Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (31 page)

Exactly where in his line General Scipio located himself we don’t know. He probably kept well away from King Juba. The king was a cruel, arrogant brute of a man who’d shown Scipio and most of his fellow noble Romans little respect. Juba’s only friend among the Roman ranks was General Petreius, a man with a similar abrasive nature. After his troops had annihilated Curio’s army, Juba had been contemptuous of Roman force of arms. Weeks before, when he’d seen Scipio wearing his scarlet general’s cloak, Juba had exploded with indignation and declared that only he was entitled to wear scarlet cloaks. Scipio, himself a proud and arrogant man, knew he needed Juba if he was to overcome Caesar. So, swallowing his pride, he lay aside his scarlet cloak and took to wearing a white one, which he sported today.

Scipio, like his son-in-law Pompey before the Battle of Pharsalus, knew that to win he could not rely on his infantry. Like Pompey, he decided to focus on his cavalry superiority. His battle plan earlier, outside Uzitta, had been to outflank Caesar’s outnumbered infantry with cavalry, c15.qxd 12/5/01 5:29 PM Page 162

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then surround them and pick them off, the way his cavalry general Labienus had almost terminated Caesar’s career weeks earlier on the bare plain outside Ruspina. It seems that he had a similar plan here at Thapsus. But here, his freedom of movement was restricted. His line, as it extended in front of Thapsus, was hemmed in by the sea on one side and the salt lake on the other. And part of his army was still frantically working on camp defenses, as Caesar and his officers were well aware—they could see men rushing in and out of the open camp gateways in disorganized confusion.

Plutarch quotes two quite different accounts of Caesar’s activities on the day of the Battle of Thapsus. One goes like this. Caesar had dismounted.

He was walking along his front line, exhorting his troops to fight well when the time came. But his men were so keen to come to grips with the Pompeians, seeing the obvious consternation in their rear, that cohorts started to advance of their own accord, and their centurions had to hurry out in front of them to stop them. Caesar himself yelled to these impatient legionaries that the battle would not be won by an impromptu advance—the men had to wait until he judged the time and the circumstances right. Then, men of the 10th on the right wing made their trumpeters sound “Charge.” The troops here surged forward, and the rest of the line followed suit. Realizing he couldn’t stop the snowball, Caesar signaled “Good luck” to his men—how, we’re not told—then mounted up and charged into the fray himself.

Plutarch says that several other sources had it that Caesar was in fact immobilized on the morning of the battle by one of his epileptic fits. It was said to have struck just as the battle was about to begin, and, feeling it coming on, he quickly had himself taken back to his camp, leaving his subordinates in charge of the battle. Depending on their type, epileptic fits usually strike without warning. But Caesar also suffered from severe headaches, and these may have served to warn him of an impending attack. And, in partial epileptic attacks, the victim remains conscious.

Whatever the nature of Caesar’s particular affliction, he was highly self-conscious about these fits, the first of which had hit him while he was at Córdoba some years earlier. People of the time associated epilepsy with insanity, and Caesar never spoke or wrote of his affliction himself.

Most of his officers likewise respected his memory and made no mention of his illness in their writings, particularly if it meant revealing he was incapacitated at the commencement of one of his greatest battles.

The facts that the battle began almost accidentally and that the officers weren’t able to rein in the troops suggest that perhaps Caesar was indeed not present at the outset, that he was laid low by his epilepsy and only came back onto the scene later.

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One way or another, the attack began with an unauthorized charge by Caesar’s troops. On the extremities of the two wings, Caesar’s slingers dis-concerted the mighty elephants with their lead projectiles; then the men of the 5th Legion charged into the cavalry and elephant formations. On Caesar’s right wing, Scipio’s left, the elephants turned and stampeded ahead of the charge of the 5th and then the 10th Legion, trampling the auxiliary troops lined up behind them. The Numidian cavalry formed up farther back broke up and fled as the elephants careered in through the unfinished gateways of Pompey’s camp and began to trample everything and everyone in their path.

