Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (27 page)

“So there I was, sitting with Pompey the Great, discussing affairs of state. . . .”

“Why would Pompey the Great discuss affairs of state with you?” one of his seamen asked with a grin.

“I don’t know why,” Peticius replied with annoyance. “He just was.”

“Have you ever met Pompey?”

“Met him? No. But I saw him, several times, in my youth. I could have almost reached out and touched him, he was that close. A fine figure of a man. A fine figure. So, as I was saying, here we were, Pompey and me, and he dressed like a common traveler, and looking in a very dejected state of affairs. . . .”

“Captain,” another crewman interjected.

“What now?” Peticius demanded.

“There’s a riverboat coming out. The people on it seem to want to attract our attention.” The seaman pointed toward the shore.

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The ship was anchored a little way off Paralia. A small port town at a river mouth, it was one of the few landing places on a coast of sand dunes and salt pans. Looking out over the port side, Captain Peticius saw a small boat, powered by several oarsmen, making its way toward his ship from the shore. The little craft was crowded with passengers, and two men were standing in the bow, waving cloaks back and forth and calling out to the ship. Intrigued, Captain Peticius and his crew crowded the rail. But as the boat drew closer they saw that some of its occupants were armed soldiers, and they suddenly became afraid.

“What do you want?” Peticius called worriedly.

“Pompey the Great requires the use of your ship,” came the reply.

In astonishment, Peticius and his crewmen looked at the occupants of the boat, and then, as a round-faced man swathed in a cloak of cheap cloth looked up, Peticius recognized him. “Pompey! It is you!” He slapped himself on the forehead and turned to his companions with a dazed smile.

“What did I tell you?”

Excited and flustered, Captain Peticius ordered a boat lowered, then a rope ladder, then called out to Pompey that he was a Roman citizen and knew who he was, and that his ship was at his service. Pompey was brought aboard, looking ashen-faced, and with him his three generals, his secretary, and his small bodyguard. This, as described by Plutarch, inclusive of Captain Peticius’s dream, was how Pompey escaped from Greece.

The captain upped anchor, raised his sail, and set a course for the island of Lesbos. The tubby merchantman—Romans called them “round ships,” because they were so broad of beam—was soon coasting south along the east coast of Greece, with snowcapped Mount Olympus, home of the Greek gods, away to its right. After passing between the islands of Voriai and Sporadhes, the craft swung due east and crossed the Aegean, arriving at Mytilene, modern Mitilini, capital of Lesbos, where Pompey’s wife, Cornelia, and son Sextus were waiting for him. The last that the young, beautiful Cornelia had heard, Pompey was about to complete the defeat of Caesar. So when a fearful messenger knocked on the door of her villa at Mitilini with the news that her husband had arrived in the harbor—with just a single commandeered round ship and not the fleet of six hundred sleek warships that had sailed for him a week before—she realized what had happened before she was even told of Pompey’s defeat, and fainted with shock.

With just four heavy cruisers he acquired after he picked up his wife from Lesbos and half a dozen frigates he encountered along the way, Pompey made a fateful decision. Instead of trying to link up with his powerful c13.qxd 12/5/01 5:25 PM Page 140

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naval forces west of Greece, he remained in the East, planning to raise new support in the region, starting with Syria. But when he reached the island of Cyprus he heard that Syria was firmly against him. Having sent Generals Lentulus and Spinther to Rhodes to raise support there, he himself set sail south, bound for Egypt, just as Marcus Brutus had predicted.

Pompey headed for Egypt because Roman troops were based there, including men from legions he’d led in the past—he’d acquired five hundred of his cavalrymen from that force the previous year—and he was confident of gaining the support of the teenaged King Ptolemy, who had sizable, well-trained, and well-equipped armed forces.

In addition to his wife, Cornelia, Pompey was almost certainly accompanied by his younger son Sextus, who’d been with Cornelia on Lesbos.

Plutarch was to report that within days of events in Egypt, Cato the Younger would encounter Sextus Pompey with a small flotilla off the North African coast, and from Sextus he would learn of Pompey’s fate.

General Favonius appears to have also remained at his commander’s side.

Plutarch says that young Favonius was so devoted to Pompey that he cared for all his needs during their flight, like a personal servant.

