The Conquest of Gaul

The earliest eye-witness account of Britain and its inhabitants appears in these famous memoirs. Betweeen 58 and 50 BC Julius Caesar not only conquered almost the whole of modern France, Belgium and Switzerland, with parts of Holland and Germany, but also invaded Britain twice. It was partly as a piece of personal propaganda that he recorded his campaigns against the various Gallic tribes in Latin; nevertheless these simple, direct and lucid texts are a unique direct source on Gaul in that period and also the only narrative actually written by a great general of antiquity about his own campaigns.