Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (26 page)

Caesar shook his head. “They brought this on themselves,” he said disdainfully. “They forced it on me. I, Caesar, after succeeding in so many c12.qxd 12/5/01 5:24 PM Page 133

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wars, would have been condemned to a similar fate if I’d dismissed my army as they wanted.”

He moved down to the battlefield on the plain. Here men of both sides still lay where they had fallen. Mass graves were dug for most of the dead, but when Caesar learned that Centurion Crastinus of the 10th had perished in the battle, he had his body found and buried separately. Before his body was interred, Caesar laid several bravery decorations on the dead centurion’s chest.

With grim satisfaction Caesar surveyed the trophies of the battle, 180

captured Pompeian standards piled untidily on the trampled corn, nine of them the eagles of legions. He was to claim that just 200 of his men had died in the battle, including 30 centurions. It was a lie. Indications are that he lost 200 cavalry alone. Plutarch and Appian agree that his actual losses at Pharsalus were 1,200. Caesar also claimed that 15,000 of Pompey’s troops were killed and 24,000 captured. But this distortion was to hide the fact that so many escaped—18,000 in all. Many of Pompey’s troops would reach Buthrotum, today’s Buthroton, in southwestern Albania, opposite Corfu.

When Cato, at Durrës, heard of the defeat in Thessaly, he also came down to Corfu. Pompey’s ships that had been anchored at and near Corfu subsequently shipped many thousands of Pompeian escapees to North Africa, among them men of the 1st, 4th, and 6th Legions, as well as General Labienus and sixteen hundred of his German and Gallic cavalrymen.

Colonel Pollio made a liar of his chief by revealing in his memoirs that the actual Pompeian losses in the battle were a maximum of six thousand soldiers, not fifteen thousand, plus an unknown number of noncombatants. Ten officers of general rank on Pompey’s side died, along with some forty colonels. But, like Pompey himself, many of his senior generals escaped: his father-in-law, Scipio, Afranius from the camp with Pompey’s son Gnaeus, as well as Generals Labienus, Petreius, Lentulus, Spinther, and Favonius. The only senior Pompeian general to fall was the ill-starred Domitius Ahenobarbus, commander of the left wing. Trying to escape the camp and reach Pompeian troops digging in on Mount Dogandzis, General Domitius had collapsed, exhausted, and was overtaken and killed by Caesar’s cavalry.

With Pompey still alive and as many as eighteen thousand troops still armed, loyal, and on the loose, Caesar wanted to give chase, but now there is a sudden gap in his story, which is only explained by later events.

The gap is caused by the revolt initiated by his Spanish legions. We can only speculate about precisely what took place next, but it likely that it c12.qxd 12/5/01 5:24 PM Page 134

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was at dawn the next day, August 11, that Caesar called the traditional postbattle assembly of all his troops and doled out praise, promotions, pay raises, and decorations to his men on the recommendation of their tribunes and centurions. We know from Appian that Caesar now announced that once the war was at an end every man could look forward to substantial rewards, both in terms of money and grants of land, but he didn’t go into detail.

Indications are he then advised that as soon as the army was ready to march, they would be going east, to chase Pompey. But before they could do that, he was forced to punish the four legions that had disobeyed his orders on the road to Larisa on August 9. The war was not yet over, and would not be over until Pompey and his adherents were soundly defeated, he would have said, and there was no room for disobedience. Therefore, as an example to all, he was going to decimate the 10th Legion.

The men of his legions would have looked at Caesar in astonishment.

They all knew that his victory two days earlier had come chiefly as a result of the efforts of the 10th Legion. If the 10th hadn’t forced the 1st Legion to retreat, Pompey’s line wouldn’t have given way. The men of the 10th were probably dumbfounded, but howls of protest rose up from the men of the 8th and 9th, and then the 7th. Then the 11th and the 12th joined in. This wasn’t justice, they cried. The men of the Spanish legions began to renew their demands for their discharge and their bonuses, swearing once again to not march another mile for Caesar. They knew that they had the strength of numbers. Without his army, Caesar was nothing, and they knew it. Perhaps a chant began. “Discharge! Bonuses!

Discharge! Bonuses!”

