Military history

XII

THE SOUR TASTE OF VICTORY

At dawn on August 10, Pompey’s troops on the hill came down to Caesar, lay down their arms, then prostrated themselves before him and begged for their lives. Caesar told them he would spare them all and instructed his troops to treat the prisoners leniently, then told the 10th and his other three Spanish legions to prepare to march on Larisa as he gave chase to Pompey.

What transpired now appears to have gone along the following lines. To his astonishment, tribunes now came to Caesar to say that the men of the Spanish legions refused to march another step for him. The revolt probably began with the 9th Legion. Its troops had never forgotten the way Caesar had decimated its ranks at Piacenza the previous autumn. Nor had they forgotten his promise of one last battle. Well, they’d fought the battle, and they’d defeated Pompey, as they’d promised. Now they wanted Caesar to keep his promise. They wanted their overdue discharge, they wanted the bonus he’d been promising his legions for eighteen months, said by Suetonius to be as much as twenty thousand sesterces a man, a fortune for legionaries with a base pay of nine hundred sesterces a year.

It’s likely that the men of the 8th quickly joined the 9th. They would have reminded their general that their continued service was illegal. They had signed enlistment contracts in 65 B.C., and so had the state. Their discharges had been due two winters back. They had served well past their discharge date as a favor to Caesar, but now that they had done what he’d asked of them, they just wanted to go home. The 7th Legion, always slow to join the others when they ventured into disputes, would have then followed suit.

Shocking Caesar even more, the men of the 10th came out in sympathy with their countrymen, apparently demanding their bonuses before they took another step toward the enemy. They had lost their most fanatical centurions in the previous day’s battle, and now, free of their influence, they could express their frustration and disappointment with the general who never seemed to keep his promises.

Caesar, furious, was determined not to be blackmailed by his own troops after he’d just won the greatest victory of his career. If these legions weren’t prepared to obey orders, he had others that would. He sent couriers galloping back to his main camp by the battlefield, with orders for four of his other legions to march at the double to his present location and replace the Spanish legions. When these units arrived, about midmorning, together with more of Caesar’s cavalry, he sent the 7th, 8th 9th, and 10th back to the Enipeus with Mark Antony, escorting the Pompeian prisoners. Intending to deal with the leaders of the mutiny when he returned, Caesar prepared to march on Larisa with the newly arrived troops.

Typically, in his own narrative, Caesar makes no mention of the revolt by his troops after the Battle of Pharsalus. Of this initial flare-up and its consequences, he merely says that he decided to send the four legions that had accompanied him from the battlefield back to camp to rest.

A messenger now reached him from Larisa, bearing a letter from Marcus Brutus. The previous night, a number of senators with the Pompeian troops on the hill had slipped away in the darkness and reached Larisa, and Marcus Brutus had been among them. About thirty-seven years of age, Brutus was a handsome and erudite senator with much influence among his peers as the nephew of Cato the Younger and also because of his natural talents and a winning personality. His mother was Servilia, Cato’s sister. Years before, Servilia had fallen in love with Julius Caesar when both were only teenagers, she being a young widow at the time. Their relationship ended when she remarried, but before long it was apparent she was pregnant. Many classical authors were to write that when Marcus was born Caesar felt sure the boy was his. While Caesar was only fifteen when Brutus was born it’s not impossible that they were father and son. Romans started their sex lives early—females could legally marry at twelve, while males officially came of age in their fifteenth year. Whatever the biological facts, for the rest of his days Caesar treated Brutus like a son.

Caesar had been staggered to learn at the outbreak of the civil war that like so many of those near and dear to him, Brutus had taken Pompey’s side. Caesar’s surprise was exacerbated by the fact that Pompey had executed Servilia’s new husband and Brutus’s “father,” Marcus Junius Brutus, some years before, and was never on friendly terms with the young man. But Brutus was a republican at heart, and believed in the values espoused by Pompey. Since the previous year Brutus had been serving on the staff of Pompey’s governor of Cilicia, but, bored, had come of his own accord to join Pompey in Thessaly.

When Caesar had learned that Brutus was in Pompey’s camp, he’d issued orders to his officers that nothing was to happen to the young man if they encountered him. If he surrendered of his own free will they were to bring him to Caesar. If he refused to surrender, they were to let him escape. Now, Caesar was overjoyed that the young man was alive and well, and he hurried to Larisa with his cavalry, leaving the replacement legions to follow at their own pace.

