The “historiographic turn” brought sweeping changes to the study of ancient historical writing in the 1970s and ’80s, but scholars only extended this new approach to Caesar’s works in the late 1990s. Over the past two decades, however—since Kathryn Welch and Anton Powell published their Julius Caesar as Artful Reporter in 1998—scholars have rediscovered and reimagined Caesar, not only as a politician and general, but also as a crafty author, orator, and scholar. Using narratological, intertextual, and semantic tools, recent studies have sought to reveal the literary complexity of the Bellum Gallicum and the Bellum Civile beneath the unadorned prose style.

As is usually the case with the Cambridge Companions, this volume offers a tour of these new approaches and suggests directions for further research. It largely succeeds in its aim. The reader comes away with a sense of the potential benefits of applying a variety of literary lenses to Caesar’s full surviving historical works (Part I and II). In addition, the collection details his activities as a littérateur in other genres (Part III) and his position in literary history (Part IV).