Caesar\'s Commentarii: Sulla as counter-model.

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My paper explores whether and to what extent, Sulla's memoirs could have constituted a model for Caesar's Commentarii. The scholarship takes for granted that Sulla's work remains in the background as a precedent of Caesar's Commentarii. At first glance, similarities - such as the title, the length of the account and the content related to a civil conflict - seem to emerge, but the fragmentary survival of Sulla's work does not allow much speculation. Crucial for Caesar might have been rather the idea of engaging and challenging the champion Sulla, as an intellectual dictator who wrote a historia. In a letter to Cicero (Att. 9.7c.1), Caesar explicitly breaks away from Sulla's methods (the proscriptions), referring to a new ratio vincendi, which arguably might have an equivalent to a new ratio scribendi in the literary field.Beyond style and content, one aspect appears to be the most striking sign of similarity and novelty between the two works: the role played by Epicadius in continuing Sulla's account and by Hirtius in completing Caesar's Commentarii. On this note my paper suggests the importance of a Roman entourage, on whom Caesar clearly relied throughout his entire military life, as different from the aristocratic habit of being surrounded by intellectual Greeks, as Sulla was. This practice seems to be genuinely Caesar's creation, and a significant trait of distinction from Sulla.
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