Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (35 page)

Like Caesar, Antony would have valued his Spanish legionaries above all others. Almost certainly, Antony followed Caesar’s practice and put the 10th Legion on his right wing this day. The unit charging forward on the extreme left of Antony’s line was the Spanish 4th Legion, which had been given back to him by Octavian after the formation of the Triumvirate. Some of the 4th Legion’s men were former Pompeian legionaries who’d signed on for a new enlistment under Caesar after the legion’s defeat at Thapsus. Most were new recruits raised in Spain since 45 b.c.

In giving the left to the 4th Legion, Antony was paying it a high compliment. The legions on an army’s extreme wings were always considered its best. Appian was to describe the 4th Legion as being of the highest quality at this time, ironically in tribute to the unit’s performance against Antony in the Modena battles the previous year.

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Brutus was preparing for battle when the unexpected charge came on his right. He’d placed the legion he considered his best on his right wing—we don’t know its identity—under the command of General Marcus Valerius Corvinus Messalla. Surviving the battle and the war, Messalla would later write of this day’s events in his memoirs. Reconciled with Octavian after Philippi, Messalla served under him at Actium, after which he was made a consul. His memoirs, consulted by classical authors including Plutarch, have not come down to us. According to Plutarch, Messalla noted that when Antony’s charge came, Brutus was busy organizing his cavalry and supporting infantry, while at the same time his orderly sergeants were still going about their legions handing out the
tesserae,
small wax sheets containing Brutus’s hastily revised watchword for the day.

Many of Brutus’s men went into action even before the new watchword reached them.

No one could say that Mark Antony was a coward—he’d proven his courage time and again in numerous battles. Equally, he was to show in numerous battles that he was an inept if not appalling tactician. He could be assessed as a poor general served by excellent lieutenants. Now, in leading this unexpected charge, he certainly grabbed the initiative and had the element of surprise on his side. But in taking his line forward against Cassius’s position he exposed his left wing to Brutus’s troops—the men of the 4th Legion had to run past Brutus’s battle line, inviting the opposition to swing in on their rear.

Brutus’s eager troops on his right wing couldn’t believe their luck.

Anticipating General Messalla’s orders, his legion launched an attack on the 4th Legion before he or Brutus even gave the word. They drove in around the 4th, attacking it from the flank and rear and cutting down its men in droves. As more of Antony’s troops came up in support of the 4th, more of Brutus’s legions joined Messalla’s unit and increased the pressure on Antony’s left.

The men of the 4th, conscious of their reputation, put up a ferocious fight, but their wing was eventually overwhelmed by superior numbers.

General Messalla’s legion and another fighting beside it excitedly swept on to Octavian’s troops as they stood in their lines watching the battle, outflanked them, and cut their way through legion formations and those of Greek auxiliaries. They reached the camp of Antony’s and Octavian’s army and overran it, killing everyone they found, and looted it.

Appian tells us that Octavian was to write in his memoirs—which were never published but kept in the imperial archives at Rome, where only those with permission to do so could consult them, and where they and all other official records were destined to be destroyed when Rome c18.qxd 12/5/01 5:38 PM Page 186

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was sacked by invaders in later centuries—that the night before the battle he’d had a dream that had warned him not to stay in camp. So he had himself removed to a safer place earlier in the day. Plutarch says that it was a friend of Octavian’s, Marcus Artorius, who’d had the cautionary dream. Either way, the fact that Octavian took heed of this dream enabled him to escape the bloody fate of others caught in his camp.

In the meantime Antony, unaware of the disaster on his left, had broken through Cassius’s line on his right. Probably with the 10th Legion in the vanguard of his attack, Antony personally led the assault on Cassius’s camp, driving through three legions in his path and smashing down the camp gates. According to Plutarch, Antony himself now withdrew, leaving his troops to an orgy of destruction and pillage in the camp.

All around him, Cassius’s troops fled in terror. As his cavalry dispersed and galloped off toward the sea to the east, his infantry began to give way as well. Grabbing a standard from a fleeing standard-bearer, Cassius planted it in the ground, determined to become the focal point for a stand. But he had difficulty rallying even the men of his personal bodyguard and in the end was forced to mount up and withdraw up the hill behind his camp.

