Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (17 page)

So they broke camp and marched their army back the way they’d come. Caesar harried them all the way, so that they covered only four miles on the first morning, before, exhausted, the Pompeian troops set up a new camp. Caesar built a camp of his own two miles away. Now the Pompeians slaughtered all their baggage animals, for food, and because they had no fodder for them.

Caesar began to build earthworks around the opposition camp, with the intention of completely surrounding it, the way he’d surrounded Vercingetorix at Alesia in Gaul three years before. The Pompeians strengthened their defenses and watched the Caesarians work for three days until, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, General Afranius led his whole army out of camp and formed his units up in battle order, his five legions in the first two lines, his auxiliaries behind. Caesar marched out with his legions and formed up facing Afranius. Caesar placed four cohorts from each of his five legions in his front line, and three in each of his second and third lines. Almost certainly the 10th Legion was stationed on Caesar’s right wing.

There the two armies stood, staring at each other in silence, with Spaniard unwilling to fight Spaniard and neither side prepared to make the first move, until the sun went down. The two armies then marched back to their respective camps. Over the next few years Caesar would not be so reticent about committing to battle, but at this early stage in the civil war he was apparently very conscious of being accused of taking the lives of fellow Romans. At this point “chivalry,” “magnanimity,” and “leniency”

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were still words with a place in his lexicon. Besides, he could see that the men on the other side, out of food and short of water in the baking heat of the Spanish midsummer, many having already demonstrated they’d lost the heart for a fight, were nearing the end of their tether. There had already been surrender overtures; capitulation was obviously on the cards.

It was just a matter of waiting.

Caesar didn’t have long to wait. The next day, August 2, Generals Afranius and Petreius sent envoys to Caesar, seeking a peace conference. But they wanted the conference to be out of the hearing of their men. Caesar would only agree to discuss their surrender out in the open, within earshot of the troops, and Pompey’s generals resignedly agreed, giving up Afranius’s son, who was probably in his late teens, as a hostage and token of their good faith.

Caesar marched up to the Pompeian camp, and his legions formed up as if on the parade ground, with helmet crests and shining decorations in place. Afranius and Petreius’s troops lined the ramparts of their camp and watched anxiously as their generals went out the praetorian gate and met Caesar in the open. Speeches were delivered by both sides, loud enough for the troops to hear, with Afranius admitting defeat and humbly seeking favorable terms of surrender.

In response, Caesar berated Afranius and his senior officers for taking the side of his enemies, but in the end he stipulated several lenient conditions for surrender: Afranius and his officers were to agree to play no further part in the war, their troops were to lay down their arms, their units were to be disbanded, and they were to go home. Hearing this, the troops behind Afranius and Petreius, who had been expecting Caesar to punish them for opposing him, began to shout their approval of the proposal. General Afranius had no choice. He agreed to the surrender terms.

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On August 4, the men of the 4th and 6th Legions, now disarmed, were formally discharged by Julius Caesar and told to go home. The men of both legions had been due for their discharge this year anyway, so this suited them just fine. The discharged men of Pompey’s two legions tramped away to their homes in eastern Spain. Before long Caesar also discharged the men of the 5th Legion, but in the meantime he set the 3rd and Valeria Legions on the road to the Var River in southern France. A few miles west of Nice, the river formed the border between Transalpine Gaul and the c08.qxd 12/5/01 5:18 PM Page 84

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two legions’ home territory of Cisalpine Gaul. Caesar promised the men of these two Pompeian legions that once they reached the river, they, too, would be paid off and discharged.

This column bound for the Var was led by two of Caesar’s own legions, the 7th and the 9th. Caesar chose the escort units quite deliberately. Both were Spanish legions, they were in their home territory, and both, like the 4th, 5th, and 6th, were due for discharge this year. In fact, they were now six months past their due discharge date. From subsequent events it is apparent that when they saw Pompey’s Spanish legions receiving their discharges the men of the 9th in particular began to grumble among themselves that they couldn’t see why they couldn’t go home, too. They considered themselves just as entitled to their discharges, if not more so—they were on the winning side, after all. But, determined to keep his best troops in the field as long as it took to defeat Pompey and win the war, Caesar ignored the unhappy undercurrent and sent the 7th and the 9th to the Var. They marched with instructions to continue on to Italy once they’d completed the discharge of the 3rd and Valeria, and to report to Mark Antony at his headquarters at Piacenza on the Po, there to await further orders.

