The enemy knew that he was coming by the scarlet cloak which he always wore in action to mark his identity; and when they saw the cavalry squadrons and cohorts following him down the slopes, which were plainly visible from the heights on which they stood, they joined battle. Both sides raised a cheer…
De bello Gallico VII, 88
Caesar’s De bello Gallico, his self-serving memoir devoted to his brilliance in Gaul as he strove to become Rome’s dictator, once gave me nightmares. The Latin tortured me. It was the set book for my O-Level exam in the ’60s. To be fair, for a 15-year-old gripped by archaeology, Caesar’s story was not dull, especially as I then lived in Wiltshire, an English county filled with Iron Age hillforts. It was the minefield posed by the tediously precise conjugation that tripped me up. And, of course, I failed. But I had a benign schoolmaster. He loved archaeology, and nurtured me through the test the second time, at which point I stopped overly thinking declensions and subjunctives, and about Caesar’s extraordinary siege of Alésia in Burgundy.
