Caesar's Lost Writings

The *Commentarii* survived. Everything else — grammar, polemic, poetry, speeches, thousands of letters — is fragments quoted by other people. What was lost, and what the scraps tell us.

What survives vs. what was lost

Caesar was a prolific author. What survives: the Gallic War (7 books), the Civil War (3 books), plus officers’ continuations. What was lost is arguably the more interesting half of his mind.

The known lost works

De Analogia (On Analogy) — 2 books

A treatise on Latin grammar and style, dedicated to Cicero, written while crossing the Alps (54 BC) — “in the midst of so many occupations,” as Cicero marveled. Fragments survive in later grammarians (notably Gellius). Its famous maxim: avoid an unusual word as a sailor avoids a reef (tamquam scopulum, sic fugias inauditum atque insolens verbum — quoted by Gellius, Attic Nights 1.10.4). The irony: the plainest stylist in Latin wrote a book about plainness.

Anticato (Against Cato) — 2 books

A polemic against the memory of Cato the Younger, written in Spain (45 BC) after Cato’s suicide at Utica. Cicero had written a Cato praising him; Caesar answered with a prosecution of the dead man — attacking his drinking, his politics, his Stoic posturing. Lost except for fragments and hostile summaries. It shows the civil war continuing by other means.

Poems

• Laudes Herculis (Praises of Hercules) — a youthful poem, mentioned by Suetonius.
• An Oedipus tragedy — also youthful.
• Iter (The Journey) — a poem written on the road to Spain (46 BC), describing the journey. A few lines quoted by later authors.
• Epigrams, including a sharp one on the playwright Terence (“half-Menander”).

Speeches

Caesar was, by Cicero’s admission, one of the great orators of the age. His published speeches — funeral orations for his aunt Julia and wife Cornelia (unconventionally political), speeches against Dolabella, for the Bithynians — circulated in antiquity. None survives complete; fragments in later rhetoricians.

Letters

Thousands, to everyone who mattered. Cicero’s replies survive; Caesar’s side mostly doesn’t — except a few preserved by Cicero himself (Letters to Atticus, to Friends), and the famous terse dispatches quoted by Suetonius and Plutarch.

Other

• A treatise on augury? (mentioned doubtfully)
• De Astris? (on stars — attribution uncertain, likely spurious)

Why they were lost

Not conspiracy — transmission. The Commentarii survived because they were school texts: perfect Latin prose for students. Grammar, polemic, and youthful poetry had no classroom function, and parchment was expensive. What the schools didn’t copy, the Middle Ages didn’t keep.

What the fragments tell us

A Caesar we barely know: the literary theorist, the vicious polemicist, the young poet, the orator Cicero ranked near himself. The surviving Caesar is the general; the lost Caesar was a man of letters who happened to conquer the world.

Source notes

• Suetonius, Divus Julius 55–56 (the catalogue of works); Cicero, Brutus 253–262 (on Caesar’s style and the De Analogia dedication) (2026-09-26).
• Gellius, Attic Nights 1.10.4 (the scopulum maxim); fragments collected in Klotz, C. Iuli Caesaris Commentarii and Courtney, The Fragmentary Latin Poets.
• Anticato: Cicero, Letters to Atticus 12.40–41, 13.50 (contemporary references); Plutarch, Life of Caesar 54.
• Iter: Suetonius, Divus Julius 56.5.
• Transmission argument: standard textual history; see Reynolds (ed.), Texts and Transmission.