WorkJulius Caesar

Commentarii de Bello Gallico [The Gallic Wars]

Commentarii de Bello Gallico [The Gallic Wars] (c. 50 BCE) Inferred

Julius Caesar (100 BCE–44 BCE) · c. 58-49 BCE

ReadMentioned

Documented 1821–1843

Letters • Books

Selected engagements, in chronological order.

Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

AttestedConfirmed reading1821Evidence ↓

Confirmed reading

Passages where the evidence goes beyond allusion to indicate that Fuller had this work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.

Dated
1821CommentariesAttested
“I have persuaded mamma to ask Mr Stiles Ganet to come here twice in a week in order to hear me recite in Caesars Commentaries and the Greek Grammar.”
Letters of Margaret Fuller ed. Hudspeth · Cambridge 15th Jan 1821
Describes arranging tutoring specifically to recite Caesar's Commentaries, a concrete, dated study/reading activity.

When Fuller engaged with this work

I. Childhood

II. Adolescence1record

III. Self-Directed

IV. Transcendentalist

V. New York1record

VI. Europe

✦. Memoirs (1852)

1810

1820

1832

1836

1844

1846

1850

1821—

Letter to Timothy Fuller

p109

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“I have persuaded mamma to ask Mr Stiles Ganet to come here twice in a week in order to hear me recite in Caesars Commentaries and the Greek Grammar.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. I. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Inferred Fuller explicitly names "Caesars Commentaries" as a text she recites from regularly with her tutor Ezra Stiles Gannett (identified by Hudspeth as a Harvard Divinity School student), engaging with Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, a standard Latin school text of the period.

1843—

Summer on the Lakes, in 1843

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“Literature should not be left to the mere literati--eloquence to the mere orator. Every Caesar should be able to write his own commentary.”

Fuller, Margaret. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1844.

Inferred Fuller names Caesar explicitly and invokes his Commentarii as the paradigm of the military-political man who records his own experience. 'Caesar' is used both as a proper name and as a generic title (any great active man). Fuller's argument ? that active men like her steamship captain should develop their powers of literary expression ? uses Caesar as the supreme example.