Military history

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A TASTE OF DEFEAT

Plutarch quotes Cato the Younger as saying that when, in his younger days, Pompey had done nothing wisely nor honestly, he had been successful, but now that he was trying to preserve his country and defend her liberty, he was unsuccessful. Certainly, in Italy and Spain things had gone against Pompey, but now in Albania he had his first, if minor success—he won the race with Caesar, reaching Durrës first.

Once his army arrived on the west coast he had his men set to work building a large fortified camp below Durrës, not far from the Apsus River. Hearing that Caesar was approaching, the knees of many inexperienced soldiers in Pompey’s army began to knock. So, led by Caesar’s former deputy General Labienus, Pompey’s generals now publicly swore an oath that they would not desert their commander, that they would share Pompey’s fate, good or bad. The tribunes and centurions of the legions all followed suit, and the troops then did the same.

Caesar, disappointed, came up and camped his legions on the opposite bank of the Apsus, within sight of Pompey’s position, planning to spend the winter there with the hope of being reinforced by Mark Antony in the meantime.

Sure enough, Antony and General Fufius now made another attempt to bring the second wave across from Italy after the weather improved and a good following wind blew up. With the men of the second wave crowded on board, the convoy, reduced by thirty ships now, set sail and tried to make the crossing from Brindisi, even though it would be in daylight. But the frightened crews quickly turned back when blockading warships were sighted. One of the vessels from the convoy failed to see the recall flag flown by Fufius’s flagship and sailed on, into the path of Admiral Bibulus’s battleship. The troopship was soon captured. Admiral Bibulus executed all on board.

Returning to Brindisi, Mark Antony decided not to risk another crossing. He kept his troopships in port and his men in camp. With just fifteen thousand troops ashore in Greece, Caesar was on his own.

Out of the blue, Admiral Bibulus now sent Admiral Lucius Libo, commander of the Liburnian Fleet, to meet with Caesar to discuss a possible peace settlement. Caesar received him, but as Pompey’s admiral pushed for a truce, with the promise that in the meantime any proposals Caesar made would be relayed to Pompey for consideration, Caesar realized that Bibulus was only trying to buy time for more troops to reach Pompey from the East, and broke off negotiations.

It soon became apparent why Admiral Bibulus himself hadn’t attended the meeting with Caesar. Never leaving his ship as he plowed through heavy seas and freezing winter rain in his determination to catch Caesar’s troopships, Bibulus had come down with what sounds like a case of pneumonia. He refused to see a doctor, and before long died at sea. With his death, Pompey lost one of his more brutal but most dedicated senior officers. Command of the fleets now devolved to their individual admirals. This lack of coordination could only help Caesar. Luck continued to run his way.

In February, Pompey’s Admiral Libo made a daring dash across the Adriatic to Brindisi, where he landed a commando force of marines from fifty warships. They sank a number of ships and captured several more, initially causing great panic in the Italian city. But the raiders were soon driven off by Mark Antony’s second-wave troops, who were still waiting in the embarkation camp to cross the Adriatic, and withdrew with their limited spoils.

Almost daily, Antony had been receiving dispatches from Caesar in Albania urging him to bring across reinforcements. Caesar later excused Antony by saying that his deputy was reluctant to bring the last troops out of Italy in case Pompey used his ships to cross the Adriatic behind Caesar’s back and invade Italy. But several classical authors tell the story—not told by Caesar himself—that he became so frustrated by Antony’s failure to reinforce him, despite days and weeks of excellent sailing weather through the latter part of January and into February, that he had his servants hire a twelve-oared fishing boat to take him across to Italy so he could personally stir his subordinates into action. He then boarded the craft disguised as a slave. But soon after the boat began the voyage, the weather changed. As the crew prepared to turn back, Caesar revealed his true identity and urged the fishermen to continue on. But the weather grew steadily worse, and in the face of a howling gale Caesar was forced back to shore, after which he abandoned the idea of the covert trip to Italy.

