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来た見た勝った kita mita katta I came, I saw, I conquered

来た見た勝った (kita mita katta), came, saw, won, is the Japanese of Caesar's veni, vidi, vici. Caesar used the three words of his victory at Zela in 47 BC. This study follows them through English and the English-Japanese dictionaries of the 1880s to the plain Japanese past by 1910.

Japanese Scroll of I came, I saw, I conquered (kita mita katta) — Calligraphy by Eri Takase
I came, I saw, I conquered来た見た勝ったkita mita katta

Original art by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase

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Abstract

来た見た勝った, came, saw, won, is the Japanese of veni, vidi, vici, the three words Caesar used of his victory over Pharnaces at Zela in 47 BC. This study reads the three ancient witnesses in their own languages: the elder Seneca, who already treats the words as Caesar's, Plutarch, who has them written to a friend in Rome, and Suetonius, who has them carried on a placard in the triumph. It follows the English from I came, I looked, I conquered in 1542 through Shakespeare's came, saw, and overcame to I came, I saw, I conquered by 1836, and the Japanese from 我來リ我見我勝テリ in the English-Japanese dictionaries of 1886 and 1887, through the classical 來たり、見たり、勝ちたり, to the plain past 来た、見た、勝つた in a teachers' manual of 1910. It finds that the words came into Japanese through dictionaries and rhetoric lessons, as the model of the short sentence, and that the Japanese tellings added an addressee no ancient witness names, the Roman Senate.

Overview

The sense. Three verbs, each a first-person past, with nothing between them. The ancient witnesses already read them as a statement about speed rather than about the war: Suetonius says the placard showed not the deeds of the war but how quickly it was finished [1], and Plutarch notes that in Latin the three words end alike, which gives the brevity its force [2]. English and Japanese rhetoric books took the sentence as their example of terseness and of verbs set side by side without and [3][4].

The words. 来た kita, came; 見た mita, saw; 勝った katta, won. Each Latin verb carries I in its ending. Japanese marks no person, so the first Japanese forms supplied it three times, 我來リ我見我勝テリ, I came, I saw, I won, and the plain past drops it [5][6]. 勝つ, to win, is the verb most renderings choose for vici; others write 征服した, conquered [7], or 克てり, prevailed [8]. Japanese has carried the line in three forms: the Chinese-style reading with 我, I, in the dictionaries of the 1880s; the classical perfect, 來たり、見たり、勝ちたり or 勝てり, from 1889 to the 1930s; and the plain past, 来た、見た、勝つた, from 1910. The scroll's form is the plain past.

The text in English. I came, I saw, I conquered is in print by 1836 [3]. Before it the English had I came, I looked, I conquered in 1542 and I came, I saw, I overcame in North's Plutarch of 1579, and Shakespeare's came, saw, and overcame [9].

The historical record

47 BC. Zela. Caesar met Pharnaces, son of Mithridates, near the city of Zela, drove him out of Pontus and destroyed his army [2]. Appian tells the battle and has Caesar exclaim on Pompey's fortune in winning his name against such enemies; he does not give the three words [10].

The elder Seneca, Suasoriae 2.22. The earliest of the three witnesses. Seneca mocks a declaimer who, arguing that the three hundred Spartans should stand at Thermopylae, said expectemus, si nihil aliud, hoc effecturi, ne insolens barbarus dicat: "veni, vidi, vici", let us wait, if only to prevent the insolent barbarian from saying "I came, I saw, I conquered", and adds: cum hoc post multos annos divus Iulius victo Pharnace dixerit, when it was many years later that the deified Julius said this, after defeating Pharnaces [11]. The words are already Caesar's, already tied to Pharnaces, and already quoted out of their age. Stevenson's Home Book of Quotations calls this the earliest occurrence of the saying in literature [12].

Plutarch, Life of Caesar 50. καὶ τῆς μάχης ταύτης τὴν ὀξύτητα καὶ τὸ τάχος ἀναγγέλλων εἰς Ῥώμην πρός τινα τῶν φίλων Ἀμάντιον ἔγραψε τρεῖς λέξεις· ἦλθον, εἶδον, ἐνίκησα, in announcing the swiftness and fierceness of this battle to one of his friends at Rome, Amantius, Caesar wrote three words: "Came, saw, conquered" [2]. Plutarch gives them in Greek and adds that in Latin the words end alike [2].

Suetonius, Divus Julius 37. Of the Pontic triumph: inter pompae fercula trium verborum praetulit titulum VENI · VIDI · VICI non acta belli significantem sicut ceteris, sed celeriter confecti notam, among the show-pieces of the procession he displayed an inscription of three words, "I came, I saw, I conquered", marking not the events of the war, as the others did, but the speed with which it was finished [1].