And now they were joined by the men of the other legions, the recruits from Italy, also demanding their bonuses before they followed Caesar any farther. He’d made an error in sending the Spanish legions back to camp while he’d gone to Larisa. It had only allowed the mutinous spirits to inflame the passions of their colleagues even more. And when they were rejoined by the other legions, they’d shared their grievances with them and won their sympathy and support. Besides, the legions would have suspected that Caesar had secured Pompey’s pay chests and could afford to pay them. Men demanded more than empty promises. Give them their money now, they cried. Discharge the men who were being kept in the ranks illegally! And if Caesar was going to give them grants of land, they told him to make sure it wasn’t confiscated land with disgruntled former owners living right next door. Yelling, chanting, jeering, the troops were becoming ugly.

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Caesar’s officers now probably warned Caesar not to call on the men of the 10th to decimate their own, or to call on other legions to decimate the 10th, because if they refused he would have a full-scale revolution on his hands, and in that case they could not vouch for his safety.

Inflamed by the disloyalty and hardly able to believe that he, victor of the Battle of Pharsalus, should have to deal with such behavior from his own troops, Caesar must have angrily declared that if his own legions wouldn’t march with him, then he’d recruit soldiers from Pompey’s surrendered ranks and use them for the rest of the war instead. The mutinous cries continued. Probably after annoucing that he would give his legions the night to think it over, Caesar left the tribunal, and the legions were dismissed.

Caesar would have been genuinely shaken by what had just taken place. Assured by his cavalry commanders that he had the loyalty of his eight hundred surviving German and Gallic mounted troops, he probably allocated the bulk of the cavalry to guarding the prisoners overnight, in case the ringleaders of the mutiny tried to set them free. He also sent officers through the POW camp beside the Enipeus, seeking volunteers from among Pompey’s men to join new units fighting for Caesar. And he would have stationed the German troopers of his bodyguard around his own quarters and the pay chests.

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With the morning of August 12, Caesar would have stepped up in front of a new assembly of his troops. If he were to now ask those men who were prepared to continue marching with him to step forward, and few did, the damage to his prestige would be incalculable. His authority was on the line, and he dare not risk it. So, to maintain control, Caesar apparently announced that he was sending all his own legions back to Italy with Mark Antony, and that he was continuing the pursuit of Pompey with the cavalry and a legion of volunteers from the ranks of the surrendered Pompeian troops. In language he would repeat later, he would have declared that once he had beaten Pompey he would come and deal with the question of discharges, bonuses, and other rewards. But not before. He then stepped down and angrily strode away, leaving his men open-mouthed.

He’d called their bluff.

The legion Caesar referred to was in fact the two cohorts of the 6th Legion that had surrendered beside the Enipeus on August 9. Caesar always preferred Spanish legionaries above all others, and would have had c12.qxd 12/5/01 5:24 PM Page 136

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his officers approach them first of all in the POW camp. These men of the 6th, little more than nine hundred of them, made a deal with Caesar—a short-term deal, based around financial incentives. Perhaps they agreed to march with him for six months, or twelve. But agree to march for Caesar they did. The only other condition stipulated by the proud Spaniards seems to have been that they continue as the 6th Legion, marching behind their own eagle, and not be assimilated into another Caesarian unit.

Within hours, Caesar rode away from the Enipeus with his eight hundred cavalry, heading northeast. Suspecting that Pompey would try calling in debts in Asia and Syria before heading for Egypt as Marcus Brutus had surmised, Caesar was bound for the Dardanelles, and the eastern states beyond. He himself tells us that at the same time he dispatched orders to General Fufius in the south of Greece to send him his five cohorts of the 28th Legion—twenty-three hundred men by Caesar’s reckoning, recruited in Italy the previous year, with limited experience, but unaffected by the mutiny at Farsala and probably even unaware of it.

Over the next few days, while Caesar’s legions mooched around camp, his quartermaster, General Quintus Cornificius, rearmed the 900 men of the 6th Legion and loaded a baggage train with the best kit, supplies, and ammunition available. The 6th Legion then set off, marching northeast to keep their part of their bargain with Caesar.