Finally, in March, inspired by their success against Libo’s commandos and feeling the heat of Caesar’s increasingly strong-worded dispatches demanding to know why they weren’t taking advantage of the favorable winds, Antony and General Fufius embarked ten thousand men of the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 29th, along with eight hundred cavalry, and set sail for Albania with a strong south wind and fingers crossed.

As Antony’s fleet of transports approached the coast near Durrës, the squadron of Rhodian cruisers based there under Admiral Gaius Coponius came out after it. But the wind strengthened into a gale, and while most of Antony’s ships found shelter in a cove three miles north of the town of Lissus, modern Alessio, sixteen of Admiral Coponius’s cruisers were dashed to pieces on the rocky coast.

In the middle of the night, the storm subsided. While Antony landed his troops north of Alessio and pulled Pompeian sailors and marines from the sea, two of his troopships that had ridden out the storm at anchor off Alessio now found themselves surrounded by burning torches on Pompeian small craft from the town. Weakened by seasickness and promised lenient treatment by Pompeian officers, 220 raw recruits of the 29th Legion aboard one ship surrendered. Disarmed, the Italian teenagers were taken ashore, where they were all summarily executed by the Pompeian commander at Alessio.

There were just under 200 experienced legionaries from one of Caesar’s veteran Spanish legions on the other ship, men of the 7th, 8th, or 9th Legion with seventeen years’ hard service under their belts. Rather than surrender, they forced the ship’s master to run their vessel onto the shore, and in the morning landed. The Spanish legionaries fought their way through a Pompeian cavalry detachment sent to capture them, then marched three miles along the coast and joined Mark Antony.

Both Pompey and Caesar received word of Antony’s landing at much the same time. Pompey reacted quickly. He broke camp and marched his army south, intent on intercepting Antony’s legions and wiping them out. He would avoid battle with Caesar, but Antony was a different proposition; Pompey had no respect for the generalship of Caesar’s deputy. Uncharacteristically, Caesar reacted more slowly than his adversary. Seeing Pompey marching south, and then realizing what he was up to, he also gave the order to march, determined to link up with Antony before Pompey could attack him.

Pompey set up an ambush, but local Greeks forewarned Antony as he was marching up the coast. Antony immediately built a camp and stayed put, sending messengers to Caesar to tell him of the situation. As Caesar approached, and unwilling to tackle his main opponent, Pompey had no choice but to abandon his plan. He struck camp and skirted around Caesar, marching back to the Durrës area, establishing a new camp some miles south of the town.

Caesar was now able to reunite with his faithful friend Mark Antony. Combining their legions, Caesar now had an army of twenty-six thousand men. But even if he’d had more troops to draw on back in Italy, he could have kissed them good-bye, because now Pompey’s eldest son, Gnaeus, brought the Roman fleet normally based in Egypt ranging along the Adriatic coast in a devastating raid. At one coastal town after another, young Pompey captured or burned Antony’s transports as they rode at anchor. Overnight, Caesar lost his capacity for resupply from Italy and was cut off in Albania.

For the first time in his illustrious military career, fortune seemed to have deserted Julius Caesar. Now, if he was to be the victor in this war, he would have to win with twenty-six thousand men. And he would have to do it soon, while he still had supplies.

In Asia, Pompey’s father-in-law, Metellus Scipio, had received word that Caesar had landed in Greece. Rapidly now, he brought his two legions into Macedonia. Anticipating this, and receiving deputations from towns throughout the region saying they would come over to him if he had troops in the area, Caesar sent several forces east and south—General Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus with the 11th and 12th Legions, General Lucius Longinus with the 27th Legion, and General Gaius Sabinus with the five remaining cohorts of the 28th, with orders to garrison friendly towns, to forage for supplies, and to screen Scipio’s movements.

Caesar says these legions did their job well. First Scipio would advance on one screening force, then wheel around and go after the other. According to Caesar, Scipio expended a great deal of energy for naught, losing a number of cavalry in one skirmish, and was kept from joining up with his son-in-law.

