De Bello Alexandrino


De Bello Alexandrino is a Latin work continuing Julius Caesar's commentaries, De Bello Gallico and De Bello Civili. It details Caesar's campaigns in Alexandria and Asia.

Authorship

De Bello Alexandrino is followed by De Bello Africo and De Bello Hispaniensi. These three works end the Caesarean corpus relating Caesar's Civil War. Though normally collected and bound with Caesar's authentic writings, their authorship has been debated since antiquity. Suetonius suggests both Oppius and Hirtius as possible authors of De Bello Alexandrino. A. Klotz demonstrates in great detail that the style of De Bello Alexandrino is very similar to the style of the eighth and last book of De Bello Gallico, which is very commonly attributed to Hirtius. Thus it seems likely on stylistic grounds that if it was Hirtius who completed the Gallic Wars, it was Hirtius also who wrote De Bello Alexandrino. But if he did so, his knowledge of the campaign was second-hand, as the author of De Bello Gallico, VIII writes in the introductory chapter: "For myself, I had not the occasion to take part in the Alexandrian and African wars".
A recent computer-assisted stylistic analysis of the five works in the Caesarian corpus confirms that books 1–7 of the Gallic War and 1–3 of the Civil War were written by the same author, but book 8 of the Gallic War, and the Alexandrian, African, and Spanish War commentaries appear to differ in style not only from Caesar's own works but also from each other; in which case, the De Bello Alexandrino would have been written by an unknown author.