Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (25 page)

Beside the 1st, the 15th Legion did likewise. Away over on Pompey’s right, General Lentulus, seeing the left wing withdrawing, and with his own auxiliaries and slingers already in full flight, ordered his legionaries to emulate the 1st Legion and make an ordered withdrawal, for if they attempted to hold their ground, the center would give way and the right wing would be pressed against the Enipeus and surrounded. Like their comrades of the 1st, the Spanish veterans of the 4th and 6th Legions maintained their formation as they slowly edged back, pressed by their countrymen of the 8th and 9th. But in the center, the inexperienced youths of the three new Italian legions began to waver. They tried to follow the example of the legions on the flanks, but their formations, like their discipline, began to break down.

Now Caesar issued another order. Again his red banner dropped.

Again trumpets sounded “Charge.” Now the men of his third line, who had been standing, waiting impatiently to join the fray, rushed forward with a cheer. As the fresh troops of the third line arrived on the scene, the men of the first and second lines gave way and let them through. The impact of this second charge shattered what cohesion remained in Pompey’s center. Raw recruits threw down their shields, turned, and fled toward the camp on the hill they’d left that morning. Auxiliaries did the same, and the entire center dissolved. It was barely midday, and the battle was already lost to Pompey’s side. It was now just a matter of who lived, and who died, before the last blows were struck.

The 1st Legion stubbornly refused to break, continuing to fight as it backpedaled across the plain pursued by the men of the 10th Legion and reserve cohorts. The 15th Legion appears to have broken at this point, with its men turning and heading for the hills. Over by the Enipeus, General Lentulus deserted his men and galloped for the camp on the hill. The c11.qxd 12/5/01 5:22 PM Page 128

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4th and 6th Legions, cut off from the rest of the army, withdrew in good order, fighting all the way, following the riverbank, which ensured they couldn’t be outflanked on their right. Mark Antony pursued them with the 7th, 8th, and 9th, and, apparently, with a charge was able to separate two cohorts of the 6th from their comrades. Surrounded, these men of the 6th, a little under a thousand of them, resisted for a time, then accepted Antony’s offer of surrender terms.

Meanwhile, two cohorts of the 6th and three of the 4th continued to escape upriver, with their eagles intact. Antony would later break off the pursuit and link up with Caesar at Pompey’s camp. These five cohorts of Pompey’s Spanish troops later found a ford in the river, slid down the bank, crossed the waterway, then struggled up the far bank. That night they would occupy a village full of terrified Greeks west of the river before continuing their flight west the next day.

At the camp on the hill, several thousand more experienced legionaries of the 15th, the Gemina, and the two legions from Syria had been regrouped by their tribunes and centurions to make a stand outside the walls. But as tens of thousands of Pompey’s newer troops and auxiliaries swamped around them, a number without arms, their standard-bearers having cast away their standards, and with Caesar’s legions on their heels, they abandoned their position and withdrew to make a stand on more favorable ground in the hills. Behind them, many of the men flooding through the gates began looting their own camp. It seems that the camp’s commander, General Afranius, had already escaped by this time, spiriting away Pompey’s son Gnaeus, probably as prearranged with Pompey.

While Pompey’s guard cohorts and their auxiliary supporters from Thrace and Thessaly put up a spirited defense of the camp, the overwhelming numbers of the attackers forced them to gradually withdraw from the walls. With fighting going on inside the camp, young General Marcus Favonius found Pompey in his headquarters tent. A friend of Marcus Brutus and an admirer of Cato the Younger, Favonius, who’d been serving on Scipio’s staff and just been made a major general, was a fervent supporter of Pompey. Now, horrified by the state in which he found his hero, the young general tried to rouse his commander from his stupor. “General, the enemy are in the camp! You must fly!”

Pompey looked at him oddly. All authorities agree on Pompey’s words at the news: “What! Into the very camp?”

