IX
In his day, and long after it, men spoke of Julius Caesar’s great luck. Caesar wouldn’t have felt so lucky as he climbed the tribunal this chill day in December of 49 B.C. and looked out over the thousands of legionaries assembled in front of him at the Brindisi embarkation camp. The only subject of conversation at the camp over the past few days would have been the dreadful news from North Africa. Gaius Curio, his two legions, and his cavalry had been wiped out in Tunisia, primarily by the forces of Pompey’s friend and ally King Juba of Numidia.
The men of Curio’s legions, almost certainly the 17th and 18th, had been former Pompeian recruits from the Marsi and Paeligni areas of central Italy who had come over to Caesar after the fall of Corfinium in February. The news of their annihilation—probably brought to Caesar by Colonel Pollio, who had been on Curio’s staff and was among the few to escape from Tunisia alive—had been so unexpected, and was so potentially shattering to the morale of his men, particularly the new, inexperienced recruits, that Caesar knew he had to address them—and make an impression.
In front of him stood the men of eleven legions plus several hundred cavalrymen. The 10th and 11th Legions had been the last to arrive. They’d had the farthest to march. Some of the other units had been camped here at Brindisi, the rest in the Puglia region, right through the summer and fall. Now they had been divided into two groups. These would be the two waves of his invasion force. At Piacenza, after the news of the loss of Gaius Antony’s ships, Caesar would have done a rapid mental calculation and reckoned that with the transports he had left to him he might have to invade Greece in three waves, sending the ships back twice after the initial landing for the subsequent waves. But now it looked as if just two convoys would be required. Hacking coughs coming from the ranks would have been evidence of the cause of change in logistical plans.
The same malady that had affected Pompey’s troops at Brindisi in February and March had reappeared in southern Italy in the autumn with a vengeance, and now gripped Caesar’s army, laying low his men in their thousands and making the embarkation camp one large melancholy hospital. Few if any tents would have been without a man or two lying, moaning, perspiring, coughing, in his bed. In an era when there were no antibiotic drugs, the sickness had reduced the legions to less than half their normal numbers of able-bodied men.
Caesar had chosen the 10th Legion to accompany him in the first wave of the landing, along with the other veteran troops of the 11th and 12th Legions. The rest of the first wave would be made up of the 25th, 26th, and 27th Legions, and the men of the five cohorts of the 28th Legion left behind when Gaius Antony embarked on his ill-fated Illyricum operation, all of them untried recruits drafted in January and February. Caesar’s first wave was a deliberate mixture of youth and experience. The second wave, which would be commanded by Mark Antony, would comprise the mutinous 7th and 9th Legions, plus the reliable 8th, Spanish legions all, and the Italian youths of the newly formed 29th.
“My soldiers,” Caesar began. Caesar himself recorded the words he used this day, words that would have been repeated by centurions for those in the rear ranks who could not hear him directly. According to Suetonius, Caesar pitched his voice high when speaking in public, and used impassioned gestures in a theatrical style that impressed his audience. Cicero was to write that he knew of no more eloquent speaker than Caesar, and that his style was grand, even noble.
“We have come almost to the end of our toils and dangers,” Caesar went on. “You may therefore leave your slaves and baggage behind in Italy with easy minds. You must embark with only basic kit to allow a greater number of troops to be put on board the ships available. When we win, my generosity in reward will answer all your hopes.”
When he asked if his troops were with him, a chorus of agreement would have swelled up from more than twenty-five thousand voices.
In the dead of night, the convoy ran before a favorable wind. Aboard their transports at the forefront of the first wave, the men of the 10th Legion stood tense and silent in their squads, gripping onto their weapons, to the sides of their lurching ships, to their neighbors. Some were sardined down in the holds; others were crammed on deck. Most would have been seasick. We hear of the prevalent seasickness of troops involved in later amphibious operations, here on the Adriatic and on the Mediterranean, and this crossing would have been no different.
