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Bellum Alexandrinum Cynthia Damon, et al. Society for Classical Studies TEI XML encoding: Samuel J. Huskey Programming for automatic generation of TEI XML: Virgina K. Felkner Coauthor of content related to section 2.5: Dallas Simons Coauthor of content related to sections 12.1–2 and 13.5: Tom Vozar Coauthor of content related to section 26.1–2: Marcie Persyn Coauthor of content related to sections 35.3 and 36.4–5: Maria Kovalchuk Coauthor of content related to sections 47.2, 49.1, and 49.2–3: Tim Warnock Coauthor of content related to section 60.2: Isabella Reinhardt Coauthor of content related to sections 63.5 and 66.3–4: Brian Credo Coauthor of content related to sections 67.1 and 68.1: Amelia Bensch-Schaus Coauthor of content related to sections 72.2–3 and 74.4: Wes Hanson First Edition The Digital Latin Library 650 Parrington Oval Carnegie Building 101 Norman OK 73071 USA The University of Oklahoma Norman, OK 2022 Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-SA 4.0) Library of Digital Latin Texts Edited by Samuel J. Huskey 1 ​ Born digital. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ I. The Bellum Alexandrinum The work now known as the Bellum Alexandrinum or War in Alexandria was completed after the assassination of Caesar in 44 BCE, probably in connection with an attempt by Caesar’s supporters to produce an edition of texts narrating Caesar’s military achievements (see the Letter to Balbus prefaced to Gallic War 8, written by Aulus Hirtius). The title is misleading, since only the first of the five campaigns described in the work occurred in Alexandria. The Caesarian commanders and theaters of war are as follows: Caesar in Alexandria (chh. 1-33; September 48 -February 47), Domitius Calvinus in Pontus (34-41; September-October 48), Cornificius, Gabinius, and Vatinius in Illyricum (42-47; October 48 - January 47), Q. Cassius in Spain (48-64; May-December 48), Caesar in Pontus (65-78; March-May 47).The dates (Julian) are taken from Raaflaub and Ramsey 2017. None of Caesar’s officers is known to have participated in all of these overlapping campaigns. As a result, the narrative, like Caesar’s own commentaries, must rest on sources written by various hands. The identity of the person who compiled these reports and turned them into a coherent narrative is unknown now and was unclear already in antiquity (Suetonius, Jul. 56.1). Between the copy from which Suetonius draws several excerpts and the nearly 200 medieval manuscripts that survive the history of the text is hard to discern, but it is clear that all of the surviving witnesses ultimately rest on a single copy of the text that was produced during the Carolingian period: they share significant errors that must go back to a single source. For the Bellum Alexandrinum, a work of just under 11,000 words, they number about 150. The word count used by Gaertner and Hausburg is 10513 (see, e.g., 2013, 286). The most striking are the gaps (12.1, 17.3, 17.6, 22.2) and the insoluble problems (2.5 †obiectis†, 22.2 †multum†, 57.2 †noctu†, 57.3 †in†). But almost every page of the critical apparatus shows one or more spots where the reading of the archetype is not the reading in the text.