Trying to observe the course of the battle from the hilltop with just a few remaining supporters, Cassius could see little because of a huge dust cloud roused by the feet of 160,000 combatants and 40,000 horses, in what was the largest battle of the era. All he could see with any clarity was Antony’s legions overrunning his camp below and killing everyone in it.

Cassius was no military novice. A little older than Brutus, he’d been quartermaster in Crassus’s army at the Carrhae debacle in 53 b.c., and had been primarily responsible for the fact that some ten thousand Roman troops had managed to survive that battle and escape back to Syria. He’d successfully commanded a fleet for Pompey in the early years of the last civil war. And over the past year he’d defeated two legions led by General Publius Dolabella on an abortive invasion of Syria on behalf of the triumvirs, then invaded and occupied the island of Rhodes in a series of sea and land battles. But now, for all his military experience, Cassius assumed the worst: Brutus was dead, his troops overrun, their mutual cause lost.

Seeing cavalry galloping toward his hill, he sent a staff officer named Titinius riding down to determine their identity. When Titinius reached the cavalry he found they were from Brutus’s forces. Recognizing him, the cavalrymen surrounded him, embracing him, and patting him on the back. But from his hilltop vantage point, it looked to Cassius as though his friend had been overwhelmed and made a prisoner.

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Most classical historians agree that there are two accounts of what followed, and none is sure which to credit as the truth. One account has the desolate Cassius ordering his servant Pindarus to kill him with his sword, while the other version says that Pindarus murdered him. Either way, Cassius died there on the hilltop on the day of the battle, which, coinciden-tally, was also his birthday.

Brutus was neither dead nor defeated. The end result of the battle was something of a stalemate, with both armies losing camps but remaining reasonably intact. According to both Appian and Plutarch, the latter quoting General Messalla, Brutus’s army had the better of the encounter, leaving only eight thousand dead on the field, while Octavian and Antony lost sixteen thousand men. Among the dead were a great many legionaries of the 4th Legion. In Appian’s narrative of the battle, Brutus was to boast to his troops the next day that they had “completely destroyed the famed 4th Legion.” Not quite, but the badly mauled 4th probably played little part in further operations against Brutus. As to the 10th, its casualties are not mentioned.

If anything, Antony and Octavian can be said to have suffered a reverse in the First Battle of Philippi. Not only did they lose twice as many men as their opponents on the battlefield, but also, out on the Adriatic that day, another convoy sailing from Brindisi to bring them reinforcements—the Martia Legion and one other, plus cohorts of the Praetorian Guard—was intercepted by 130 opposition warships, which swarmed all over the heavily laden transports. Many troopships were sunk and thousands of legionaries and Praetorians died, some consumed by flames in burning vessels, others drowning in the Adriatic, others still dying of thirst in succeeding days as they clung to wreckage. Weeks later, a number of survivors were found on deserted islands.

Yet, the republican cause took a body blow with the death of the well-respected Cassius. The morale of the troops opposing the Triumvirate had to be affected, not to mention that of Brutus. And three weeks later, at three o’clock in the afternoon of October 23, Brutus, likening himself to Pompey at Farsala, was dragged unwillingly into a second Battle of Philippi near the location of the first by his officers, who included his close friend and Pompey’s dedicated follower General Marcus Favonius.

This time Brutus’s dispirited forces were routed by Antony and Octavian. At first Brutus led his left wing in a successful charge, but his right wing quickly gave way, allowing Antony’s and Octavian’s legions to swing around into Brutus’s rear and steamroll his troops from behind, much as Brutus had devastated the 4th Legion a few weeks earlier. Among the c18.qxd 12/5/01 5:38 PM Page 188

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fatalities were Brutus’s deputy, General Antistius Labeo, and Flavius, his chief of engineers, both of whom died before his eyes, and his cousin Marcus Cato, son of Cato the Younger.