Even though they probably weren’t particularly popular with his men, Caesar had a penchant for amphibious landings and night operations. He liked the way an amphibious assault could deliver a mass of troops to one place at one time. He also liked to use the element of surprise that darkness provided, recognizing, as Appian has Caesar say, that “the mightiest weapon of war is surprise.” In modern times, Caesar would have been a great exponent of the use of paratroops and the U.S. Marine Corps for troop insertions. Always at night, of course.
It was the night of January 4, 48 B.C. This was before Caesar adjusted the Roman calendar, so it was then running two months behind our own calendar, making January a month in late autumn. Just the same, by all accounts the weather was wintry this January, and the spray coming over the prows of the ships and licking the faces of seasick Spaniards of the 10th as the landing craft bucked through the Adriatic troughs would have been refreshingly icy cold.
This operation was yet another new experience for the men of the 10th. They’d fought in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Britain, and Spain; they’d recently marched the length of Italy, the center of the Roman universe, to reach the embarkation camp just days before the year ended; and now they were on their way to invade Greece. What stories they’d have to tell their grandchildren—if they lived that long. These men had been through amphibious landings before. They’d invaded Britain twice, after all. But that had been different. There had been no opposition naval forces lurking in the darkness when they crossed the English Channel. Now, somewhere out there in the night, picket ships of Pompey’s navy might appear at any moment. Pompey possessed six hundred warships of various classes, spread among five fleets. And many of them were based here on the Adriatic.
Everyone on board the ships of the convoy was conscious of the fate of Gaius Antony and his men of the 24th and 28th Legions who had been caught on the Adriatic by Admiral Octavius the previous year. But that botched operation and its timing had not been unexpected. At least this time the Pompeians weren’t expecting visitors. Sure, everyone on both sides of the Adriatic knew that sooner or later Caesar might invade Greece, but even the men of 10th would have thought that Caesar would wait until the spring. No one launched a major operation like this on winter’s eve. No one except the ever-audacious Julius Caesar.
The darkness was their chief ally. It negated Pompey’s naval advantage. If the convoy was spotted, it would be through bad luck. And everyone in his army knew about Caesar’s famous good luck. Caesar had planned it so the landing would take place unseen, in the early hours of the morning. The empty transports would then dash back across the Adriatic to Brindisi, clearing the coast of Greece well before dawn, returning the following night with the next wave. And with Pompey’s navy none the wiser.
The epidemic had reduced all eleven legions of the task force, so that now fifteen thousand legionaries from the seven legions of the first wave and five hundred German and Gallic cavalrymen were crammed aboard the landing ships, with thousands of their comrades still in their sickbeds back at Brindisi. The intent was that once they recovered, the victims would be ferried over to join their legions in Greece aboard later convoys. As it transpired, those men would remain in Italy, garrisoning the ports of the southeast and southwest, fighting off Pompeian commando raids, and even serving as marines in an Adriatic sea battle before rejoining their legions two years later.
Like foot soldiers in all wars in all times, the men of the 10th Legion wouldn’t have been told exactly where they were going. But they would have guessed that the landing zone was somewhere between the Pompeian naval bases at Durrës and Corfu, almost directly opposite Brindisi, near the present-day border between Greece and Albania. Landing there, right under the noses of the enemy, was a dangerous proposition, but the very audacity of it would have boosted the confidence of the men of the 10th.
Caesar had originally intended launching the operation on New Year’s Day, and the men of the 10th and the other first-wave units had filed down to the docks through the narrow streets of Brindisi on January 1 and climbed the gangplanks to their ships, only to be told to disembark again after a couple of hours’ standing, waiting for the outgoing tide. The weather out on the Adriatic had deteriorated rapidly, and Caesar had reluctantly canceled the operation, forcing the troops to tramp back along the cobbled lanes to the embarkation camp, to wait for a better day. That better day had come.
There was much about Caesar’s 48 B.C. amphibious invasion of Greece that would be mirrored by the Allied landing in Normandy two thousand years later, in June 1944, and in the same way that Caesar had to put off the operation because of bad weather, so deteriorating weather conditions would force the Allied commanders to postpone their landing from June 5 to June 6.
