Caesar fought the Gallic wars twice — once in Gaul, and once on paper. The dispatches became the Commentarii de Bello Gallico, and he wrote them in the third person, so that Caesar does this and Caesar decides that, and the account of his own war reads like the level testimony of some other man entirely. This was not modesty. His enemies in the Senate were waiting to prosecute him the moment he surrendered his command, and the Commentaries went straight over the Senate's head to the Roman public, presenting nine years of conquest as a run of just and necessary defence. The arithmetic went over too — he reports a single engagement in which 430,000 Gauls died and not one Roman, a figure modern historians treat as invention. And the last turn is the best. The prose was so clean and so clear that it became the standard Latin schoolbook, which means that for centuries the West learned Latin by translating Julius Caesar's account of Julius Caesar.

King & Country show him on campaign rather than in triumph — muscled cuirass, red cloak thrown back, arms folded, waiting with visible patience for somebody to finish speaking. It suits a man whose other great reform was to the calendar: in 46 BC he found the Roman year so mangled by political tampering that he had to stretch it to 445 days to drag the seasons back into place, and the system he put in its stead governed European time for over 1,600 years. Set him against Pompey the Great, the son-in-law who became the enemy; give the vignette its ending with The Death of Caesar; or place him with The Emperor Augustus, the great-nephew who inherited the name and made it mean something permanent. In a diorama he is a still point — put the movement around him.

Model: ROM038 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set