This left the way open for cohorts of the 5th Legion to get behind Scipio’s left wing while the 10th attacked from the front. Virtually surrounded, it was Pharsalus all over again for the men of the legions on the Pompeian left. Up against the tough, disciplined 1st Legion, the progress of the 8th and 9th Legions on the far wing wasn’t as dramatic, but it didn’t have to be. As the Pompeian left swiftly unraveled, the rest of Scipio’s line dissolved, with groups of soldiers fleeing in all directions, some into Scipio’s new camp, many to the camps of Afranius and Juba to the south of the peninsula.

At the Battle of Pharsalus, those inexperienced troops who had sought safety in the camp had paid the price. It was the same here. Caesar’s legionaries swept in through the open gateways of Scipio’s incomplete camp and massacred everyone they found, soldiers and unarmed camp followers alike. Caesar’s troops then pushed on to Juba’s camp and eventually smashed their way in there, too.

Thousands of Pompeian soldiers in Juba’s camp threw down their arms and tried to surrender. But they, along with colonels and generals, were butchered, whether armed or not. Caesarian troops ignored their officers’

orders to stop, killing in an indiscriminate frenzy of blood. Several of Caesar’s own colonels were killed or wounded here by their own troops, who angrily labeled them “agitators.” It’s possible these were officers who’d worked against the mutineers at Farsala and Rome and that their assailants included men of the 10th who were settling old scores.

Despite the apparent simplicity of the action, like the Battle of Pharsalus before it, the Battle of Thapsus raged all day, lasting until nightfall, with a series of actions taking place all over the coastal plain around Thapsus. Some accounts say that fifty thousand Pompeian troops were killed. The more authoritative reports put the number at five thousand to ten thousand, with Caesar’s losses ranging from fifty to several hundred. In anyone’s language it was a comprehensive victory for Caesar.

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As at Farsala, most of the Pompeian generals escaped. Farther up the coast, the port town of Utique was still in Pompeian hands, under the firm command of Cato the Younger. Thousands of soldiers as well as numerous generals and senators flocked to it to escape on the many ships sheltering there. Once all the leading figures had escaped, along with the 1st Legion, which had withdrawn to Utique substantially intact, the principled Cato took his own life. Caesar was later to write a bitter condemnation of him in his
Anti-Cato
.

General Afranius escaped west into Mauretania with a thousand troops, possibly including men of the 4th and 6th Legions, aiming to get away to Spain. His small force was ultimately ambushed, and most of its members, including Afranius, were taken prisoner. It appears that Caesar subsequently had Afranius executed for breaking the parole he’d given after surrendering in Spain. Officially, Afranius was killed by Caesarian troops who got out of hand, along with the young Lucius Caesar, Caesar’s second cousin who’d acted as an envoy between Pompey and Caesar just after Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

As Caesar mopped up all resistance in Tunisia, with one town after another surrendering to him over the next three weeks, King Juba fled to Zama, one of his two capitals, in Numidia, accompanied by General Petreius. With Caesar’s cavalry patrols everywhere, the pair hid in farmhouses by day and traveled at night. But when they reached Zama the inhabitants closed the city gates to them. Juba and Petreius dined together that night, then fought a fatal duel. The survivor committed suicide.

General Labienus, Pompey’s cavalry commander, who had recovered from the fall outside Ruspina, managed to escape from Tunisia by sea and head for Spain, as did the chief Pompeian commander, Scipio, and a number of other officers, including General Publius Varus. Scipio’s convoy of twelve undecked ships was soon caught in a storm and blown into the harbor at Annaba, also known as Bône—Roman Hippo Regius—on the coast of Algeria, only to find a large number of Caesar’s warships also sheltering there. Trapped, Scipio took his own life. But Generals Labienus and Varus succeeded in reaching the Balearic Isles off the Spanish coast, together with the 1st Legion.

Prior to the Battle of Thapsus, Gnaeus, Pompey’s eldest son, had tried to take Mauretania with a motley force of two thousand men, many of them slaves. Repulsed by the garrisons of the local monarchs, he’d sailed to the Balearic Isles, joining his younger brother Sextus, who was hiding there. Now, landing at Cádiz in southwestern Spain with the 1st Legion and other escapees from Africa, the Pompey brothers declared that there, in Spain, they would continue the war against Caesar.

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CAESAR’S LAST BATTLE

aesar returned to Rome by the end of July 46 b.c., after wrapping up Pompeian opposition in Africa and leaving four legions there.

