Throughout the course of Caesar's De Bello Gallico and Vergil's The Aeneid, the reader sees a large discrepancy between the writing styles of the two authors. Caesar wrote De Bello Gallico as a war commentary for the common people, whereas Vergil wrote The Aeneid as an epic poem for the educated literary class. Hence, a stylistic discrepancy is all but inevitable. On one hand, Caesar is straightforward, grammatically strict, and unambiguous; on the other, Vergil is verbose, descriptive, and meticulous. These differences can be most easily seen through the authors' uses of diction, literary techniques and devices, and characterization.
To begin, the authors vary greatly in their use of diction and literary techniques. Driven by a desire to make his work widely understood by the vulgus, Caesar uses simple, "vulgar" language. For example, the first line of De Bello Gallico, all of Gaul was divided into three parts "Gallia est omnes divisa in tres partes," could likely be deciphered by even someone who is not a student of Latin and especially the common Roman (Caesar 1. 1). The first line of Vergil's The Aeneid does not hold the same simplicity. Instead, Vergil starts his epic with a literary technique of an allusion to Homer's Illiad and Odyssey with his decision to not invoke the Muse and sing of arms and a man himself "Arma virumque cano" (Aeneid 1. 1). Choosing to start the piece with a (knowledge based) poetic device is Vergil's way of setting the stage for the complexity and depth that is to come in his piece. Caesar hopes to develop a sense of trust and credibility between the reader and himself, as a general and leader of Rome. To achieve this, he uses straightforwardly dictated accounts of battles. In Caesar's depiction of one of the Romans' battles with Ambiorix, he explains the conflict in simple, chronological order, even including time stamps for reader referencedawn to 8:00 in this case "cum a pugnaretur" (5. 35). When men die in the battle, he recounts their death and quickly moves on to the next event in the timeline "Quintus Lucanius ineterficitur" (5. 35). Caesar essentially removes any emotion and literary devices from the battle. Doing away with verbose descriptions of conflict and death and including simple time stamps allows the reader to better understand the battles and Caesar's efforts. Vergil's diction is in stark contrast to Caesar's. For example, in Vergil's depiction of a fatal conflict, this time between Laocoon and the twin snakes, the reader sees an incredibly vivid image. Whereas Caesar included no dialogue, devices, or laments of the soldiers in the battle, Vergil spends almost a dozen lines on Laocoon's monologue-warning of the Trojan horse, which begins the conflict at hand (2. 40-50). The lament is full of emotionally-charged words such as miserable "miseri" (2. 42), tricks "dolis" (2. 44), and fear "timeo" (2. 49). This blatant use of emotional language contrasts Caesar's almost cold lack of such. Vergi...