Meanwhile, Caesar followed Pompey back up toward Durrës, then tramped off through the hills to the east. Pompey let him go, thinking he was going in search of wheat. Then it dawned on him what Caesar was up to. Rapidly he broke camp and marched his army north along the coast. Within a day, his worst fears were realized. By forced march, Caesar had used hill paths to work his way north of Pompey’s position through the mountainous terrain. Marching up the road from Apollonia, Pompey came up on Caesar’s army digging in along the coast south of Durrës. Now, to reach his food and ammunition stored at Durrës, Pompey would have to go through Caesar’s army.

Pompey had his legions build a camp on a rocky mountain slope called Petra, overlooking the coast road and the bay south of Durrës. The bay offered a reasonable anchorage, and he gave orders for his ships to start bringing fresh supplies to him from eastern Greece and Asia via Corfu. At the same time, Caesar sent troops foraging far and wide for grain, with limited success.

Caesar, as much an engineering genius as a master soldier, then began building a double line of entrenchments right around Pompey’s camp. By the time he had finished, the inner line ran for fifteen miles and incorporated twenty-four forts. The outer line, set back eleven hundred yards, extended for seventeen miles. The inner line of wall and trench was intended to keep Pompey in, the outer to keep his sailors and marines out. To counter this, Pompey had his chief of engineers, Theosaphanes, a Greek from Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, build a formidable entrenchment line of his own inside Caesar’s.

Several times Caesar lined up his troops in the open in battle formation, inviting Pompey to come out and fight. But Pompey didn’t accept the invitation. He simply didn’t have sufficient confidence in his forces for an all-out battle, and was aiming to win a war of attrition. There were numerous skirmishes during the construction work as parties sallied forth here and there for hit-and-run raids, with a few casualties to both sides, but in the end the result was a stalemate.

All the while, both sides were becoming more and more hungry. Caesar sent a number of raiding parties against the town of Durrës itself, hoping to secure its supplies, but all were repulsed by Pompey’s garrison. Both the narrow approaches to the port and numbers were against Caesar—for a full-scale assault he would have had to risk depleting his forces in the encirclement, inviting an attack by Pompey behind his back.

As the months passed, Pompey knew that to survive he had break out of the encirclement. It had been many years since he had last been involved in a military campaign, but he had surprised his men over the past twelve months by taking part in their infantry training and cavalry exercises, showing he was just as agile, just as adept as any of his troops. Nor had the years dulled his brain. A shrewd tactician, he decided to concentrate on just one part of the encircling fortifications, and came up with a scheme to improve his chance of success.

The section of Caesar’s narrative dealing with the first part of this operation is missing, probably edited out by one of his friends after his death, as were a number of other incidents that showed that Caesar had blundered—such as the escape from Spain of Generals Afranius and Petreius with the men of the 4th and 6th Legions. This same section is also missing from other, later histories, which rely heavily on Caesar’s version of events. Fortunately, from Appian, who took some of his information from the memoirs of Caesar’s staff officer Gaius Pollio, we know a little of what took place.

It was probably in mid-June that residents of Durrës stole out of the city and found their way to Caesar, offering to change sides and betray the town to him. They told him to come in the dead of night to one of the city gates, the one near the shrine of Artemis, which was apparently outside the city walls, bringing a small number of picked men. Then, just before dawn, they would open the gates to him so he could seize the city.

This offer was too good to refuse, and, taking a detachment from his German cavalry bodyguard with him, Caesar slipped away from the encirclement and rode through the night to the town to keep the appointment. It seems Caesar was so disappointed with Mark Antony after his slowness in bringing over the second wave that he gave him command of the four legions he’d brought to Albania but not the powers of second-in-command of the whole army. Either that, or Antony accompanied him to Durrës. Either way, in his absence Caesar now left General Publius Sulla, nephew of the famous Sulla the Dictator, in charge of the encirclement of Pompey’s army.

