Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (20 page)

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weather changed. As the crew prepared to turn back, Caesar revealed his true identity and urged the fishermen to continue on. But the weather grew steadily worse, and in the face of a howling gale Caesar was forced back to shore, after which he abandoned the idea of the covert trip to Italy.

Finally, in March, inspired by their success against Libo’s commandos and feeling the heat of Caesar’s increasingly strong-worded dispatches demanding to know why they weren’t taking advantage of the favorable winds, Antony and General Fufius embarked ten thousand men of the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 29th, along with eight hundred cavalry, and set sail for Albania with a strong south wind and fingers crossed.

As Antony’s fleet of transports approached the coast near Durrës, the squadron of Rhodian cruisers based there under Admiral Gaius Coponius came out after it. But the wind strengthened into a gale, and while most of Antony’s ships found shelter in a cove three miles north of the town of Lissus, modern Alessio, sixteen of Admiral Coponius’s cruisers were dashed to pieces on the rocky coast.

In the middle of the night, the storm subsided. While Antony landed his troops north of Alessio and pulled Pompeian sailors and marines from the sea, two of his troopships that had ridden out the storm at anchor off Alessio now found themselves surrounded by burning torches on Pompeian small craft from the town. Weakened by seasickness and promised lenient treatment by Pompeian officers, 220 raw recruits of the 29th Legion aboard one ship surrendered. Disarmed, the Italian teenagers were taken ashore, where they were all summarily executed by the Pompeian commander at Alessio.

There were just under 200 experienced legionaries from one of Caesar’s veteran Spanish legions on the other ship, men of the 7th, 8th, or 9th Legion with seventeen years’ hard service under their belts. Rather than surrender, they forced the ship’s master to run their vessel onto the shore, and in the morning landed. The Spanish legionaries fought their way through a Pompeian cavalry detachment sent to capture them, then marched three miles along the coast and joined Mark Antony.

Both Pompey and Caesar received word of Antony’s landing at much the same time. Pompey reacted quickly. He broke camp and marched his army south, intent on intercepting Antony’s legions and wiping them out.

He would avoid battle with Caesar, but Antony was a different proposition; Pompey had no respect for the generalship of Caesar’s deputy.

Uncharacteristically, Caesar reacted more slowly than his adversary. Seeing Pompey marching south, and then realizing what he was up to, he also c10.qxd 12/5/01 5:21 PM Page 101

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gave the order to march, determined to link up with Antony before Pompey could attack him.

Pompey set up an ambush, but local Greeks forewarned Antony as he was marching up the coast. Antony immediately built a camp and stayed put, sending messengers to Caesar to tell him of the situation. As Caesar approached, and unwilling to tackle his main opponent, Pompey had no choice but to abandon his plan. He struck camp and skirted around Caesar, marching back to the Durrës area, establishing a new camp some miles south of the town.

Caesar was now able to reunite with his faithful friend Mark Antony.

Combining their legions, Caesar now had an army of twenty-six thousand men. But even if he’d had more troops to draw on back in Italy, he could have kissed them good-bye, because now Pompey’s eldest son, Gnaeus, brought the Roman fleet normally based in Egypt ranging along the Adriatic coast in a devastating raid. At one coastal town after another, young Pompey captured or burned Antony’s transports as they rode at anchor.

Overnight, Caesar lost his capacity for resupply from Italy and was cut off in Albania.

For the first time in his illustrious military career, fortune seemed to have deserted Julius Caesar. Now, if he was to be the victor in this war, he would have to win with twenty-six thousand men. And he would have to do it soon, while he still had supplies.

In Asia, Pompey’s father-in-law, Metellus Scipio, had received word that Caesar had landed in Greece. Rapidly now, he brought his two legions into Macedonia. Anticipating this, and receiving deputations from towns throughout the region saying they would come over to him if he had troops in the area, Caesar sent several forces east and south—General Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus with the 11th and 12th Legions, General Lucius Longinus with the 27th Legion, and General Gaius Sabinus with the five remaining cohorts of the 28th, with orders to garrison friendly towns, to forage for supplies, and to screen Scipio’s movements.

