Creating Roman identity : Caesar’s Bello Gallico and the enfranchisement of Cisalpine Gaul

Abstract

The political nature of Caesar’s Bello Gallico is a well–recognised aspect of the text and the purposes behind its production, especially when understood in the context of elite competition and the resulting concentration of power within the hands of a few ‘big men’ during the first century BCE. This is a perfectly convincing way of understanding some of the political motives that Caesar would have had in producing and distributing the account of his campaigns in Gaul, and I do not wish to challenge this notion here. Rather, I seek in this paper to propose a different angle of approach to the politics of Caesar’s Bello Gallico, thinking specifically about how it may relate to the creation or reinforcement of a sense of Roman identity in Cisalpine Gaul, a province where the process of enfranchisement had begun only a few decades before Caesar launched his intervention against the Helvetii. [excerpt]