Like many towns of the day, Durrës had outgrown its walls, and a number of newer buildings had been built along narrow lanes leading up to the city gates. Here at daybreak, as Caesar approached the gate by the temple of Artemis, Pompey sprung a trap. Caesar’s cavalry were ambushed in the lanes by waiting troops, and they had to fight desperately to make their escape, with Caesar himself only just evading capture. Caesar later tells us there were three skirmishes this day at the town, so it is probable he led two counterattacks before withdrawing on receiving news of what had taken place back at the encirclement.

As the sun was rising over the bay at Petra, at the same moment that Caesar was fighting for his life at Durrës, Pompey launched a full legion supported by a large contingent of archers against one of the twenty-four forts on the perimeter of Caesar’s encircling trench line. The fort was occupied by a cohort of the 8th Legion commanded by a Colonel Minucius, in the sector under the overall jurisdiction of Mark Antony. To draw potential reinforcements away from Pompey’s main target, two other forts were attacked at the same time at different parts of the encirclement, one by a force at legion strength, the other by a German cavalry detachment that was probably led by General Labienus.

It had been a moonlit night, but aided by thick clouds that shrouded the moon, the assault force had crept unseen across no-man’s-land and quietly filled in parts of the trenches skirting the fortified wall of the 8th Legion fort. As dawn broke, the spearhead troops surged across the trench, paving the way for archers, who set about raining arrows into the fort. The cohort of the 8th held out for four hours until General Sulla dealt with the feints, then arrived with two legions to relieve them; the 10th may have been one of these units, but we don’t know. The appearance of reinforcements prompted Pompey’s assault troops to withdraw.

Caesar says his troops killed two thousand of the attackers in this action, but no other account corroborates this figure, which, considering Caesar’s track record, is without doubt substantially inflated. He also says that for his side not more than 20 of the fort’s defenders were killed in four hours of fighting, again a suspect figure. But he does admit that every survivor was wounded—some 250 to 300 men—with 4 centurions of the 8th Legion cohort losing eyes to arrows.

Among the wounded, according to Appian, was the fort’s commander, Colonel Minucius, who also lost an eye and received five additional wounds. When Caesar arrived back from Durrës he was shown the shield of Cassius Scaevus, a junior centurion of the 8th grade who’d taken over command of the fort after Colonel Minucius and the four other more senior centurions were wounded. If we can believe it, the shield had been punctured 120 times in the fight. Caesar also claims that his men collected thirty thousand Pompeian arrows that had been fired into the fort. Centurion Scaevus was promoted to the first rank and received a bonus of two hundred thousand sesterces, a fortune for an enlisted man. All the other survivors of the cohort were later given duplicarius status—their wages were doubled—and received extra food and clothing allowances.

Caesar had sent General Fufius south to take command of the force led by Generals Longinus and Sabinus, comprising the 27th Legion and five cohorts of the 28th, and he advanced into the Boeotia region, accepting the surrender of the famous cities of Delphi and Thebes and storming several others. But Fufius’s successes in the south weren’t helping Caesar at Durrës. With each passing day, the supply situation became increasingly grim on both sides. Caesar’s men resorted to digging up the roots of a local plant called “chara,” which they mixed with milk to make a kind of bread.

Troops deserting from Caesar’s army—and quite a number apparently changed sides—took loaves of this unsavory creation to Pompey as proof of the hard times being endured by Caesar’s troops, and Pompey is said to have remarked that the opposition troops were becoming like animals, eating the roots of wild plants. Pompey’s own army was little better off for provisions. His men killed all their pack animals, and fed their increasingly weak cavalry horses the leaves of trees. Pompey’s cavalry arm was much larger than Caesar’s, and, with little confidence in much of his infantry, Pompey was determined to maintain his substantial mounted superiority. As he saw both his men and his cavalry horses dropping, he was forced to set in motion a new plan for a breakout to gain access to his supplies.