The addressee. The three ancient witnesses give the words as said, as written to a friend at Rome, and as carried in the triumph [11][2][1]. None of them names the Roman Senate.

The text in English

1542. Nicholas Udall's translation of Erasmus's Apophthegmes. When he had euen at the first choppe of encountreyng, vanquished Pharnaces, he wrote briefly to his frendes after this sort: I came, I looked, I conquered, as the Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs quotes it [9].

1579. Thomas North's Plutarch. Caesar . . . wrote three words unto Anitius at Rome: Veni, Vidi, Vici: to wit, I came, I saw, I overcame [9].

1594 to 1610. Shakespeare. Armado in Love's Labour's Lost, He came, saw, and overcame; Falstaff in 2 Henry IV, I may justly say, with the hook-nosed fellow of Rome, "I came, saw, and overcame"; Rosalind in As You Like It, Caesar's thrasonical brag of "I came, saw, and overcame"; and Cymbeline [9][13].

1836. Henry Wilkinson Williams, A Treatise on English Composition. The sentence of Caesar, "I came, I saw, I conquered," forms a much more vivid and animated description of the successful enterprise to which it had reference, than any lengthened statement [3]. The wording of the English title, set as the model of a sentence without conjunctions.

The text in Japanese

1886 and 1887. The English-Japanese dictionaries. 市川義夫's 『英和和英字彙大全』 of 1886 has 吾レハ來リ吾レハ見, I came, I saw, in its list of foreign phrases [14]. The appendix of An English and Japanese Lexicon, revised by 杉浦, 井上 and 曲直瀬 and published by 大倉 in 1887, reads: Veni, vidi, vici. (羅)我來リ我見我勝テリ「セーサル」戰勝ヲ羅都ニ報告セル詞ニシテ簡切雄勁ヲ以テ世ニ稱セラルヽ文辭ナリ, (Latin) I came, I saw, I won: the words in which Caesar reported his victory to the city of Rome, famous for their terse vigor [5]. The same gloss runs through the Webster translations of 1888 and later [15].

1889. 尺振八, 『明治英和字典』, in its list of quotations from the Greek, Latin and modern languages. Veni, vidi, vici. (羅) 來タリ、見タリ、勝チタリ [16]. The classical perfect, without 我.

1890. 宮崎湖処子, 『帰省』. The narrator remembers leaving for Tokyo, 未來の空念と大望を以て、我來り我見我勝つ爲めに往くものゝ如く, with empty dreams of the future and great ambition, as one going there to come, to see and to win [17]. Caesar is not named: the dictionaries' phrase has become an allusion a reader was expected to catch.

1910. 島田民治, 『国語科教授要義』, a manual for teachers of the national reader. Under 省略法, ellipsis: シーザーの名文「来た、見た、勝つた」の如きも是れなり, Caesar's famous words, "came, saw, won," are an example [6]. The plain past, and the first character is 来, the scroll's own. It is the oldest form of the scroll's wording in the National Diet Library's full-text index.

1920. 坪内逍遥's As You Like It. Rosalind: 「來た、見た、勝つた」といふ例のシーザーの高言ぢやあるまいし, as if it were that brag of Caesar's, "came, saw, won" [18]. Shakespeare's line reaches Japanese in the plain past.

1924. 佐々木恒清, 『受験西洋史の準備』. Veni, Vidi, Vici (來た、見た、勝つた)の三語を以て元老院へ戰勝報告, he reported his victory to the Senate in the three words [19]. The Senate as addressee, which none of the three ancient witnesses gives.

1931. 畑耕一, 『女たらしの昇天』, a guide to seduction. 希臘時代はなんといつても、例のVini, vidi, vici(來たり見たり勝ちたり)といふ思想で、非常に心持が簡潔だつたから, in the Greek age it was, after all, that "veni, vidi, vici" way of thinking, and feeling was very simple [20]. The Latin misspelled and the age wrong, as the declaimer in Seneca had it wrong nineteen centuries earlier.

1934. 今井登志喜, 『西洋歴史解説』. Caesar's letter to a friend at Rome: Veni Vidi Vici「來た見た勝つた。」 [21]. The three verbs without commas, as the scroll has them.

The dictionaries today. デジタル大辞泉: カエサルがポントス王を討ったとき、友人に書いた手紙の文。簡単明瞭な手紙の例とされる, the words of a letter Caesar wrote to a friend when he defeated the king of Pontus; taken as the model of a short, clear letter. 山川 世界史小辞典: a report to Rome, and 一説では凱旋式の行列の高札の句, by another account, the words of a placard in the triumphal procession. 旺文社世界史事典 and the 世界大百科事典: a report to the Senate [22]. The two ancient versions survive in the reference works beside the Senate.

Today. What a rendering must keep is the three bare verbs and their tense.

