I am in the process of reading The Gallic Wars and am wondering how we have the full body of this fairly massive text. I tried to exercise my Google-Fu and it failed me here.
Was the content of the text passed down through generations similar to say the Bible? If so this seems incredible as the Bible I understand (religious text being passed on through generations) whereas The Gallic Wars is not nearly as "important" through generations and seems like it would not be nearly as likely to be passed on...
Was the text "found" somewhere? Written out on tablets that were dug up?
Really interested in understanding how I can be sitting here reading something this large that was written ~2000 years ago. Any insight would be appreciated as I feel it would help to deepen my reading experience!
The text was indeed transmitted through (at least some) successive generations of manuscripts, but despite Caesar's popularity/infamy the Gallic Wars was not a widely-circulated text in the Middle Ages. Dante never read Caesar, for example - he based his interpretation of Caesar in the Divine Comedy on Caesar's portrayal in Lucan (and, IIRC, the only really good manuscript was located somewhere in France, so he might not have been able to get hold of it anyway). In terms of why the work was preserved, though, it's hard to overestimate just how much medievals loved antiquity. While it's true that the Gallic Wars isn't necessarily as exciting as, say, Caesar's lost poetry or grammatical treatises (he supposedly invented a present active participle for esse, though I think Cicero says it felt kind of awkward) it's still a purportedly first-hand account of exciting derring-do in strange barbarian lands from Julius Caesar himself. I mean, it's not as full of salvific potential as the Bible (though I'm sure someone tried to moralize it somehow) but the Middle Ages also saw the continued copying of scandalous things like Ovid, so whether something was preserved didn't really depend on how spiritually valuable it was. Some works were really "rediscovered," Indiana Jones-style, but the earliest one I can think of is Lucretius De Rerum Natura, which was rediscovered in the fifteenth century - but manuscripts of Caesar were definitely being produced by then, and I think even in Italy, so I'm not sure when it ended up being re-exported outside of wherever that one manuscript was originally held.
Textual transmission studies are very complicated, though, so don't feel bad about not being able to find anything! If you can get your hands on a physical book, most critical editions of the Latin text (e.g. Loeb or Oxford Classical Texts) explain or at least have a short outline of the manuscripts that went into preparation of the text the book presents - this might not include the very earliest MSS, and I don't have my Loeb handy to check, but I think it might be able to give you some leads for further research.
Followup question, did it help that this is a nearly ideal teaching-kids-Latin text? It is written in basic, nonflowery prose. The military subject matter is interesting to at least male children, compared to most other choices of old literature. Would Dark Ages and Medieval monks have always used this as a teaching text the way it is in common use today in 2nd year highschool Latin?
It took me a while to find your post again, but I just wanted to thank you for motivating me to buy a copy of this! I honestly did not know that it existed, but after reading your post, I found a beautiful 1881 edition that I started reading tonight!