A Note on Suetonius, Divus Julius 56, 6

Abstract

‘Epistulae quoque ejus ad senatum extant, quas primum videtur ad paginas et formam memorialis libelli convertisse, cum antea consules et duces non nisi transversa charta scriptas mitterent.’ The form that Caesar used in writing his dispatches to the Senate is still a matter of dispute: the object of this note is to suggest that an old interpretation of this passage, to be found implicit in Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary, s.v. ‘libellus,’ has more in its favour than recent critics have admitted and to claim for the papyrus codex, or rather for a crude precursor of that form, an antiquity reaching back to the middle of the first century B.C. The sentence in question occurs towards the end of the chapter, after the description of the literary works and before that of the private papers; consequently the position of the sentence does little to support Sir F. G. Kenyon's view that ‘the point of the passage must be that Caesar's dispatches to the Senate were in such a form that they could be enumerated among his literary works.’ The obvious meaning of the passage is that, of the contrasted methods described by ‘transversa charta’ and ‘paginas et formam memorialis libelli,’ Caesar was the first to adopt the latter in official correspondence.