Favonius and Pompey’s chief secretary, Philip, a Greek freedman, helped their commander to his feet, removed their general’s identifying scarlet cloak, replacing it with a plain one, then ushered him to the door. Five c11.qxd 12/5/01 5:22 PM Page 129

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horses were waiting outside the tent. According to Plutarch, three of the four men who accompanied Pompey as he galloped from a rear gate before Caesar’s troops could reach it were General Favonius; General Lentulus, commander of the right wing division; and General Publius Lentulus Spinther. The fourth man would have been Pompey’s secretary, Philip.

The five riders galloped north toward the town of Larisa, whose people were sympathetic toward Pompey. On the road, they encountered a group of thirty cavalrymen. As Pompey’s generals drew their swords to defend their leader they recognized the cavalry as one of Labienus’s squadrons, intact, unscathed, and lost. With the troopers gladly joining their commander to provide a meager bodyguard, the thirty-five riders hurried on.

Many of the men who had found a temporary haven in the camp now burst out and fled toward Mount Dogandzis, where a number of their colleagues were already digging in. The 1st Legion, in the meantime, appears to have withdrawn east. With Caesar summoning the 10th Legion to help him in the last stages of the battle at the camp, the 1st was able to continue to make its escape. It appears to have swung around to the south in the night and then, substantially intact and complete with most of its standards, including its eagle, marched west to the coast and Pompey’s anchored fleet.

Leaving General Sulla in charge of the continuing fight at the camp, Caesar regrouped four legions, his veteran 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th, and set off after Pompey’s men who had fled to the mountain. Upward of twenty thousand in number, mostly armed, and well officered still, these Pompeians continued to pose a threat. As scouts reported that these survivors had now left the mountain and were withdrawing across the foothills toward Larisa, Caesar determined to cut them off before they reached the town and its supplies.

Caesar took a shortcut that after a march of six miles brought his four legions around into the path of the escaping troops in the late afternoon.

He formed up his men into a battle line. Seeing this, the Pompeians halted on a hill. There was a river running along the bottom of the hill, and Caesar had his weary troops build a long entrenchment line on the hillside above the river, to deprive the other side of water. Observing this, the men on the hill, all exhausted, hungry, and thirsty, and not a few wounded, sent down a deputation to discuss surrender terms. Caesar sent the deputation back up the hill with the message that he was willing to accept only an unconditional surrender. He then prepared to spend the night in the open.

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t dawn on August 10, Pompey’s troops on the hill came down to Caesar, lay down their arms, then prostrated themselves before
A
him and begged for their lives. Caesar told them he would spare them all and instructed his troops to treat the prisoners leniently, then told the 10th and his other three Spanish legions to prepare to march on Larisa as he gave chase to Pompey.

What transpired now appears to have gone along the following lines.

To his astonishment, tribunes now came to Caesar to say that the men of the Spanish legions refused to march another step for him. The revolt probably began with the 9th Legion. Its troops had never forgotten the way Caesar had decimated its ranks at Piacenza the previous autumn. Nor had they forgotten his promise of one last battle. Well, they’d fought the battle, and they’d defeated Pompey, as they’d promised. Now they wanted Caesar to keep his promise. They wanted their overdue discharge, they wanted the bonus he’d been promising his legions for eighteen months, said by Suetonius to be as much as twenty thousand sesterces a man, a fortune for legionaries with a base pay of nine hundred sesterces a year.

It’s likely that the men of the 8th quickly joined the 9th. They would have reminded their general that their continued service was illegal. They had signed enlistment contracts in 65 b.c., and so had the state. Their discharges had been due two winters back. They had served well past their discharge date as a favor to Caesar, but now that they had done what he’d asked of them, they just wanted to go home. The 7th Legion, always slow to join the others when they ventured into disputes, would have then followed suit.

Shocking Caesar even more, the men of the 10th came out in sympathy with their countrymen, apparently demanding their bonuses before they
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took another step toward the enemy. They had lost their most fanatical centurions in the previous day’s battle, and now, free of their influence, they could express their frustration and disappointment with the general who never seemed to keep his promises.

