‘Caesar's art in fact does not consist in openly falsifying the narrated events so much as in directing the reader to infer the particular ethical points that he wants to make. This process places great demands upon readers and takes its strength precisely from the fact that it relies upon their participation’ (6). This is the central claim of Grillo's welcome book. It is illustrated, or, better, demonstrated, by a sequence of close readings of key passages in which Caesar distinguishes himself from his adversaries on the basis of their comparative virtues and practices. Again and again, Caesar's style and his arrangement of material ‘lead the reader toward the very conclusions the text refuses to draw’ (35; cf. 79): Caesar charms — and in so doing perhaps persuades — his readers by leaving it to them to connect the dots.

G., following J. Henderson (Cl. Ant. 15 (1996), 261–85 = Fighting for Rome (1998), 37–72), rightly reads the B.Civ. in the light of its predecessor. His focus is sharply on diction: how is Caesar's vocabulary dispersed throughout the B.Civ. and how do his word choices there reprise moments and themes in the B.Gall.? It is largely by way of these intratextual and intertextual connections that G. proceeds. The council of war convened by Afranius and Petreius at B.Civ. 1.67, for instance, is read against Curio's at B.Civ. 2.30–1 — and each is read against Caesar's own at B.Gall. 1.39–41. The military circumstances of these passages share important similarities, or at least similarities made important by Caesar's representation of them, and in each pudor and timor clash so violently in the spirits of the troops that only decisive leadership, marked by mutual confidence between general and soldier, can deliver an intelligent and honourable way forward (46–51). Unsurprisingly, Curio excels the Pompeians and everyone falls short of Caesar. But what matters here is the telling of each episode and the right appreciation of their ensemble, which lead every reader to the same inevitable conclusion. And here G.’s astute readings of specific passages offer us an excellent guide to the necessary work Caesar expects of his audience.

G. recurs often to the Ilerda campaign, which he rightly deems programmatic for the work as a whole. In that episode, and not infrequently in Caesar, we are impressed by his celebrated celeritas. However, as G. observes, this attribute is not, in the B.Civ., a thing good-in-itself. In fact, Pompeians exhibit swiftness more often than Caesar does. Their brand of celeritas, however, is typically misdirected or poorly thought out — the Ilerda campaign is an example – whereas Caesar wins not because he is faster than his enemies but because he is smarter (22), a truth the reader comes to (courtesy of G.’s unpacking) through the B.Civ.’s deployment of diction, narrative architecture and focalization. This book teems with similarly important observations.

Although G. concentrates on close readings of selected passages, he is also good on the shape of the B.Civ. taken as a whole. He observes the false closures that characterize Book 1, and he emphasizes how false or unsatisfactory conclusions mark the construction of all three books. G. is of course aware that the B.Civ. is unfinished, but he makes a good case for Caesar's unwillingness, in the very design of the first three of however many books he ultimately planned to write, to allow his readers any sense of final stability or security until Rome's community is restored on sound Caesarian terms.

The book's introduction is best left unread. It works too hard (and unnecessarily) in insisting on its own originality and in complaining about the absence of nuance on the part of too many prior critics of Caesar. M. Rambaud especially comes in for censure (although his still important book is cited throughout). It is easy to forget that Rambaud, more than most, appreciated Caesar's artfulness, even if he did not celebrate it, and in any case did not have at his disposal the highly refined discourse of twenty-first-century criticism. Any of us can be reductive, after all. G. himself asserts that ‘the BC in fact is not a piece of propaganda, but a work of literature, and in literature allusions can count as political gestures and advance an ideological program’ (7): yet here we have a notion of propaganda that can only be described as simplistic, in the way that Rambaud's déformations are often formulated in terms that are too simple to be entirely satisfactory. But forget all that. Everything after the introduction is sophisticated, erudite and genuinely helpful.

My only serious disagreement concerns ch. 5, where G. argues that Caesar depicts the Pompeians as barbarians. Here G.’s claims about Roman prejudices against foreigners could have benefited from the nuanced and now indispensible treatment recently advanced by E. S. Gruen in Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (2010, perhaps a bit too late for G. to have seen it). In any case, in this chapter I am unpersuaded by G.’s critical method. In the B.Gall., Gauls do things that are stupid or cruel. So also, in the B.Civ., do Pompeians. But does the application of, say, crudelis or crudeliter in both works suffice to demonstrate barbarology? I rather doubt it. A couple of slips. On p. 33 G. notes that, for Caesar, the Romans’ failure at Utica in Book 2 ‘must be attributed to Curio's adulescentia (but he was no adulescens)’; quaestor in 54 b.c., however, Curio remained in his thirties at the time of his death and so could quite correctly be denominated an adulescens. On p. 127 Faustus Sulla is designated Pompey's brother-in-law; Pompey's brother-in-law was in fact P. Sulla, consul-designate for 65 b.c. and a Caesarian partisan.

The fundamental and recurring message of the B.Civ. is simple to the point of monotony: Caesar is better than the rest of us, and his enemies are appalling. He is, to recycle a phrase from Daniel Dennett, the centre of gravity in his own narrative. And it is only through the close reading of his narrative that Caesar's B.Civ. impresses, through its intricate and artistic propaganda — pure but unsimple. G.’s study is superb at teasing out its complexities.