Hello and welcome to this episode of Epox and if you remember last time we left off where

Julius Caesar had just finished his consulship and was going off for his first five-year spell

in Gaul as pro-consul as governor as general of the legions in Gaul, both cisalpine and transalpine Gaul.

And I'll be reading today from Caesar's own account of his conquest of Gaul.

You can buy it just in Penguin Paperback.

It's quite a remarkable book.

It's a really remarkable book.

I mean, it's the only time in all of ancient history where we get a long account from a military commander,

a successful military commander. And although there's all sorts of issues around the text,

whether Caesar's lying or exaggerating or leaving things out, lying by omission, or whether

it's just pure sort of political propaganda or not, once you take all those sorts of things into account,

which is the job of the modern historian, it's still an absolutely incredible source, remarkable.

I mean, Caesar speaks of himself in the third person all the time, but it is Caesar writing

it or supposed to be. Probably actually dictated it to a slave or a freedman.

But nonetheless, still, it's an absolutely incredible thing that it survives.

And it's the best source and bits of evidence we've got for Gaul in that period,

because the Celts weren't writing things down. The Germans, the Britons, weren't really writing anything down at that point.

So it's absolutely

valuable, incredibly valuable, in all sorts of different ways, not just for the life and career

of Caesar. It's a fantastic thing, a wondrous thing, nearly, or in my opinion it is. So first of all,

before we just dive straight into the events, I wanted to read a section from the introduction in the book.

Now lots of books, lots of ancient texts, something like even the Iliad or something,

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