As his convoy approached the Albanian coast in the late-night darkness, Caesar’s plans had to be altered yet again. The wind changed, swinging around to blast down from the north, driving the invasion fleet farther south than Caesar had intended—right past a Pompeian squadron of eighteen cruisers riding at anchor at Oricum, toward the island of Corfu, and Pompey’s main battle fleet based there. Yet Caesar’s luck held, and the convoy slipped through Pompey’s naval blockade in the inky dark.
In the last, nerve-racking hour of the run, the wild, mountainous coast of the Epirus region of Greece, just to the north of Corfu, loomed out of the night away to the left. The location wasn’t ideal. There were no harbors here; in fact, this area was infamous as a graveyard of ships swept by gales onto its rocky shore and wrecked. And Caesar would have farther to march once on shore than he’d originally intended, and over rough country, too. But Caesar gave the order for the landing to go ahead. A signal lantern was quickly run up on his flagship.
The steersmen of the leading ships now shoved their twin tillers hard over, and turned their craft toward the shore. Sailors prepared to take in sail. The legionaries of the landing force tensed for the crunch of terra firma under the keels of their transports and listened for the order from their centurions to go over the sides.
It was near Palaeste on the Epirus coast that Caesar ran his ships up onto the rocky shore like latter-day landing barges, enabling the troops to rapidly disembark. It is likely that the men of the 10th were the first to hit the deserted, stony beach. Unexpected and unopposed, the night landing went off without a hitch and without a casualty.
Caesar refloated the ships on the tide, and, with the wind changing to a southeasterly, as it always did during the early morning in these climes at this time of year, he sent them back to Brindisi with General Quintus Fufius Calenus to pick up the legions and cavalry of the second wave waiting anxiously with Mark Antony.
We can imagine the scene as, on Corfu, a servant of Admiral Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus tentatively shook his master’s shoulder. The admiral, in his bed, opened his eyes to the news, no doubt told in a hushed voice and in the light of a flickering oil lamp that a picket ship had reported sighting enemy ships off the coast. The picket vessel’s captain felt sure a landing was taking place.
Bibulus would have sat up abruptly. Pompey had appointed him admiral in chief of all five of his fleets stationed along the coasts of Greece, Albania, and Croatia and given him the task of intercepting any Caesarian invasion force. Bibulus was a good choice for the job. Caesar’s fellow consul in 59 B.C., foul-tempered but determined and capable, he’d had several political confrontations with Caesar in the past, coming off the worse each time. As a result, he hated Caesar with a passion. Rising now he would have taken up his scarlet cloak from the back of the chair where he’d thrown it as he went fully dressed to his bed, as was the Roman habit. Quickly draping the military cloak around his shoulders, he would have stormed from his sleeping chamber, issuing a stream of instructions to bleary-eyed staff officers as his armor-bearers flocked around him with his personal arms and equipment.
Furious that his captains had failed to intercept the invasion fleet, Admiral Bibulus ordered the 110 battleships, cruisers, and frigates based at Corfu to immediately put to sea. As junior officers scurried around the onshore billets rousing the crews of the fleet, the admiral hurried to the dockside to board his flagship.
The landing of the troops of the first wave had taken longer than it should have. The last squadron of Caesar’s invasion fleet to depart Epirus for the return run to Italy had hardly put out to sea when the first rays of daylight began to peek over the top of the Ceraunian Mountains behind them. Before long, the strong breeze that traditionally blew from the south on January nights dropped away. Soon the empty transports were drifting helplessly, within sight of the coast.
The first to go into action because they had fewer crewmen to round up, Admiral Bibulus’s fast frigates came sliding out of Corfu Harbor with their timekeepers rapidly pounding the beat for their skilled oarsmen and with the eyes of their lookouts peeled. Soon spotting the wallowing transports, the frigates rapidly overtook the stranded craft. Thirty of Caesar’s troopships were captured.
Before long, Admiral Bibulus’s own daunting battleship came surging onto the scene—probably a vessel of the deceres class, 145 feet from end to end, with a beam of 28 feet, equipped with three banks of oars up to 40 feet long and a crew of 800 oarsmen, sailors, and marines.