When he wrote his memoirs, Caesar could not bring himself to reveal the details of the mutiny of his entire army, and attempted to explain away the fact that none of his own legionaries marched with him after the Battle at Pharsalus with the excuse that all twenty thousand survivors had been overcome by their wounds in the battle or by the toil of their long march to the battle site—even though they’d been there several weeks before the battle, had plenty of time to recover from the march, and completely ignoring the fact that the men of the 6th had arrived after his troops and had less time to recover, yet were still fit to follow him.

Over the coming days, another ten thousand of Pompey’s surrendered men in the POW camp accepted the terms offered by Caesar’s officers.

They swore loyalty to Caesar and volunteered to serve in two new Caesarian legions created there on the plain of Farsala, the 36th and the 37th.

Once they were rearmed and ready to march, these two new legions set off after Caesar. By early October they would be encamped in Asia, where they awaited further orders. The remaining POWs marched for the west coast in company with Mark Antony and Caesar’s nine legions, including the 10th.

One of those prisoners heading west with Antony was a veteran soldier of seventeen years’ service by the name of Titus Flavius Petro, whose c12.qxd 12/5/01 5:24 PM Page 137

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hometown was Sabine Reate in central Italy. Originally joining one of Pompey’s legions in the mass enlistments of 65 b.c., he’d distinguished himself fighting for Pompey in the East in his youth. Probably a centurion by the time of his retirement early in 49 b.c., he’d soon been recalled by Pompey, and shipped out of Brindisi in the March evacuation. Serving with one of the three new Italian legions, he’d fought at both Durrës and Farsala before his surrender on August 9. Centurion Petro had seen enough fighting, and didn’t volunteer to serve under Caesar. Pardoned and allowed to go home once he reached Italy, he became a debt collector at Reate after the war and raised a family. His son would work as a farmer’s agent in Asia in his youth, later returning home to Reate to set up in business as a small-time moneylender. Centurion Petro’s grandson would also become a soldier. Rising to the rank of lieutenant general, that grandson would subsequently become the ninth emperor of Rome, Vespasian.

In July and August, a Pompeian fleet under Admiral Decimus Laelius had lain siege to Brindisi, but when news of Pompey’s defeat in Thessaly arrived, it withdrew. Admiral Laelius soon reconciled with Caesar, so it’s possible he helped bring Mark Antony, his legions, and POWs back across the Adriatic from Epirus. One way or another, once Pompey’s ships evacuated his fleeing troops from Buthroton to Tunisia, the Pompeian naval threat on the Adriatic ended until a raid by Admiral Marcus Octavius the following year, giving Antony a clear run back to Italy during these days of the late summer of 48 b.c.

Once they were shipped over to Brindisi, the disgraced legions were dispersed. The 11th and the 12th seem to have soon lost their passion for revolt and were sent overland to Illyricum with General Cornificius to carry out the mission Gaius Antony had failed to accomplish the previous year. The three Italian legions, the 25th, 26th, and 29th, stayed in southern Italy, in the Puglia region. The Spanish legions, the 7th, 8th 9th, and 10th, all marched up the Appian Way to Rome with Mark Antony and set up camp on the Field of Mars just outside the city, where Antony could keep an eye on them.

Antony was apparently under strict orders not to let the men of the four Spanish legions left behind in their sickbeds the previous year, and who’d since recovered and fought off enemy raids on Brindisi and Vibo, where they were now based, mix with the Pharsalus mutineers and be pol-luted by their rebellious ideas. Meanwhile, the men of the 10th and three other legions now at Rome were told that Antony didn’t have the authority to give them their discharge or bonus payments. Only Caesar could do that. And Caesar was busy right now. Chasing Pompey.

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XIII

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THE MURDER OF

POMPEY THE GREAT

aptain Peticius was the master of a grain ship. Typically 90 feet long, with a beam of 28 feet, Roman grain ships could carry 250

C
tons of cargo and 300 passengers. At dawn on the morning of August 10, 48 b.c., Captain Peticius had neither cargo nor passengers. His empty vessel lay at anchor in Thermaikos Bay, a little south of Katerini, off the northeastern coast of Greece. With the Greek wheat harvest about to take place, Captain Peticius and his crew had come looking for a consignment of grain. As the sun rose over the Aegean and the men of his crew were taking down the hide covers strung over the ship’s deck each night to provide shelter and catch rainwater, in preparation for weighing anchor, Captain Peticius was telling them about a dream he’d had the night before.