Pompey’s latest plan came together in early July after two major defections from Caesar’s camp. Roucillus and Egus were brothers from the Rhône valley in southeastern France. The sons of Adubucillus, chief of the Allobroges tribe, they had been commanders of Caesar’s Gallic cavalry for the past ten years, and even appear to have been enrolled in the Senate at Rome the previous year by Caesar in reward for their service. According to Caesar, when they heard rumors that complaints had been laid against them accusing them of embezzling cavalry funds the pair went over to Pompey, although it’s likely Caesar invented this to explain away their change of loyalties.

Whatever their motivation, the two cavalry generals knew Caesar’s dispositions, the strong points and the weak points of his encirclement, and the weaknesses of the various units. And Pompey welcomed them. He paraded the two senior defectors around his camp for all his men to see, and he talked with them for hours at a time about Caesar’s camp and his army. And then he made careful preparations.

At dawn on the still morning of July 7, the Spanish legionaries of Caesar’s 9th Legion manning the western side of the entrenchments, by the sea, found themselves suddenly under sustained attack. Just like the last time Pompey launched a perimeter assault, heavy clouds had hidden the moon, and again legionaries and archers who had crept into position in the predawn darkness were all over Caesar’s defenses in moments.

Roucillus and Egus, the high-placed defectors, had told Pompey that the fortifications at this point in the encirclement, just below those manned by the 8th Legion, were incomplete, that the Spanish legionaries of the 9th Legion occupying this sector were overdue for their discharge and not very happy about their continued service, as demonstrated by their mutiny at Piacenza the previous fall, and that the 9th’s commander, Major General Lentulus Marcellinus, was unwell and often in his sickbed. These were weaknesses that begged exploitation. Pompey also knew that the sector commander was Mark Antony, and he’d never had any respect for Antony’s military abilities.

Now, while some of Pompey’s legionaries made a frontal attack, filling in the ditches in front of the Caesarian wall, then bringing up assault ladders and artillery pieces, archers worked their way around the flanks. The only form of missile that the men of the 9th possessed was stones. Pompey’s intelligence was so good he even knew this fact, and he’d equipped his storm troops with special wicker coverings for their helmets that created faceguards to protect their faces from flying stones.

The legionaries who carried out this dawn assault stuck to their task and Pompey’s well-planned attack overwhelmed the men of the 9th, who were all mature soldiers, in their midthirties or older. Most of their senior centurions fell. The eagle of the 9th was almost gained by the attackers before its dying eagle-bearer passed the standard to other hands. General Marcellinus sent reinforcements, but they were beaten back by Pompey’s determined assault force. Urgent smoke signals were sent to Caesar to bring help, and they were relayed from fort to fort around the miles of entrenchments by burning flares.

At the nearest fort, Mark Antony assembled a relief force, then rushed down the hill with twelve cohorts from the 7th and 8th Legions, both of which formed part of his command. These reinforcements stabilized the situation to the south, but Pompey’s troops still managed to break out to the sea where they had overrun the 9th Legion. The 9th’s fort had been taken and the double walls of the encirclement were breached in numerous places along the shoreline so that Pompey’s cavalry could get out and seek fodder, and ships could land supplies.

As Caesar himself hurriedly arrived with more reinforcements, a Pompeian unit of legion strength was seen to occupy a deserted Caesarian camp three hundred yards from the sea; the camp had originally been built by the 9th Legion at Mark Antony’s direction weeks before. At the time they had been forced to give it up by constant attack from Pompey’s archers and auxiliaries, and the camp, out in no-man’s-land, had become untenable for both sides. Things were different now that Pompey had pushed back the 9th from its position on the water’s edge; the deserted camp was his for the taking.

It seems that the men who now occupied this camp were from Caesar’s former 24th Legion, the unit that the previous year had defected to Pompey at Corfu. As they took up defensive positions on the ramparts of the camp, Caesar could see that these troops would be able to cover supplies coming to the beach. If he was to seal the hole in his encirclement and prevent Pompey from landing supplies coming up from Corfu, he had to dislodge the men now holding that camp.