From the deck of his flagship, Bibulus would have surveyed the cargo vessels rolling with their sails struck and their crews looking up at him plaintively, his expression as cold as the morning air. According to Caesar, angry that he hadn’t been able to stop the invasion, and knowing that Caesar would attempt to reinforce his landed troops with further legions from Italy, Bibulus decided to make an example of the captured vessels.
“Burn them,” he ordered.
“And their captains and crews, Admiral?” a subordinate would have asked.
“Leave them where they are.”
The battleship’s artillery pieces, trained on the captured vessels, would have been loaded with bolts dipped in tar. The tar was set alight. The burning bolts were fired at the cargo vessels. Soon all thirty were burning fiercely as the crews of the warships all around them watched the spectacle in engrossed, ghoulish silence. Those crewmen on the thirty doomed transports who didn’t burn to death were drowned when they jumped into the cold, dark waters to escape the flames. Any who tried to swim to the Pompeian warships were fended off, and they, too, were eventually claimed by the waves.
Back at Brindisi, as the hours passed and the ships of the last squadron failed to arrive, the realization hit Mark Antony and General Fufius that the missing transports had been intercepted. The crews of their remaining ships began to talk fearfully about the risks entailed in making a second crossing now that Pompey’s navy had obviously been alerted to the operation.
As the weather deteriorated during the rest of the day, Bibulus cast his warships along the west coast of Greece and Albania like a net, ordering them to anchor in every safe harbor and potential landing place. That night he stayed at sea, beginning the habit of sleeping on board his flagship so he could react more quickly to sightings of enemy ships in the future.
The same day that he landed in Epirus, Caesar began advancing north toward Durrës with the men of the 10th and his six other legions of the first wave. He would have had intelligence that Pompey was keeping large amounts of stores at Durrës for the winter, enough to last him well into the spring, but as the main Roman port on the Adriatic coast and starting point of the Egnatian Way, the Roman military highway to Thessalonika and the East, it always would have been an objective anyway. Once he had taken that, Caesar could ship reinforcements and supplies straight across from Brindisi with some security.
Almost as soon as he landed, Caesar set free a prisoner he’d brought over from Italy with him, to perform a task he probably planned well in advance. Lucius Vibullius Rufus, one of Pompey’s officers, had been made a prisoner twice by Caesar; once at Corfinium in February during Caesar’s advance into Italy, a second time after he’d fled to Pompey’s legions in Spain, only to be caught up in their surrender. Caesar now gave Vibullius Rufus a horse and told him to find Pompey and put a peace proposal to him. The deal was that both leaders were to dismiss their armies within three days and then allow the Senate at Rome to decide a final settlement to their differences. Only an idiot would agree to terms like these—over the past nine months Caesar had filled the Senate with his supporters, and any decision they made would naturally favor Caesar. But he wanted to be seen as the honorable man in this conflict, the man whose hand was continually forced by the forces pitted against him.
As Vibullius Rufus galloped off to fulfill his mission, Caesar advanced up the west coast without meeting any resistance. Town after town threw out its Pompeian commander and small garrison and then opened its gates to the Dictator.
Meanwhile, as Caesar’s landing was taking place in the west, Pompey, in northeastern Macedonia, was breaking camp and marching his bolstered army of upward of forty thousand men out of his base at Veroia, heading west to spend the winter on the west coast at Durrës, his main supply base, and as yet totally ignorant of the invasion.
Vibullius Rufus headed north until he reached the Egnatian Way, then turned east and rode as fast as he could, changing horses at every town until he met Pompey on the march on the highway. Breathlessly he gave Pompey the news of the invasion, news that sent ripples of panic through the non-Roman contingents of the army, the troops furnished by eastern allies, and passed on the peace offer, which Pompey promptly and not surprisingly dismissed out of hand. No doubt cursing Caesar for surprising him twice within twelve months—first by crossing the Rubicon with just one legion, now by invading Greece on the eve of winter—Pompey ordered his army to march for Durrës at the double, day and night. If Caesar reached the port first and seized his stores, Pompey would be in deep trouble.
The race for Durrës was on.