The legions Caesar retained with him in Spain for the moment were the 10th, 14th, 21st, and 30th. The 10th wasn’t due for discharge for another four years, and the 14th not for seven years, while the other two legions had only been recruited that year, so Caesar knew he could rely on all of them to serve without the complaints coming from the 9th and the 7th.

Caesar also now set free General Afranius and General Petreius and their senior officers, accepting their word that they would take no further part in the civil war, then turned toward the southwest, setting his sights on the last two Pompeian legions in Spain, the 2nd and the Indigena at Córdoba with General Varro. Leaving the 10th and the 14th in the east with the bulk of the cavalry, he sent General Quintus Cassius Longinus marching on Córdoba with the 21st and the 30th while he took six hundred cavalry via a separate route. At the same time, he sent messages to all the major towns of western Spain, urging them to throw out their Pompeian garrisons.

Meanwhile, Varro, an old friend of Caesar’s but also a man who felt bound by his oath to serve Pompey, decided to march his two legions to Cádiz to safeguard the grain and shipping there. On the march, the Indigena Legion pulled out of his column and withdrew to Hispalis, modern Seville. The people of Córdoba behind him and those of Cádiz then threw c08.qxd 12/5/01 5:18 PM Page 85

out his garrisons, and Varro, left with just Pompey’s loyal 2nd Legion and nowhere to go, sent word to Caesar that he was prepared to hand over the 2nd to him. Caesar sent his distant cousin Sextus Caesar to take over the 2nd Legion, and Varro went to Córdoba to meet Caesar and pass over public money and property.

In this way, Caesar’s conquest of western Spain was achieved without the shedding of a drop of blood. Assimilating the 2nd and Indigena Legions into his armed forces, he left them to garrison the province together with the 21st and the 30th, under General Cassius Longinus, brother of the Cassius who would be one of Caesar’s assassins. Caesar himself acquired a dozen Pompeian ships at Cádiz and sailed up the coast to Tarragona. There, throngs of deputations from throughout Spain awaited him, as did some disagreeable news.

The main account of this episode was removed from Caesar’s memoirs by his editors, but from remaining references in his and other works it is possible to piece together what took place. While Caesar had been in the west, Generals Afranius and Petreius had come to Tarragona. At the same time, a squadron of eighteen Pompeian warships commanded by Admiral Lucius Nasidius had pulled into the port.

Admiral Nasidius had been sent from Greece by Pompey with sixteen cruisers and battleships to help the people of Marseilles in southern France hold out against Caesar’s legions. The squadron had arrived in Sicily at Messina, which Caesar’s commander there, Curio, had left undefended. Taking a warship out of the docks at Messina and adding it to his little fleet, the admiral had then crossed the Mediterranean to Marseilles.

There, his ships had joined forces with a squadron of eleven warships built by the people of Marseilles and gone to battle against the Caesarian fleet led by Caesar’s longtime naval commander Decimus Brutus. The battle had been a victory for Admiral Brutus, who sank five Marseillaise vessels and captured another four. One of the surviving ships joined Admiral Nasidius’s craft, all of which were still intact, after which Nasidius decided to withdraw to Nearer Spain.

The unexpected appearance of the little fleet of friendly warships at Tarragona was a godsend as far as General Afranius was concerned. He and his officers had subsequently hurried around the homes and haunts of the surrendered and discharged men of the 4th and 6th Legions in the region and rounded up some thirty-five hundred of them—enough to make three cohorts of one and four of the other. Contemptuous of their oath of neutrality to Caesar, they loaded the remobilized troops on board Nasidius’s warships and set sail from Tarragona to join Pompey in Greece.