Caesar, smarting at having been outmaneuvered by Pompey, planned a counterattack. Setting some troops to work very visibly extending defensive walls and trenches to cover his troop buildup in the area, he soon launched a surprise attack on the camp recently occupied by Pompey’s cohorts. In two lines, thirty-two cohorts, including legionaries from the 7th and 8th Legions and all the surviving men of the 9th Legion, swept up the slope toward the camp, supported by cavalry.

Pompey’s men put up a furious fight from the camp’s walls, even though they were outnumbered three to one. Here Caesar gives praise to one of Pompey’s officers. Centurion Titus Puleio, who had served bravely with Caesar’s legions in Gaul before being assigned to the 24th, had been among Gaius Antony’s troops when they were intercepted on the Adriatic. Puleio had been the one who convinced them all to go over to Pompey. Now Puleio fought like a demon, inspiring his men.

Led by Caesar himself, the left wing of his assault force broke into Puleio’s camp. But the men of the 8th and 9th Legions on the right wing became lost in the confusing entrenchments. Caesar’s cavalry followed the men on the right wing, filing along a narrow passageway between trench walls. At this moment Pompey himself appeared, at the head of five legions, coming to the support of his men at the camp. The 1st Legion was almost certainly at the forefront of this force. Pompey always kept the elite legion close by him. The other four legions were probably the 15th and the three legions recruited in southern Italy before Pompey’s withdrawal to Greece.

Encouraged by the sight of their commander in chief coming up with the experienced legions, Puleio and his troops fighting for their lives in the camp regained the initiative and charged Caesar’s men, driving them back. Seeing this sudden change of fortune, Caesar’s cavalry panicked. They tried to go back the way they had come, down the narrow alley. The troops of the right wing, seeing the cavalry turning and fleeing, seeing Pompey coming with thousands of reinforcements, hearing their comrades inside the camp in trouble, and fearing that they were going to be cut off, jumped into a ten-foot trench that they thought would provide an escape route. Hundreds of Caesar’s men were trampled to death in this trench as their own desperate colleagues jumped in on top of them in an attempt to escape.

Seeing the cavalry in wide-eyed flight, Caesar tried to stop them, but they ignored him. He grabbed standards to stem the flood, but the standard-bearers simply let go of them and kept going. Appian even writes of a frantic standard-bearer trying to stab Caesar with the pointed bottom tip of his standard in his desperation to get away—and being cut down by men of Caesar’s bodyguard. As the infantry also now flooded in confusion back toward their own lines, the stragglers being overtaken and cut down by the men of Pompey’s legions, Caesar had no choice but to retreat himself.

At this point Pompey had the opportunity to turn a success into a victory. With thousands of Caesar’s troops retreating, many in panic, he could have continued on with his five legions, and with his cavalry just then starting to come up, he could have overrun the siege works and rolled up Caesar’s army. But he ordered his troops not to pursue the fleeing Caesarians. Pompey himself never explained why.

Caesar later speculated that the scope of Pompey’s success on the day was far beyond his expectations—Pompey had merely wanted to break out to the sea so his supplies could reach him. Caesar was sure that Pompey was afraid of being led into an ambush. No one had ever seen Caesar’s troops run before. It had to be a trap. Some reports have Caesar later belittling Pompey, saying the enemy could have had a victory that day if they’d possessed a general who knew how to gain it.

In this encounter, which historians were to call the Battle of Dyrrhachium, Pompey’s troops captured thirty-two standards from the 9th Legion and other units involved in the right wing of Caesar’s counterattack and from the Caesarian cavalry. Pompey and his men justifiably celebrated the outcome of the battle as a success. But it could have been so much more.

A chastened Caesar admitted to losing 960 legionaries, the majority of them from the 9th Legion, as well as 36 officers—4 of the rank of general and 32 tribunes and centurions. And he had hundreds more wounded; Caesar never revealed exactly how many, but the number was substantial enough, together with the fatalities, to reduce the effectiveness of the 8th and 9th Legions to the point that Caesar later combined the two. But had Pompey followed up on his success, Caesar could have lost the war. Yet again, Julius Caesar’s luck prevailed.