In his letter, Brutus had probably told Caesar that the people of Larisa wished to submit to him; when he arrived, the town opened its gates to the conqueror. There, he embraced Brutus, and immediately pardoned him. A little later, as they walked in private together, Caesar asked where Brutus thought Pompey might go. Pompey hadn’t confided his intentions to Brutus, but, according to Plutarch, Brutus guessed that Pompey would seek support in Egypt.

Spending the night at Larisa, having learned that Pompey had stopped only briefly at Larisa the previous day before continuing on to the east coast, and with intelligence that he had since escaped by sea, Caesar turned around and marched back to the plain of Farsala with his four legions and cavalry, to look after unfinished business.

Arriving in the afternoon, he went first to Pompey’s former camp. Colonel Pollio was with him as he surveyed the scene. Caesar sneered at the way Pompey’s officers had left the camp, with artificial arbors, tents of generals spread with fresh turf and decorated with ivy, their tables laid with vast amounts of silver plate in readiness for the victory banquet they’d expected to celebrate after the battle, all of which offended Caesar, who had a soldier’s taste and expected a military camp to look like a military camp, not a bordello.

The camp was littered with thousands of bodies, which would have already been beginning to bloat and reek in the summer heat. According to Colonel Pollio, who was at Caesar’s shoulder as usual and would note his chief’s words for use in his later memoirs, some of the dead here were soldiers, but most had been unarmed Pompeian noncombatants who had been killed by the indiscriminate blows of Caesar’s troops as they overran the camp the previous day.

Caesar shook his head. “They brought this on themselves,” he said disdainfully. “They forced it on me. I, Caesar, after succeeding in so many wars, would have been condemned to a similar fate if I’d dismissed my army as they wanted.”

He moved down to the battlefield on the plain. Here men of both sides still lay where they had fallen. Mass graves were dug for most of the dead, but when Caesar learned that Centurion Crastinus of the 10th had perished in the battle, he had his body found and buried separately. Before his body was interred, Caesar laid several bravery decorations on the dead centurion’s chest.

With grim satisfaction Caesar surveyed the trophies of the battle, 180 captured Pompeian standards piled untidily on the trampled corn, nine of them the eagles of legions. He was to claim that just 200 of his men had died in the battle, including 30 centurions. It was a lie. Indications are that he lost 200 cavalry alone. Plutarch and Appian agree that his actual losses at Pharsalus were 1,200. Caesar also claimed that 15,000 of Pompey’s troops were killed and 24,000 captured. But this distortion was to hide the fact that so many escaped—18,000 in all. Many of Pompey’s troops would reach Buthrotum, today’s Buthroton, in southwestern Albania, opposite Corfu.

When Cato, at Durrës, heard of the defeat in Thessaly, he also came down to Corfu. Pompey’s ships that had been anchored at and near Corfu subsequently shipped many thousands of Pompeian escapees to North Africa, among them men of the 1st, 4th, and 6th Legions, as well as General Labienus and sixteen hundred of his German and Gallic cavalrymen.

Colonel Pollio made a liar of his chief by revealing in his memoirs that the actual Pompeian losses in the battle were a maximum of six thousand soldiers, not fifteen thousand, plus an unknown number of noncombatants. Ten officers of general rank on Pompey’s side died, along with some forty colonels. But, like Pompey himself, many of his senior generals escaped: his father-in-law, Scipio, Afranius from the camp with Pompey’s son Gnaeus, as well as Generals Labienus, Petreius, Lentulus, Spinther, and Favonius. The only senior Pompeian general to fall was the ill-starred Domitius Ahenobarbus, commander of the left wing. Trying to escape the camp and reach Pompeian troops digging in on Mount Dogandzis, General Domitius had collapsed, exhausted, and was overtaken and killed by Caesar’s cavalry.

