Julius Caesar and the Spectacular Kneeless Moose

Analogy as Bread and Circuses

Abstract

In this paper, I explore why Caesar wrote about the exceedingly strange kneeless moose in 6.27 of his De Bello Gallico, devoting the entire chapter to it. I examine Caesar’s use of analogy with the other ‘alien’ animals of the Hercynian Forest to simultaneously distract his audience from his inability to conquer Germany with the spectacle of novel information as well as to argue that the Germans are so anti-Roman as to be uncivilizable. Then, I detail the history of kneeless animals in ancient ethnographies like De Bello Gallico and compare Caesar’s moose to Diodorus’ elephants in the Library of History, 3.26-27, an ethnography on the Ethiopians. In all, I argue that Caesar’s kneeless moose serves to further alienate the Germans through an analogy of their uncivilizablity and to contribute to Caesar’s distracting intellectual victory.