A reading

The three words were a report of speed before they were anything else, and every tradition that took them in took them as a lesson in brevity: Plutarch on the matching endings, the English composition books on sentences without and, and a Japanese teachers' manual of 1910 on ellipsis, which is also the oldest place the National Diet Library's full-text index finds the scroll's own wording. The Japanese came to the line by way of English dictionaries, reading it first in Chinese and then in the classical perfect, and by 1934 it is the plain 來た見た勝つた of the scroll. Where the tradition drifts it drifts on the addressee: a friend, the city, the triumph, and at last a Senate that none of the ancient witnesses names. The 1931 seducer who sets the words in the Greek age is in old company; the earliest writer Stevenson could name as quoting them was already mocking a man who put them in a Persian king's mouth.

References

  1. Suetonius, Divus Julius 37, at The Latin Library. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/suetonius/suet.caesar.html
  2. Plutarch, Life of Caesar 50.2–4, Greek text and Bernadotte Perrin's translation (Loeb, 1919), at the Perseus Digital Library and LacusCurtius. http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0007.tlg048.perseus-grc1:50 · https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Caesar*.html
  3. Henry Wilkinson Williams, A Treatise on English Composition, 1836. https://archive.org/details/atreatiseonengl00willgoog
  4. 『教育報知』, April 1890, a lesson on figures of speech: 『來り、見たり、勝てり』とは是此人にいふべきか (これは有名なる羅馬の撒塞が報告の文を引きたるなり), quoted from the index excerpt. National Diet Library pid 3546138. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/3546138
  5. An English and Japanese Lexicon, Explanatory, Pronouncing and Etymological, revised by S. Sugiura, J. Inoue and A. Manase, M. Okura, 1887, appendix p. 46. National Diet Library pid 1699966, scan 506. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1699966/1/506
  6. 島田民治『国語科教授要義 : 新国定教科書』, 広文堂, 1910, p. 137. National Diet Library pid 812079, scan 78. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/812079/1/78
  7. 松村松年『新時代の国民体育』, 1926: 『來た、見た、征服した』. National Diet Library pid 939879. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/939879
  8. ボツフオード著, 竹林熊彦訳『西洋古代史概説』, 1930: 我來たり、我見たり、我克てり. National Diet Library pid 1180119. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1180119
  9. F. P. Wilson, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, third edition, Oxford University Press, 1970, "Came, saw, and overcame, I".
  10. Appian, Civil Wars 2.91, Horace White's translation, at LacusCurtius. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Appian/Civil_Wars/2*.html
  11. Seneca the Elder, Suasoriae 2.22, at The Latin Library. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/seneca.suasoriae.html
  12. Burton Stevenson, The Home Book of Quotations, fourth edition, 1944, "Conquest".
  13. Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, University of Michigan Press, 1950, C540.
  14. 市川義夫 編訳『英和和英字彙大全』, 1886, quoted from the index excerpt. National Diet Library pid 870117. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/870117
  15. イーストレーキ, 棚橋一郎 訳『和訳字彙 : ウェブスター氏新刊大辞書』, 1888, from the NDL Lab text. National Diet Library pid 869978. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/869978
  16. 尺振八 訳『明治英和字典』, 六合館, 1889, Part VIII, p. 1196. National Diet Library pid 870185, scan 110. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/870185/1/110
  17. 宮崎湖処子『帰省』, 民友社, 1890, p. 26. National Diet Library pid 872272, scan 16. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/872272/1/16
  18. シエークスピヤ著, 坪内逍遥訳『お気に召すまゝ』, 早稲田大学出版部, 1920, p. 190. National Diet Library pid 962971, scan 108. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/962971/1/108
  19. 佐々木恒清『受験西洋史の準備』, 研究社, 1924, p. 42. National Diet Library pid 913290, scan 32. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/913290/1/32
  20. 畑耕一『女たらしの昇天』, 新思想社, 1931, p. 66. National Diet Library pid 1170982, scan 42. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1170982/1/42
  21. 今井登志喜『西洋歴史解説』, 目黒書店, 1934, p. 46. National Diet Library pid 1211964, scan 28. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1211964/1/28
  22. 「来た見た勝った」, デジタル大辞泉 · 山川 世界史小辞典 · 旺文社世界史事典 · 世界大百科事典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/来た見た勝った-3210292

Authors

Tim Jackowski (Systems Architect, Takase Studios, LLC) · 典 Ten (Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1, Takase Studios, LLC)

AI written · Ten wrote the history. Tim Jackowski commissioned it and answers for it.

Checked · Grok 4.6 (xAI), 2026-09-06, citations of the s49 draft; not re-run on the s324 amendment

Cite as: Tim Jackowski and Ten, "Philology of 来た見た勝った (kita mita katta)," Takase Studios, 2026, https://takase.com/library/philology/kita-mita-katta.