Feeling Narrow-Minded

In the left margin of his weblog, The Cranky Professor lists books "recently checked out", "recently ordered", and "finally getting around to reading". Here is the current entry for the second category:

The Greek Anthology (Loeb Classical Library, #67). I just had to have my own copy of volume 1, which has the Christian epigrams.

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that it had never occurred to me that anyone would actually buy the Greek Anthology for the Christian epigrams. I have always found them mere filler, to be passed over while looking for Callimachus, Argentarius, Posidippus, Palladas, and the rest. Then again, I'm not a Mediaevalist.

If anyone is wondering, my current reading is Caesar's Gallic War. (Why do I want to say Gallic Wars? De Bello Gallico is singular.) I spent much of my Christmas vacation on a quick read-through of the first seven books. They were surprisingly interesting, and I plan to spend the new year rereading them and the rest of the corpus in a more leisurely and intensive way, keeping a close eye on tenses and moods, hyperbata, textual difficulties, tactical details, and historical uncertainties. Though my current job leaves me with very little spare time, I calculate that if I read just three chapters of the Gallic War or two chapters of the other volumes per day, it will take 366 days, and 2004 is a leap year. It seems a reasonable New Year's resolution.

I have already read all but the Spanish War, but that was over twenty years ago. I hadn't even looked at any since then except for some bits I taught in Latin 201 when I was in graduate school, and even that was fourteen years ago. It was sometimes surprising which parts seemed mildly familiar and which had entirely vanished from memory.

The biggest difference I noticed this time through is that Caesar's victories seem far less inevitable. I had remembered the conquest of Gaul as an unbroken sequence of victories except for the massacre of Sabinus and Cotta and their 1 1/2 legions, which is approximately true, but had somehow thought of these victories as more or less inevitable, with one Gallic or German chieftain after another rising in revolt and quickly and efficiently crushed. I do still have trouble remembering which chieftain is which, also which of Caesar's lieutenants is which, except for Labienus and those famous for other reasons: Quintus the less-famous Cicero, Caninius Rebilus the half-day consul, and of course Mark Antony (only one mention so far, in VII.81.6).

Update: (1:18 AM)

I just realized that Caninius Rebilus' consulship was 2047 years ago today, though even in Italy there are a few hours to go before the anniversary hour, since he doesn't seem to have been named consul until the afternoon of the last day of 45. Which raises an interesting question that someone has no doubt answered somewhere: Was that Prid. Kal. Ian. DCCIX or Prid. Kal. Ian. DCCX? If December 31st is "the day before the Kalends of January, Year N", is N specified as the year of the Kalends, or the year of the day before the Kalends, which is of course different?