C
Back in the capital he attended to business and enjoyed the adulation of the crowds in a series of Triumphs for his victories in Egypt, Pontus, and Africa, and, by some accounts, also for Gaul. Because a Triumph could only be celebrated over foreign enemies, Thapsus was called a victory over King Juba of Numidia.

But worrying news had reached Caesar from Spain. When the Pompey brothers landed in Farther Spain, Caesar’s two legions based there, the 2nd and the Indigena, both former Pompeian units, had deserted Caesar’s commander, General Trebonius. They’d gone over to the brothers, linking up with the one Pompeian legion that had escaped from North Africa, the 1st. As Caesar recalled General Trebonius to Rome, his three other legions in Nearer Spain, the 21st, the 30th, and a new enlistment of the 3rd Legion raised in Cisalpine Gaul for Caesar and now led by General Pedius, Caesar’s relative and a subordinate in the Gallic campaign, together with General Quintus Fabius Maximus, were instructed not to engage the Pompeys until Caesar reached the scene with reinforcements.

The Pompeys quickly took Córdoba and were in the process of occupying most of Andalusia, attracting large local support and enrolling new recruits daily—their father had been widely popular in Spain. Caesar had reacted with a stream of movement orders. The 5th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 13th had all been shipped back across from Tunisia and were by this time camped in southern Italy. The 28th also had been brought out of Tunisia, but, being just five cohorts strong, it went to Syria. According to Appian, Caesar was already thinking about an operation against Rome’s old enemy in the East, Parthia, once he’d dealt with the Pompeians, and the 28th arrived in Syria with orders to commence preparations for that operation. The other six legions transferred out of North Africa were
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ordered to march to Spain. Meanwhile, the two cohorts of the 6th that had fought so well for Caesar in Egypt and Pontus had been resting in Italy, probably at Rome, where they would have participated in his triumphal parades, and they, too, were ordered to Spain.

It wasn’t until late December that Caesar himself set off. Appian says he made the journey to Spain in twenty-seven days. When he arrived in January, it was accompanied by just his staff officers and personal attendants. Almost certainly he made the last leg, from Marseilles to Tarragona, by sea, avoiding a crossing of the Pyrenees. But in doing so he’d been forced to leave behind his faithful German cavalry bodyguard, so he had dispatched a courier ahead to Generals Pedius and Fabius in Spain with orders to send him a cavalry detachment to act as his bodyguard once he arrived. Camped east of the Guadalquivir River, or the Baetis, as it was called in Roman times, the generals had barely received the message by the time Caesar landed.

Without waiting for an escort, or for his main cavalry force, which was still on its way from Italy with General Nonius Asprenas, Caesar hurried south and joined the legions camped on the border of Nearer and Farther Spain. His rush had been necessitated by stunning news awaiting him in Tarragona: when his veteran legions reached Spain as ordered, after marching from Italy and through southern France, three of them had defected to the Pompey brothers.

Caesar had blundered in sending Spanish legions back to their homeland, legions now four years past their discharge date, legions sick of promises of rewards that never materialized and with no wish to fight their own countrymen, legions that had already mutinied several times over the past few years. Probably inspired by the news that the 2nd and the Indigena had gone over to the Pompeys, the 8th and 9th Legions deserted Caesar and went over to the other side to fight for their own people in their own country. The 13th, the legion that had crossed the Rubicon with Caesar, followed them. Why, it’s unclear. The 13th’s enlistment wasn’t up for another three years. Maybe its legionaries from northern Italy were simply sick of Caesar’s endless unfulfilled promises. No doubt to Caesar’s great relief, his crack 10th and 7th Legions remained loyal to him.

The Pompeys were as surprised as Caesar by the defections. To be on the safe side, the younger Pompey, Sextus, who was now twenty-two, kept the 9th and 13th Legions with him at Córdoba. Only the 8th Legion joined his elder brother Gnaeus’s field army.

In late January 45 b.c., Caesar crossed the Guadalquivir River and advanced deep into Andalusia with the 3rd, 5th, 6th, 7th, 10th, 21st, and c16.qxd 12/5/01 5:32 PM Page 167