When Brutus’s surviving four legions refused to continue the fight, he was forced to flee with just a handful of supporters. Shortly after, he took the honorable way out. His head was sent to Rome for display on the Gemonian Stairs, the traditional fate of traitors. His chief surviving followers, including Favonius, were led off in chains to an uncertain fate.

With the death of Julius Caesar’s “son” and chief assassin, hostilities came to an end.

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There was still work for the men of the 10th Legion in the coming years.

First there would be soldiering against the Parthians with Antony, who was determined to carry through Caesar’s planned invasion of Parthian territory, and then the great confrontation between Octavian and Antony and Cleopatra that, in the summer of 31 b.c., would bring the 10th to a promontory on the west coast of Greece called Actium.

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Details of the Battle of Actium are in part sketchy. The battle was a long time coming, but it was inevitable. Between 42 and 33 b.c., Antony and Octavian became increasingly at odds. By 36 b.c., Lepidus had been pushed out of the Triumvirate after foolishly trying to convince Octavian’s legions on Sicily to throw their support behind him. Lepidus played no further part in Rome’s government. By some accounts retaining just his post as
pontifex maximus,
according to Suetonius he lived out the rest of his days in exile on the coast of southwestern Italy, at Circeii, today’s village of San Felice Circeo, then an isolated summer resort popular with the Roman elite. This left Antony, in control in the East, and Octavian, in charge at Rome, to fight over who would eventually rule the empire.

In the 30s b.c., Antony’s legions had success against the Parthians in Armenia. Although most of the credit was due to his deputy, General Ventidius, that didn’t stop Antony from riding in a pseudo Triumph through the streets of Alexandria. At the same time, Antony developed an amorous relationship with Queen Cleopatra of Egypt that scandalized Roman soci-ety. Already married, and at a time when Romans could not legally marry c18.qxd 12/5/01 5:38 PM Page 189

foreigners anyway, he treated Cleopatra as his consort and partner, his wife in all but name. His stocks in Rome fell even lower when he gifted Roman territories in the East to her. The latest power-sharing agreement between Antony and Octavian was not renewed when it expired in late 33 b.c. Hostilities were just a matter of time.

Antony wasn’t without his supporters in Rome. As the war clouds gathered in 32 b.c., judging the mere slip of a boy Octavian unfit to lead them, both consuls for the year and more than two hundred senators departed Rome and fled to the fifty-year-old Antony in Egypt. But Octavian retained the loyalty of the legions in the West, who saw him as the legitimate heir of Julius Caesar, the commander they’d come to venerate.

With an army the equal of Antony’s and an organizational ability and tactical sense that Antony never possessed, Octavian had the tools to win this contest.

Both sides prepared for war, but in different ways. Many of Octavian’s legions had been raised by Caesar in Italy at the outbreak of the civil war in 49 b.c. and were due to undergo their sixteen-year discharge this year, 33 b.c. But rather than lose these experienced veteran troops Octavian kept them in service, promising them big rewards once the conflict with Antony was settled.

In the East, a number of Antony’s legions were also due for discharge, but he let most of his veterans retire, replacing them with recruits drafted in the territories under his control, being effectively cut off from the recruiting grounds of some of his legions such as the 3rd, a unit that had been recruited in Cisalpine Gaul for the last few enlistments, and the 4th, a Spanish legion. He raised new recruits for several of his legions, including the 3rd, in Syria, which had been made a Roman province by Pompey thirty-one years before. Meanwhile, letting those surviving Spanish legionaries of the 4th who wished to retire do so—he had no desire to bring on a repeat of the mutiny of Spanish legions under Caesar that had damaged his own reputation—Antony filled their places with new recruits from Macedonia. The 10th Legion had more than three years of its current enlistment to run, so Antony still had the Spanish veterans of his best legion marching with him.

In 31 b.c., to bring their conflict to a head, the two opponents began issuing each other challenges. Octavian offered Antony a beachhead in Italy, with space for a camp, where their two armies could fight it out.

Antony replied with a challenge of his own—single combat, just the two of them, like the heroes of Greek legend. When Octavian turned down that flamboyant invitation, Antony issued another, this time for a pitched c18.qxd 12/5/01 5:38 PM Page 190