After the unaccustomed experience of failure at Durrës, Caesar decided to withdraw. The siege line had been broken, and Pompey could once again be supplied by sea. It was pointless for Caesar to keep his troops in the trenches, particularly when they were starving. First, with the men in marching order, he called an assembly, and from the tribunal publicly demoted standard-bearers who had fled during the battle.

Then, as his memoirs record, he told the assembled legions: “The setback we have sustained cannot be blamed on me. I gave an opportunity for battle on favorable ground. I took possession of the enemy camp. I drove the enemy out. Through your fear, or some mistake, or some stroke of fate, the victory that was as good as in our grasp was lost. So it falls to you to make an effort to repair the damage, through your valor. If you do, you will turn our loss to gain, as happened at Gergovia.”

Well did the listening men of the 10th Legion remember the siege of Gergovia, four years before, Caesar’s reverse during the Vercingetorix Revolt in central France. It had been the men of the 10th who’d saved the day for Caesar back then.

Caesar sent the baggage train on ahead just after sunset. As the wagons and pack mules moved out in the darkness, Caesar kept the bulk of his army in camp, with all the visible signs of occupation. In the last hours of darkness next morning Caesar then pulled out his main force. The troops were able to travel light and fast without the impediment of the baggage train, which had a start of eight hours or so. At forced-march pace they hurried east. In Macedonia and Thessaly there were towns friendly to Caesar. They, and their wheat fields, could provide the one thing his troops needed now: food.

Next morning, as soon as he realized that Caesar had pulled out, Pompey set off in pursuit. Leaving Cato the Younger in charge at Durrës with fifteen cohorts detached from his legions, he left his own baggage train behind to make its own progress; this would allow his infantry to make good time, and hopefully catch Caesar on the march. Encouraged by his subordinates, and more confident of the morale of his troops following the success at Durrës, Pompey was more inclined toward a pitched battle now. His confidence spread through the army. His men would have shared jokes about what they would do to Caesar’s raw recruits when they got ahold of them.

A detachment of Pompey’s cavalry caught up with Caesar’s rear guard, which fought them off, and by the middle of the day the two armies prepared to spend the night at camps in eastern Albania. Again Caesar had a trick up his sleeve. Just when a number of Pompey’s troops departed from his camp and marched out of sight to provide an escort for their baggage train, which was straggling up from the coast, Caesar suddenly set off again with his entire force. They covered another eight miles before making a new camp that night, leaving Pompey in their wake.

Each day after that, Caesar would send his baggage on ahead in the night, then follow later with the army. After four days of trying to pursue Caesar, Pompey gave up the chase. Instead, he diverted east to Thessaly to link up with his father-in-law, Metellus Scipio, who was camped with his two legions at the town of Larisa on the Peneus River.

Caesar made a halt at Apollonia, modern Pollina, then a famous center of learning. This stop was just long enough for Caesar to leave his wounded behind—several thousand men, mostly from the veteran Spanish legions that had been fighting for him for the past thirteen years. Detaching a total of eight cohorts of fit legionaries, almost certainly from his newer Italian legions, he spread them between Apollonia and two other towns to maintain his hold on the region. He then continued east and linked up with the veteran legions under his general Domitius Calvinus, the 11th and 12th, which had been screening Scipio’s two legions in Thessaly.

Gomphi, a town in Thessaly, had gone over to Pompey after the news of his success at Durrës, and Caesar decided to make an example of it, to ensure the cooperation of other Greek communities. A little rape and pillage wouldn’t do the damaged morale of his men any harm, either. Surrounding the town, he sent his legions against its walls. They began the assault in the early afternoon. As the sun was setting, they broke into the town. Caesar gave his troops permission to plunder Gomphi. It was destroyed, and every one of its inhabitants killed.

The victorious troops drank the town dry, with, according to Appian, Caesar’s German cavalrymen in particular ending up disgustingly drunk. Germans in general, Appian remarked, had no head for drink, especially wine. A similar observation would be made by Tacitus a century later.

