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Led by Gaius Julius Caesar Simulacrum
One of the three Literature and Culture options of OCR GCSE Classical Civilisation (J199/23), taught by Caesar — the soldier who conquered Gaul and wrote the account himself. The Culture half covers Spartan and Athenian military systems and the Romans at war (Actium, Trajan's Dacian wars and their commemoration on Trajan's Column); the Literature half studies the range of war poetry from glorification to horror.
Led by Gaius Julius Caesar Simulacrum
The question
Every soldier since has envied Sparta, and few have understood her. Caesar shows how the Spartans made war the whole purpose of the state: the boy taken at seven into the agoge, raised hard and disciplined; the man who ate every night in the common mess, the syssitia, a soldier for life; below them the perioeci who armed them and the helots who fed them — a slave population so large that Sparta lived in permanent fear of its own farmers. From this came the finest heavy infantry in Greece and a society that idealised death in battle. The student studies the system using the prescribed material evidence and weighs the hard question: a state built entirely for war — strength, or a kind of prison?
Outcome
The student can explain how Spartan society shaped its military, describe Spartan training, equipment and command using the correct terms, and explain the idealisation of war and its dependence on the helots.
Sub-units
Led by Gaius Julius Caesar Simulacrum
The question
Sparta fought on land; Athens ruled the sea, and that single fact shaped everything. Athenian power was the trireme and the men who rowed it — and because the poorest citizens pulled the oars, sea-power and democracy grew together: a man who fought for the city claimed a voice in it. The student studies the Athenian naval system using the Lenormant trireme relief, and the deep truth of the whole subject — that how a state fights and how it governs itself are the same question asked twice — contrasting the Spartan land-power and the Athenian sea-power as expressions of two different societies.
Outcome
The student can explain the Athenian naval system and its link to democracy, explain the interplay of war, politics and society, and contrast the Spartan and Athenian systems as expressions of their societies.
Sub-units
Led by Gaius Julius Caesar Simulacrum
The question
Caesar conquered Gaul and wrote it down, so he teaches how Romans made war — and how they made war into glory. Actium, where Octavian beat Antony and Cleopatra and became master of the world, then ensured every Roman remembered it as the West saving itself from a foreign queen. Trajan, who crushed the Dacians and carved the whole campaign up a marble column a hundred feet high so that Rome would look up and see its soldiers winning forever. The student studies both, reads Trajan's Column as the Romans meant it to be read — and then asks what it leaves out: the Roman genius was not only winning wars but turning victory into monument and meaning.
Outcome
The student can explain the Battle of Actium and its significance, explain Trajan's Dacian campaign and its commemoration using Trajan's Column, and read a triumphal monument critically as propaganda.
Sub-units
Led by Gaius Julius Caesar Simulacrum
The question
Caesar wrote war as a commander wants it remembered — clear, controlled, victorious — but that is only one voice. The poets gave war every voice there is: the glory that makes a young man march, and the horror the survivors carry home. The student reads the prescribed responses across the range of epic and shorter verse, hearing in them what later poets heard — the recruiting-song and the elegy, the trumpet and the lament — and brings literary and material evidence together to judge how the ancient world understood war. A culture that only glorifies war has not understood it; one that only mourns it has forgotten why men fight. The literature of war holds both.
Outcome
The student can explain the genres, authors and techniques of the prescribed war literature, analyse the range of responses from glorification to horror, and reach a substantiated judgement on how the ancient world represented war using literary and material evidence.
Sub-units