiquity to dispel the very same misconceptions Mr. Jimenez ignorantly propagates as sound research in this poor work. Ignore this pitiful text and read Caesar's Commentaries directly or the work of qualified scholars of classics such as Gruen, Syme, Millar, or others who clearly know what they're writing about before they publish their work.

The author had carefully traced Julius Caesar's war against the Celts in a yearly basis.This book is a useful supplement to the book written by the protaganist himself - 'The Gallic Wars'. As we read through the book, we can see how Caesar managed to subdue the fierce Celts, and unknowingly, managed to postpone the Germanic tribes invasion of Gaul for the next 300 years.

This book chronicles the period in Caesar's life when he conquered Gaul and crossed the english channel into England. It was the largest crossing until world war 2. The book is fast paced and details organization and engineering feats that Caesar's armies performed. In under 300 pages you get a good background of Caesar's years prior to returning to Rome.

Ramon Jimenez brings Caesar and his famous Legions back to life in their campaigns against the Celts and Germans. Ramon uses historical records and archaeology in this fun to read text book. Buy the book. It's a fun to read book.
'Caesar attempting to pass a large river in Britain, Cassoellaunus king of the Britons. obstructed him with many horsemen and chariots. Caesar had in his train a very large elephant, an animal hitherto unseen by the Britons. Having armed him with scales of iron, and put a large tower upon him, and placed therein archers and slingers, he ordered them to enter the stream. The Britons were amazed on beholding a beast till then unseen, and of a extraordinary nature. As to the horses, what need to write of them? Since even among the Greeks, horses fly at seeing an elephant even without harness; but thus towered and armed, and casting darts and slinging, they could not endure even to look upon the sight. The Britons therefore fled with their horses and chariots. Thus the Romans passed the river without molestation, having terrified the enemy by a single animal.'