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Annoyed that Afranius and the others had broken their word to him and that thousands of Pompey’s veteran Spanish legionaries had escaped from Spain, Caesar determined to concentrate on the nearest problem, the siege of Marseilles just around the Mediterranean coast, which General Trebonius had yet to bring to a conclusion despite operating against the city with three legions and Brutus’s naval forces since April. Leaving the depleted 14th Legion in Nearer Spain, Caesar marched on Marseilles with the 10th Legion.

Never willing to let go of experienced troops, Caesar would have dis-approved when he heard that General Fabius had let the senior centurions of the 10th Legion take their discharges back in January. Now, as he marched from Spain with the 10th, Caesar sent out recalls to every one of them. Under the terms of their original enlistment they had to make themselves available for up to four additional years’ service if their general required them and had to hand in their names and addresses to the local authorities wherever they went in their retirement.

Legally, these retired centurions had no choice but return to their unit.

Many, in fact, were probably itching to get back into harness. Chief Centurion Gaius Crastinus responded to the recall. We don’t know exactly where he was when it reached him, but Crastinus was back with the 10th by the time it marched into Brindisi several weeks later.

Caesar and the 10th arrived at Marseilles in early October, just as the city finally capitulated to General Trebonius, and after the Pompeian commander, General Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, had escaped by sea.

This was the same Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus who had commanded at Corfinium, the same man Caesar had let go free after accepting his word he would take no further part in the war. Domitius had promptly gone to Marseilles to help the locals against Caesar’s forces. After being let down by Afranius, Petreius, and now Domitius, Caesar would not be quick to pardon opposing generals in the future.

Caesar was, of course, delighted to have taken control of Marseilles, but more bad news reached him here. From Appian we know that Mark Antony sent a dispatch from Piacenza to tell him that the 9th Legion, which had joined him at the Po as ordered after escorting the 3rd and Valeria to the Var, was demanding its overdue discharge and a bonus Caesar had promised it at the outbreak of the civil war, and had gone on strike, refusing to obey its officers until its demands were met. The 7th Legion, influenced by the 9th, had then followed suit. Antony told Caesar that nothing he’d done or said had satisfied the two mutinous legions, and now he begged Caesar to come and solve the problem.

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That problem had been partly of Antony’s creation. Plutarch says he was too lazy to pay attention to complaints and listened impatiently to petitions, and he would have dismissed the grumbles of the 9th without giving them the courtesy of a hearing. It was an attitude that would have fanned discontent until it flared into mutiny.

Before he left Marseilles, Caesar finalized his campaign plans, then issued a mass of troop movement orders. Gaius Curio, holding Sicily with four legions, had already been ordered to invade Tunisia in North Africa by sea, leaving Sicily under the command of General Aulus Albinus. To inspire his troops to rapid success, Curio told them that Caesar had just conquered all of Spain within forty days of first coming into contact with the enemy. It was a flagrant lie; his Spanish operations had taken him months. The tactical value of this North African operation is questionable. Pompey’s own forces in the province of Africa, as Tunisia and western Libya were collectively known, were limited, and there was no indication that Pompey’s ally King Juba of neighboring Numidia intended sending him further reinforcements in Greece—he’d already sent him several thousand light infantry, and he had internal problems to contend with at home. The operation could have been designed to deny Pompey’s strong naval forces based in North Africa, but neither Caesar nor other classical writers offer this as a motive for the invasion. Strategically, however, it would secure a rich wheat-growing area, and add to Caesar’s prestige.

Meanwhile, the main target was still Pompey, in Greece. Caesar chose twelve legions and his best cavalry for an invasion of Greece, and soon orders were going out to specific legions to assemble at the embarkation camp at Brindisi. As a part of that operation, the 10th Legion was ordered to march for Brindisi, accompanied by the 11th, which had been part of the siege army operating against Marseilles. The 22nd and 23rd were to stay at Marseilles as a force of occupation, keeping the locals under firm control. The 31st and 32nd, two more new legions, were ordered to eastern Spain, to join the 14th Legion. Marcus Lepidus would take up General Afranius’s former appointment as Governor of Nearer Spain. Caesar himself then set off for Rome, via Piacenza.