Leaving Ghompi a smoking ruin, Caesar marched on to the town of Metropolis. At first it closed its gates to him. Then news reached the townspeople of the fate of Gomphi. Metropolis quickly opened its gates to Caesar. Before long, he moved on.

A little east of Metropolis, Caesar crossed the Enipeus River. Just to the north of the river, on a plain covered with ripening wheat, he made camp. The town of Pharsalus, modern Farsala, was on a hill some way off in the distance. Several miles to the northwest, the plain was fringed by the foothills of Mount Dogandzis. Here Caesar was determined to do two things: cut down the wheat as soon as it was ripe so his men could get some fresh bread in their bellies again, and then offer Pompey battle.

A few days later, Pompey marched into Thessaly and linked up with Scipio, father of the beautiful young Cornelia, his fifth wife. Cornelia, widow of Publius Crassus, youthful commander of the 7th Legion who had impressed many in Gaul before dying with his father at Carrhae, was waiting on the island of Lesbos to the east with Pompey’s youngest son, nineteen-year-old Sextus Pompey. Already couriers were on their way to Cornelia with news that her husband had achieved a great success at Durrës and he was now in hot pursuit of Caesar. The message-bringers assured Cornelia that Caesar’s ultimate defeat was now just a matter of time.

As the legions of Pompey’s two armies combined with cheers of greeting, and as friendly banter was exchanged between the ranks, Pompey honored Scipio by appointing him his co-commander. Giving up his tent to him and pitching a new one for himself beside it, he also issued orders for the trumpeters who sounded the changes of watch every three hours to do so from outside Scipio’s quarters, as a mark of respect.

The combined army resumed the pursuit of Caesar, finding him on the plain of Farsala. Pompey chose a camp site three miles to the northwest of Caesar with the advantage of higher ground, making his camp in foothills fringing the plain to the west, with Mount Dogandzis rising behind him.

Pompey was still reluctant to commit to a full-scale battle. Despite his success at Durrës, and even though he outnumbered Caesar, he had little confidence in the majority of his infantry. He knew that Caesar had by far the most experienced legionaries, and when it came down to it, experience would win out over numbers. Pompey’s plan now was to avoid a major encounter and wear Caesar down through a war of attrition. Few of the generals and senators with him were of the same view, as they repeatedly informed him. This was the big difference between Pompey and Caesar, and why Pompey had so much popular support—he would listen to others, although for now he put off their demands for a decisive battle by saying the time was not yet right. But, says Caesar, so sure were members of Pompey’s party that victory was just around the corner that they began to argue among themselves about who should receive what official appointment after Caesar had been defeated.

Pompey called a council of war. He told his colleagues to be neither overconfident nor impatient, but assured them that they would indeed do battle with Caesar in due course, and that when the armies met he would defeat Caesar before the two battle lines even came together. The secret, he confided, lay with their cavalry.

In his memoirs, Caesar disparaged General Labienus, his former deputy and now Pompey’s cavalry commander, claiming that at this war council Labienus assured his fellow Pompeian generals that all Caesar’s best troops were dead and that the bulk of the Caesarian soldiers now were inexperienced, poor-quality levies from Cisalpine Gaul and Transalpine Gaul. This claim by Caesar is just plain silly. From highly placed deserters such as Roucillus and Egus, Labienus and his fellow commanders knew precisely what the makeup of Caesar’s army was, knew about his four veteran Spanish legions, including the 10th, knew that just two of his legions, the 11th and 12th, were from Cisalpine Gaul, and that they were made up of highly experienced men. Besides, both Pompey’s best legions, the 1st and the 15th, were from Cisalpine Gaul.

From other sources we know what Labienus actually said that day. He did encourage his colleagues, but not by putting down Caesar’s troops. All Romans were highly superstitious and much influenced by omens, and Labienus, probably a member of several priesthoods, assured his fellow commanders that all the omens were auspicious and pointed to a victory for Pompey. General Labienus then led all present in an oath that once they went out to fight they would only return to camp as victors. Pompey’s supporters enthusiastically took the oath, and left the meeting in high spirits.

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