Pompey dropped anchor in a shallow bay off Pelusium, on the northeastern coast of Egypt, on September 28, 48 b.c. The next day he would celebrate his fifty-eighth birthday. Young Ptolemy XIII, no more than sixteen years of age, had been in conflict with his elder sister Cleopatra for the past few months, and he was camped here at Pelusium with an army of twenty thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry while Cleopatra camped in Syria to the north, trying to gather an army of her own around her.

News of Pompey’s defeat in Thessaly reached Ptolemy before Pompey did. Knowing that Pompey was on the run, and seeing his pitifully small fleet, the king’s advisers decided to turn against Pompey to stay in Julius Caesar’s favor. A Roman tribune named Lucius Septimius, who was a commander with the cohorts stationed in Egypt for years to keep Ptolemy and his late father in power, was made a proposition by the Egyptians. Septimius had served under Pompey during the 66 b.c. campaign against Cilician pirates as a young centurion commanding a century in one of his legions, and consequently knew Pompey on sight. The Roman troops in Egypt had been there for years, had forgotten Roman rules and discipline, had acquired local wives and children. Men such as Colonel Septimius knew where their best interests lay. Or thought they did. He agreed to the proposition.

After Pompey sent several officers ashore to discuss the question of assistance from the king, Ptolemy in turn sent a small boat out to Pompey’s c13.qxd 12/5/01 5:25 PM Page 141

flagship. From the boat stepped Ptolemy’s general, the Egyptian Achillas, as well as Colonel Septimius and one of his subordinates, a Roman centurion named Salvius. It’s possible that Septimius wore Egyptian-style clothing, because Pompey didn’t seem to recognize him as a Roman at first.

The pair told Pompey that they’d been sent to bring him ashore to meet the king. Pompey looked at the small boat unhappily, but decided that if he didn’t accept the invitation he risked offending the Egyptians. And right now he needed them. So he bid farewell to his unhappy wife, Cornelia, who didn’t want him to go ashore. After assuring her that all would be well, he climbed down into the boat alongside, wearing his best armor and a scarlet general’s cloak once more.

Pompey was accompanied by Philip, his secretary; Scythes, a slave who’d probably been in Cornelia’s entourage on Lesbos; and just two armed companions, a pair of centurions of the legion he’d left in Cilicia when creating the Gemina—they’d brought a detachment of legionaries to join him at Pamphylia, on the southern coast of modern-day Turkey, when he’d been on his way from Lesbos to Cyprus. Pompey and his centurion bodyguards seated themselves in the boat, and General Achillas, Colonel Septimius, and Centurion Salvius took seats opposite. As the boat pulled away from Pompey’s cruiser and slid across the bay toward the beach, where the young king was sitting waiting on a throne with his army drawn up in rank after serried rank behind him, Pompey’s wife, consumed with dread, watched from the ship’s deck with his son Sextus and Pompey’s small staff.

Plutarch and Appian both record in detail what followed. Looking up at Colonel Septimius opposite as the boat moved across the water, Pompey began to frown. The officer’s face was beginning to look familiar.

“Don’t I know you, fellow soldier?” Pompey asked.

Septimius nodded but didn’t say anything. Pompey looked away, perhaps thinking about his changed circumstances and harking back with regret to his recent poor decisions. Plutarch wrote that Pompey had complained to his companions on the voyage to Egypt that he blamed himself for being talked into the battle at Farsala, and for not taking the precaution of having the navy stand off the east coast of Greece to provide support. Had he not done the former, or had he done the latter, he wouldn’t have been here now, about to beg the help of a boy.

As the boat came gliding into the beach, members of the young king’s retinue walked to the water’s edge, all smiles. The keel ground into the sand. Philip the secretary stood and offered his hand to his general. Pompey rose up and turned to step to the front of the boat. At the same time, c13.qxd 12/5/01 5:25 PM Page 142

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his two bodyguards also came to their feet and turned with him. Behind them, Colonel Septimius drew his sword, stepped forward, and before any of Pompey’s companions could prevent him, plunged it into the general.

As Pompey fell forward, General Achillas and Centurion Salvius slid their swords from their scabbards and slit the throats of Pompey’s centurions; then they, too, struck Pompey.

