There is a fun article at the Times Literary Supplement on a biography of Vercingetorix:
Don’t despair! Are you aiming to write a “serious†300-page biography of someone about whom we basically know nothing – Wat Tyler, Nefertiti, or Pontius Pilate? Easy: it is all just a matter of careful manipulation of narrative past tenses. When you have genuine evidence for something, you can use the passé simple (and a footnote): “After his defeat at Alesia, Vercingetorix threw his arms down at Caesar’s feet (Caesar, Gallic Wars VII 89.4)â€. When the evidence gives out, but there is space for legitimate speculation and analogy, you can use the passé spéculatif: “Caesar may well have required Vercingetorix to pass beneath a yoke of spears, the standard Roman military ritual for humiliating defeated enemiesâ€.
If anything the author of the article overstates the historicity of Vercingetorix. The only primary sources testifying to his existence are Gallic Wars and a few coins. It is even possible that the author of Gallic Wars only knowledge of Vercingetorix was through the coins. The earliest extant manuscript of Caesar’s Gallic Wars is from the 9th century, nearly a millennium after the events it allegedly describes. My own opinion is that the text we have was what it has always been, a text for schoolboys learning to read Latin.
But it doesn’t stop there. The evidence that Jesus of Nazareth lived is an order of magnitude better than the evidence that Julius Caesar lived. Choosing to believe in Julius Caesar but disbelieve in Jesus of Nazareth is a religious choice not an historical one. So much more so for believing in Vercingetorix. It is part of the civil religion of the French. Any biography would necessarily be in an eccentric style.
One of the reasons (though not the most important) I decided not to pursue my Ph.D. was the documentary fetishism that dominates the Academy. “If it was written down it must be true” was a near-ubiquitous attitude. One professor would actually argue that we could understand the meanings of words by studying copies of copies of dictionaries on the assumption that everybody strictly adhered to those books in a time when almost no one could read. Raising that concern got me demoted to a B+ in the class.
If someone forged The Gallic Wars they would have to forge a great many other Latin and Greek texts as well as possess incredible archeological knowledge of battle-sites found that seem to correspond with the forged text.
Or, alternatively, the text we have might be a gloss on an older text now lost.
Also note that those other Latin and Greek texts you mention mostly exist in 12th century manuscripts and in most cases just one or two of them.
That’s entirely possible. But archeologists have found and dated sites that seem to correspond to the text we have. For someone to have invented ‘Caesar’ out of thin air requires an inventing a host of other texts–it’s like a conspiracy out of an Umberto Eco novel that relates to almost incontrovertible physical evidence. It would be an incredible achievement to create this Roman past that didn’t exist, all for inflicting Latin on schoolchildren.
Archaeologists have found and dated sites that seem to correspond to all sorts of Biblical and mythical figures. We just don’t really know that much about the past prior to about 1500.
Additionally, there may have been all sorts of important individuals, events, and even entire cultures about which we know nothing. More is being learned all of the time.
My point is that existing texts don’t necessarily provide a good guide to the past. We just don’t know.
In the particular case of Vercingetorix we have no real idea as to whether he ever existed or not. The sole source is Caesar’s Gallic Wars and a few coins and, even assuming that the Gallic Wars was actually written by Julius Caesar and actually was written in the 1st century BCE it is not necessarily a portrayal of true events in every detail. “Vercingetorix” might just be a personification of unnamed Gaulish leaders. Again, we don’t really know. The actual record is extremely slim.
There are hundreds or even thousands of manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible dating to considerably older than the oldest manuscript of the Gallic Wars. Do they depict real history or not? We don’t really know.
Hmmm. I’m trying to recall when monasteries and manuscript copying got rolling, and memory says it was 700 AD or so (there were Christian hermits before then memory says, who often dwelt in proximity to each other, but they weren’t what we’d call monks). So the notion that a copy of the Gallic Wars which dates to the 800’s, “nearly a thousand years” after Julius Caesar’s death, might be a fabrication isn’t especially strong — that’s about as soon as we might expect copyists to get around to old Roman documents.