Caesar says these legions did their job well. First Scipio would advance on one screening force, then wheel around and go after the other. According to Caesar, Scipio expended a great deal of energy for naught, losing a number of cavalry in one skirmish, and was kept from joining up with his son-in-law.

Meanwhile, Caesar followed Pompey back up toward Durrës, then tramped off through the hills to the east. Pompey let him go, thinking he was going in search of wheat. Then it dawned on him what Caesar was up to. Rapidly he broke camp and marched his army north along the coast.

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Within a day, his worst fears were realized. By forced march, Caesar had used hill paths to work his way north of Pompey’s position through the mountainous terrain. Marching up the road from Apollonia, Pompey came up on Caesar’s army digging in along the coast south of Durrës. Now, to reach his food and ammunition stored at Durrës, Pompey would have to go through Caesar’s army.

Pompey had his legions build a camp on a rocky mountain slope called Petra, overlooking the coast road and the bay south of Durrës. The bay offered a reasonable anchorage, and he gave orders for his ships to start bringing fresh supplies to him from eastern Greece and Asia via Corfu. At the same time, Caesar sent troops foraging far and wide for grain, with limited success.

Caesar, as much an engineering genius as a master soldier, then began building a double line of entrenchments right around Pompey’s camp. By the time he had finished, the inner line ran for fifteen miles and incorporated twenty-four forts. The outer line, set back eleven hundred yards, extended for seventeen miles. The inner line of wall and trench was intended to keep Pompey in, the outer to keep his sailors and marines out.

To counter this, Pompey had his chief of engineers, Theosaphanes, a Greek from Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, build a formidable entrenchment line of his own inside Caesar’s.

Several times Caesar lined up his troops in the open in battle formation, inviting Pompey to come out and fight. But Pompey didn’t accept the invitation. He simply didn’t have sufficient confidence in his forces for an all-out battle, and was aiming to win a war of attrition. There were numerous skirmishes during the construction work as parties sallied forth here and there for hit-and-run raids, with a few casualties to both sides, but in the end the result was a stalemate.

All the while, both sides were becoming more and more hungry. Caesar sent a number of raiding parties against the town of Durrës itself, hoping to secure its supplies, but all were repulsed by Pompey’s garrison. Both the narrow approaches to the port and numbers were against Caesar—for a full-scale assault he would have had to risk depleting his forces in the encirclement, inviting an attack by Pompey behind his back.

As the months passed, Pompey knew that to survive he had break out of the encirclement. It had been many years since he had last been involved in a military campaign, but he had surprised his men over the past twelve months by taking part in their infantry training and cavalry exercises, showing he was just as agile, just as adept as any of his troops.

Nor had the years dulled his brain. A shrewd tactician, he decided to con-

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centrate on just one part of the encircling fortifications, and came up with a scheme to improve his chance of success.

The section of Caesar’s narrative dealing with the first part of this operation is missing, probably edited out by one of his friends after his death, as were a number of other incidents that showed that Caesar had blundered—such as the escape from Spain of Generals Afranius and Petreius with the men of the 4th and 6th Legions. This same section is also missing from other, later histories, which rely heavily on Caesar’s version of events. Fortunately, from Appian, who took some of his information from the memoirs of Caesar’s staff officer Gaius Pollio, we know a little of what took place.

It was probably in mid-June that residents of Durrës stole out of the city and found their way to Caesar, offering to change sides and betray the town to him. They told him to come in the dead of night to one of the city gates, the one near the shrine of Artemis, which was apparently outside the city walls, bringing a small number of picked men. Then, just before dawn, they would open the gates to him so he could seize the city.

This offer was too good to refuse, and, taking a detachment from his German cavalry bodyguard with him, Caesar slipped away from the encirclement and rode through the night to the town to keep the appointment.

It seems Caesar was so disappointed with Mark Antony after his slowness in bringing over the second wave that he gave him command of the four legions he’d brought to Albania but not the powers of second-in-command of the whole army. Either that, or Antony accompanied him to Durrës.