A woman’s scream echoed across the water—Cornelia had witnessed it all. Still alive, Pompey dragged his scarlet cloak over his head, so that his face was hidden from spectators in his dying moments. As Pompey’s two servants watched in terror, Colonel Septimius then stepped up, and wielding his sword like an ax, severed Pompey’s head with several blows.

Reaching down with his left hand, he grabbed a handful of his victim’s graying hair and lifted the head up for those on shore to see. There was a roar of approval from the Egyptians. Septimius dropped the head, then reached down and roughly removed Pompey’s signet ring, which contained his personal seal, the image of a lion with a sword in its paw.

The body was quickly stripped, then thrown into the shallows. After a throng of Egyptians had insulted the remains, Philip, his secretary, was left on the beach with his master’s naked, bloody corpse. Already, Pompey’s few ships were rowing back out to sea as fast as they could go to preserve the lives of Pompey’s wife and son, as the crews of Egyptian ships in the bay began to man their battle stations to give chase. The Egyptian king was marching away with his army, and with Pompey’s signet ring and severed head, heading back to his camp, feeling satisfied with his day’s work.

Philip sank down beside the headless body. According to Plutarch, Philip cremated the remains on the beach, and both servant and ashes were found there the following day when General Lentulus, commander of Pompey’s right at the Battle of Pharsalus, arrived by sea in search of his commander in chief after an unsuccessful trip to Rhodes. Lentulus was himself seized by the Egyptians and later put to death in prison by Ptolemy.

Four days after the assassination of Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar arrived at Alexandria, hot on his adversary’s trail. The Egyptians proudly informed him of Pompey’s inglorious fate. He refused to look at Pompey’s severed head when it was presented to him by the Egyptians, but did accept his signet ring. Some classical authors say that Caesar cried at the meanness of Pompey’s end. Perhaps he did. Nowhere, in any account of Caesar’s life, is there any suggestion that he’d ever wanted Pompey dead.

He merely wanted to remove an obstacle to achieving his ambitions.

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According to Appian, Pompey’s remains, either bones or ashes, were buried there on the Pelusium shore, and a memorial built over them inscribed “Rich Was This Man in Temples, but Poor Now in His Tomb.”

Pompey’s burial place soon fell into disrepair. Dio says that 170 years later, on a visit to Egypt, the emperor Hadrian made a point of locating Pompey’s forgotten grave and restoring his memorial.

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XIV

:

THE POWER OF A

SINGLE WORD

aesar is here! Caesar is here!” The word swept through the camp like fire before a hot north wind. As the men of the 10th Legion
C
emerged from their tents on the Field of Mars, the trumpets of the legion began sounding “Assembly.”

More than a year had passed since they’d seen Caesar riding out of the camp on the plain of Farsala for the last time, in pursuit of Pompey. He’d spent nine of the past thirteen months in Egypt locked in a life-and-death struggle with the Egyptians, who, after he’d arrived there on October 2, had decided to eliminate him the way they’d eliminated Pompey. Reacting quickly, Caesar had kidnapped young King Ptolemy. Joined by Ptolemy’s sister and rival Cleopatra, Caesar and his small force had barricaded themselves in part of the royal palace at Alexandria. Trapped, and with just his eight hundred cavalrymen, the nine hundred men of the 6th Legion, and the twenty-three hundred inexperienced legionaries of the 28th, Caesar had battled King Ptolemy’s twenty-two thousand troops for months, the contest involving savage street fighting and desperate battles for control of the dock area. He’d sent to Asia for the 36th and 37th Legions, the two units created using former members of Pompey’s army after the Battle of Pharsalus, but the 36th was caught up in strife in Pontus, and only the 37th answered his call. Later, Caesar’s friend Mithradates of Pergamum had marched to his relief with an army made up of allied troops plus the 27th Legion, the unit that had remained stationed in southern Greece all this time. In a battle beside the Nile, Caesar had defeated Ptolemy’s army.

The king himself drowned while trying to escape, allowing Caesar to install Cleopatra, by now his mistress, as queen of Egypt. Caesar had then marched with the 6th Legion cohorts and his cavalry to Pontus, where, adding the 36th Legion and the remnants of two units of King Deiotarus
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