Gallic Wars. In the work, Caesar describes the battles that took place during the nine years that he spent fighting local armies in the Gallic Wars. His second memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on the Civil War) is an account of the events that took place between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war against Gnaeus Pompeius and the Senate. Leonor López de Córdoba (1362–1420) wrote what is supposed to be the first autobiography in Spanish. The English Civil War (1642–1651) provoked a number of examples of this genre, including works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby. French examples from the same period include the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz (1614–1679) and the Duc de Saint-Simon. Fictional autobiography The term "fictional autobiography" signifies novels about a fictional character written as though the character were writing their own autobiography, meaning that the character is the first-person narrator and that the novel addresses both internal and external experiences of the character. Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders is an early example. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is another such classic, and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is a well-known modern example of fictional autobiography. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is yet another example of fictional autobiography, as noted on the front page of the original version. The term may also apply to works of fiction purporting to be autobiographies of real characters, e.g., Robert Nye's Memoirs of Lord Byron. Autobiography through the ages The classical period: Apologia, oration, confession In antiquity such works were typically entitled apologia, purporting to be self-justification rather than self-documentation. The title of John Henry Newman's 1864 Christian confessional work Apologia Pro Vita Sua refers to this tradition. The historian Flavius Josephus introduces his autobiography Josephi Vita (c. 99) with self-praise, which is followed by a justification of his actions as a Jewish rebel commander of Galilee. The rhetor Libanius (c. 314–394) framed his life memoir Oration I (begun in 374) as one of his orations, not of a public kind, but of a literary kind that would not be read aloud in privacy. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) applied the title Confessions to his autobiographical work, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the same title in the 18th century, initiating the chain of confessional and sometimes racy and highly self-critical autobiographies of the Romantic era and beyond. Augustine's was arguably the first Western autobiography ever written, and