Caesar, furious, was determined not to be blackmailed by his own troops after he’d just won the greatest victory of his career. If these legions weren’t prepared to obey orders, he had others that would. He sent couriers galloping back to his main camp by the battlefield, with orders for four of his other legions to march at the double to his present location and replace the Spanish legions. When these units arrived, about midmorning, together with more of Caesar’s cavalry, he sent the 7th, 8th 9th, and 10th back to the Enipeus with Mark Antony, escorting the Pompeian prisoners.

Intending to deal with the leaders of the mutiny when he returned, Caesar prepared to march on Larisa with the newly arrived troops.

Typically, in his own narrative, Caesar makes no mention of the revolt by his troops after the Battle of Pharsalus. Of this initial flare-up and its consequences, he merely says that he decided to send the four legions that had accompanied him from the battlefield back to camp to rest.

A messenger now reached him from Larisa, bearing a letter from Marcus Brutus. The previous night, a number of senators with the Pompeian troops on the hill had slipped away in the darkness and reached Larisa, and Marcus Brutus had been among them. About thirty-seven years of age, Brutus was a handsome and erudite senator with much influence among his peers as the nephew of Cato the Younger and also because of his natural talents and a winning personality. His mother was Servilia, Cato’s sister. Years before, Servilia had fallen in love with Julius Caesar when both were only teenagers, she being a young widow at the time.

Their relationship ended when she remarried, but before long it was apparent she was pregnant. Many classical authors were to write that when Marcus was born Caesar felt sure the boy was his. While Caesar was only fifteen when Brutus was born it’s not impossible that they were father and son. Romans started their sex lives early—females could legally marry at twelve, while males officially came of age in their fifteenth year. Whatever the biological facts, for the rest of his days Caesar treated Brutus like a son.

Caesar had been staggered to learn at the outbreak of the civil war that like so many of those near and dear to him, Brutus had taken Pompey’s side. Caesar’s surprise was exacerbated by the fact that Pompey had executed Servilia’s new husband and Brutus’s “father,” Marcus Junius Brutus, some years before, and was never on friendly terms with the young c12.qxd 12/5/01 5:24 PM Page 132

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man. But Brutus was a republican at heart, and believed in the values espoused by Pompey. Since the previous year Brutus had been serving on the staff of Pompey’s governor of Cilicia, but, bored, had come of his own accord to join Pompey in Thessaly.

When Caesar had learned that Brutus was in Pompey’s camp, he’d issued orders to his officers that nothing was to happen to the young man if they encountered him. If he surrendered of his own free will they were to bring him to Caesar. If he refused to surrender, they were to let him escape. Now, Caesar was overjoyed that the young man was alive and well, and he hurried to Larisa with his cavalry, leaving the replacement legions to follow at their own pace.

In his letter, Brutus had probably told Caesar that the people of Larisa wished to submit to him; when he arrived, the town opened its gates to the conqueror. There, he embraced Brutus, and immediately pardoned him. A little later, as they walked in private together, Caesar asked where Brutus thought Pompey might go. Pompey hadn’t confided his intentions to Brutus, but, according to Plutarch, Brutus guessed that Pompey would seek support in Egypt.

Spending the night at Larisa, having learned that Pompey had stopped only briefly at Larisa the previous day before continuing on to the east coast, and with intelligence that he had since escaped by sea, Caesar turned around and marched back to the plain of Farsala with his four legions and cavalry, to look after unfinished business.

Arriving in the afternoon, he went first to Pompey’s former camp.

Colonel Pollio was with him as he surveyed the scene. Caesar sneered at the way Pompey’s officers had left the camp, with artificial arbors, tents of generals spread with fresh turf and decorated with ivy, their tables laid with vast amounts of silver plate in readiness for the victory banquet they’d expected to celebrate after the battle, all of which offended Caesar, who had a soldier’s taste and expected a military camp to look like a military camp, not a bordello.

The camp was littered with thousands of bodies, which would have already been beginning to bloat and reek in the summer heat. According to Colonel Pollio, who was at Caesar’s shoulder as usual and would note his chief’s words for use in his later memoirs, some of the dead here were soldiers, but most had been unarmed Pompeian noncombatants who had been killed by the indiscriminate blows of Caesar’s troops as they overran the camp the previous day.