Either way, in his absence Caesar now left General Publius Sulla, nephew of the famous Sulla the Dictator, in charge of the encirclement of Pompey’s army.

Like many towns of the day, Durrës had outgrown its walls, and a number of newer buildings had been built along narrow lanes leading up to the city gates. Here at daybreak, as Caesar approached the gate by the temple of Artemis, Pompey sprung a trap. Caesar’s cavalry were ambushed in the lanes by waiting troops, and they had to fight desperately to make their escape, with Caesar himself only just evading capture. Caesar later tells us there were three skirmishes this day at the town, so it is probable he led two counterattacks before withdrawing on receiving news of what had taken place back at the encirclement.

As the sun was rising over the bay at Petra, at the same moment that Caesar was fighting for his life at Durrës, Pompey launched a full legion supported by a large contingent of archers against one of the twenty-four forts on the perimeter of Caesar’s encircling trench line. The fort was c10.qxd 12/5/01 5:21 PM Page 104

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occupied by a cohort of the 8th Legion commanded by a Colonel Minucius, in the sector under the overall jurisdiction of Mark Antony. To draw potential reinforcements away from Pompey’s main target, two other forts were attacked at the same time at different parts of the encirclement, one by a force at legion strength, the other by a German cavalry detachment that was probably led by General Labienus.

It had been a moonlit night, but aided by thick clouds that shrouded the moon, the assault force had crept unseen across no-man’s-land and quietly filled in parts of the trenches skirting the fortified wall of the 8th Legion fort. As dawn broke, the spearhead troops surged across the trench, paving the way for archers, who set about raining arrows into the fort.

The cohort of the 8th held out for four hours until General Sulla dealt with the feints, then arrived with two legions to relieve them; the 10th may have been one of these units, but we don’t know. The appearance of reinforcements prompted Pompey’s assault troops to withdraw.

Caesar says his troops killed two thousand of the attackers in this action, but no other account corroborates this figure, which, considering Caesar’s track record, is without doubt substantially inflated. He also says that for his side not more than 20 of the fort’s defenders were killed in four hours of fighting, again a suspect figure. But he does admit that every survivor was wounded—some 250 to 300 men—with 4 centurions of the 8th Legion cohort losing eyes to arrows.

Among the wounded, according to Appian, was the fort’s commander, Colonel Minucius, who also lost an eye and received five additional wounds. When Caesar arrived back from Durrës he was shown the shield of Cassius Scaevus, a junior centurion of the 8th grade who’d taken over command of the fort after Colonel Minucius and the four other more senior centurions were wounded. If we can believe it, the shield had been punctured 120 times in the fight. Caesar also claims that his men collected thirty thousand Pompeian arrows that had been fired into the fort.

Centurion Scaevus was promoted to the first rank and received a bonus of two hundred thousand sesterces, a fortune for an enlisted man. All the other survivors of the cohort were later given
duplicarius
status—their wages were doubled—and received extra food and clothing allowances.

:

Caesar had sent General Fufius south to take command of the force led by Generals Longinus and Sabinus, comprising the 27th Legion and five cohorts of the 28th, and he advanced into the Boeotia region, accepting the surrender of the famous cities of Delphi and Thebes and storming sev-

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eral others. But Fufius’s successes in the south weren’t helping Caesar at Durrës. With each passing day, the supply situation became increasingly grim on both sides. Caesar’s men resorted to digging up the roots of a local plant called “chara,” which they mixed with milk to make a kind of bread.

Troops deserting from Caesar’s army—and quite a number apparently changed sides—took loaves of this unsavory creation to Pompey as proof of the hard times being endured by Caesar’s troops, and Pompey is said to have remarked that the opposition troops were becoming like animals, eating the roots of wild plants. Pompey’s own army was little better off for provisions. His men killed all their pack animals, and fed their increasingly weak cavalry horses the leaves of trees. Pompey’s cavalry arm was much larger than Caesar’s, and, with little confidence in much of his infantry, Pompey was determined to maintain his substantial mounted superiority. As he saw both his men and his cavalry horses dropping, he was forced to set in motion a new plan for a breakout to gain access to his supplies.