Upper School Intersession 2025

"He plundered and burnt the town, bestowed the booty on the troops, and then crossed the Loire with the army." Julius Caesar led a huge army that conquered much of modern day France, leaving death and destruction in its trail. He also wrote reports on that war, seven books known as the Gallic War (from which the first sentence is quoted). Slightly less than a generation later, the poet Vergil wrote the Aeneid, which Romans thought of as their national poem; it too deals with warfare and its costs, but from a very different perspective. Two Romans, two takes on war: where Caesar is cold and calculating and distant,Vergil is close and compassionate.
In this seminar we will read and discuss sections of Caesar's Gallic War and Vergil's Aeneid. We'll reflect on the representations of war by the two authors, what it means to be human(e) in times of war, the notion of the hero (then and now), and views of 'the other'; and, lastly, questions of destiny, the darkness and cost of empire, and loss. We will combine it with a modern reading on drone warfare.