@build_in_public

Imagine Julius Caesar had a Twitter account. What would his tone, his style or strategy have been like it? As odd as it sounds, I can absolutely answer this question with absolute confidence, because he did this when Caesar was away from Rome for 10 years.

So a long time up in Gaul. He's conquering Gaul, modern France. He regularly sent back little sort of dispatches telling what he was doing.

His purpose was, I'm out of Rome for 10 years, I need to be constantly reminding the people what I'm doing to keep myself in their mental eye, to compete with all my peers. He wrote these little accounts of his campaigns as they were ongoing, and he sent them back to Rome and install them. So it's like regular newsletters from Caesar.

So this is his Twitter account. What was very memorable about them is the style he use, because a lot of Roman histories or writings are very formal or they're flowery in their prose. Caesar adopted a very, very simple, straightforward, kind of plain spoken style.

And again, this is delivered. This is propaganda. He's saying, I'm in every man.

I'm just an ordinary Joe like you guys. Look, I just write not in this fancy language like the elites, but just like a simple soldier. So he very deliberately wrote it in this simple, straightforward, clear Latin style.

This, by the way, is published today. Is. Is the Gallic wars.

So they collected them all. Together and published them. It.

It's the thing that's usually the very first Latin you give to students who are learning Latin because it's so simple and straightforward in its style, it's easy for them to understand, but it's brilliant. And he also, by the way, talks about himself in the third person, which is a little weird. Normally we see that as being kind of egotistical, but in this context it was bent actually in a humble way.

And it's very repetitive. Half of it is and then Caesar marched to this town full of these savage people and he fought a big battle and he killed half of them and he enslaved the other and he stole their cows. And then Caesar marched to this other town into this and this.

Basically what he's doing is he's reminding the Roman people of all these victories he's winning on their behalf and all this territory and wealth he's adding to their empire. It's a very deliberate act of propaganda to keep himself in the public mind by doing these things regularly. It's not all at once, it's little installments.

And it's in the style that's meant to say, hey, I'm an ordinary guy, I'm not one of these fancy politicians who's looking down on you. I'm just a hard working, simple soldier. So yeah, we know exactly what his Twitter feed would be.