How accurate is quantitative evidence included in Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico?
Upvote:0
I agree that most quantitative measures in the commentaries are right on the money. The exception would probably be the size of enemy armies and the casualties inflicted, as there is a more or less universal inflating of these numbers in all historical works, ancient and modern.
Upvote:6
I, like many historians, consider Caesar's histories to be accurate and objective. In fact, Caesar is, like Thucydides, considered to be an author who set a new standard for historical accuracy for writers coming after him. The reasons I consider his accounts to be accurate:
There are no cases I know of where some fact in his histories has been shown to be false by other reliable evidence.
There are many instances where his facts have been corroborated by other evidence.
His claims, as far as I have read, are self-consistent.
There are, to my knowledge, no significant complaints among Roman writers about the accuracy of his writings.
Since Caesar became imperator everything that he wrote was heavily scrutinized by critics of different types in Greece and Italy. These writers would have access to competing accounts of Caesar's compaigns and it is very possible that had Caesar falsified information it would have come out, yet it is hard to find any instance of this happening.
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