As for the thought that “Vercingetorix†might just be a personification of unnamed Gaulish leaders”, hmmmm again. There’s no particular reason for Caesar to have invented such a composite character, so I’m skeptical that he did. If he wished to magnify his achievement by highlighting his opponents, he’d surely have picked one known to the general Roman population or at least one familiar to other soldiers. Contrarily, if he’d really wanted the Frankish leaders to fall into obscurity, he’d have mentioned none of them by name. Odds are, Vercingetorix was a real name, just as Erwin Rommel and Gerd von Runstedt were once real names.
On the general notion of forgotten history … Oh yeah. Technological advances have failed us! Once upon a time, up to say 2500 BC or so, people wrote messages by inscribing them on damp clay which they dried in the sun or baked in ovens. And once that was these done, they lived forever, even if broken, like so much smashed pottery and discard jars in contemporary landfills. Then the bright idea came along — really, it was as clever as anything done by Guttenberg, except it was destructive — of putting a thin layer of clay onto a wooden slab, and enscribing your message there. Bake a message onto that, read it, then rap the slab against a hard surface or tap on it with a hammer till the clay fell off in pieces, then apply another layer of clay and reuse the slab. It was like inventing erasers and bingo! all over the Middle East people switched to doing that, and nearly 1500 years passed in some places before papyrus leaves got established as a a communications media. So there are all sorts of places and peoples which have effected erased themselves from history and are known only from casual Bible references.
I am aware that Hebrew texts are the most ancient, and probably the most accurate ancient history that we have. News to me that we have less evidence of Julius Caesar than Jesus. Josephus, they say, mentioned Jesus briefly, but it never occurred to me what media he used. The Romans never recorded on parchment?
Actually, the very oldest fragments of the Hebrew Bible are among the Dead Sea scrolls and date from no earlier than 250 BC. When were they actually written? Nobody knows but the smart money is no earlier than 300-400 BC.
There are Sumerian texts quite literally millennia older than the oldest text of the Hebrew Bible is even claimed to be. The story of Moses in the bulrushes is a retelling of the story of Sargon the Great who lived a couple of millennia before Moses was supposed to have lived. You be the judge.
There is not one manuscript that mentions Julius Caesar older than 700 AD. Most of the earliest are from the 12th century. When were they actually written? Nobody knows although we can be pretty confident it was after 54 BC. There are dozens, even hundreds of manuscripts dating from the 2nd century AD through the 4th century that mention Jesus of Nazareth.
Nonetheless I am 98% sure that Gaius Octavius Thurinus was a real person and probably 90% sure that Gaius Julius Caesar was a real person. I’m 99.99% sure that Alexander III of Macedon lived. Do I believe that he had a horse named Bucephalos or cut the Gordian Knot? Probably no.
There are multiple independent sources avering that Jesus of Nazareth lived, including not only multiple books of the New Testament but Tacitus. There’s some question as to whether Josephus is an independent source.
This is pretty silly. Numerous discovered references exist to Julius Caesar outside of texts–coins, busts, and inscriptions. The New Testament refers to Augustus as Caesar. The New Testament is, at the very least, a credible historical document. If there’s no Julius Caesar how is there an Octavian Augustus? Or a Pontius Pilate or a Herod? No Greek or Roman text has ever disputed Julius Caesar’s existence. Again, if there’s no Julius Caesar it’s an Illuminati conspiracy.
Meanwhile, Jesus does not exist when he’s alive. Which shouldn’t be surprising–he was a nobody. Still, there’s no physical record of him at all. Paul is the first text, then the Gospels, then Christians in the 2nd century plus Tacitus and Josephus. But who knows how Tacitus would have known? Anyway, Christians are never going to be able to prove–barring the Rapture–that Jesus existed. But Mohammed clearly existed. He was lucky enough to be born into history. I’ve always assumed that Christianity (minus the Episcopalians who raised me) has a certain insecurity regarding Jesus’ historicity.
All of which is why I say I’m highly confident that Caesar Augustus and Julius Caesar lived. I also agree that Mohammed existed. I don’t believe that an angel dictated the Qur’an to him.
I believe that George Washington existed but I don’t think he chopped down a cherry tree or threw a silver dollar across the Potomac. Those were Parson Weems’s fabrications. A lot of what we think of as history is like that. There’s a kernel of truth embroidered with fiction.
I think that anybody who has 100% confidence of specific events that occurred two, three, or more millennia ago is doing so on faith.