With Pompey still alive and as many as eighteen thousand troops still armed, loyal, and on the loose, Caesar wanted to give chase, but now there is a sudden gap in his story, which is only explained by later events. The gap is caused by the revolt initiated by his Spanish legions. We can only speculate about precisely what took place next, but it likely that it was at dawn the next day, August 11, that Caesar called the traditional postbattle assembly of all his troops and doled out praise, promotions, pay raises, and decorations to his men on the recommendation of their tribunes and centurions. We know from Appian that Caesar now announced that once the war was at an end every man could look forward to substantial rewards, both in terms of money and grants of land, but he didn’t go into detail.

Indications are he then advised that as soon as the army was ready to march, they would be going east, to chase Pompey. But before they could do that, he was forced to punish the four legions that had disobeyed his orders on the road to Larisa on August 9. The war was not yet over, and would not be over until Pompey and his adherents were soundly defeated, he would have said, and there was no room for disobedience. Therefore, as an example to all, he was going to decimate the 10th Legion.

The men of his legions would have looked at Caesar in astonishment. They all knew that his victory two days earlier had come chiefly as a result of the efforts of the 10th Legion. If the 10th hadn’t forced the 1st Legion to retreat, Pompey’s line wouldn’t have given way. The men of the 10th were probably dumbfounded, but howls of protest rose up from the men of the 8th and 9th, and then the 7th. Then the 11th and the 12th joined in. This wasn’t justice, they cried. The men of the Spanish legions began to renew their demands for their discharge and their bonuses, swearing once again to not march another mile for Caesar. They knew that they had the strength of numbers. Without his army, Caesar was nothing, and they knew it. Perhaps a chant began. “Discharge! Bonuses! Discharge! Bonuses!”

And now they were joined by the men of the other legions, the recruits from Italy, also demanding their bonuses before they followed Caesar any farther. He’d made an error in sending the Spanish legions back to camp while he’d gone to Larisa. It had only allowed the mutinous spirits to inflame the passions of their colleagues even more. And when they were rejoined by the other legions, they’d shared their grievances with them and won their sympathy and support. Besides, the legions would have suspected that Caesar had secured Pompey’s pay chests and could afford to pay them. Men demanded more than empty promises. Give them their money now, they cried. Discharge the men who were being kept in the ranks illegally! And if Caesar was going to give them grants of land, they told him to make sure it wasn’t confiscated land with disgruntled former owners living right next door. Yelling, chanting, jeering, the troops were becoming ugly.

Caesar’s officers now probably warned Caesar not to call on the men of the 10th to decimate their own, or to call on other legions to decimate the 10th, because if they refused he would have a full-scale revolution on his hands, and in that case they could not vouch for his safety.

Inflamed by the disloyalty and hardly able to believe that he, victor of the Battle of Pharsalus, should have to deal with such behavior from his own troops, Caesar must have angrily declared that if his own legions wouldn’t march with him, then he’d recruit soldiers from Pompey’s surrendered ranks and use them for the rest of the war instead. The mutinous cries continued. Probably after annoucing that he would give his legions the night to think it over, Caesar left the tribunal, and the legions were dismissed.

Caesar would have been genuinely shaken by what had just taken place. Assured by his cavalry commanders that he had the loyalty of his eight hundred surviving German and Gallic mounted troops, he probably allocated the bulk of the cavalry to guarding the prisoners overnight, in case the ringleaders of the mutiny tried to set them free. He also sent officers through the POW camp beside the Enipeus, seeking volunteers from among Pompey’s men to join new units fighting for Caesar. And he would have stationed the German troopers of his bodyguard around his own quarters and the pay chests.

With the morning of August 12, Caesar would have stepped up in front of a new assembly of his troops. If he were to now ask those men who were prepared to continue marching with him to step forward, and few did, the damage to his prestige would be incalculable. His authority was on the line, and he dare not risk it. So, to maintain control, Caesar apparently announced that he was sending all his own legions back to Italy with Mark Antony, and that he was continuing the pursuit of Pompey with the cavalry and a legion of volunteers from the ranks of the surrendered Pompeian troops. In language he would repeat later, he would have declared that once he had beaten Pompey he would come and deal with the question of discharges, bonuses, and other rewards. But not before. He then stepped down and angrily strode away, leaving his men open-mouthed. He’d called their bluff.

The legion Caesar referred to was in fact the two cohorts of the 6th Legion that had surrendered beside the Enipeus on August 9. Caesar always preferred Spanish legionaries above all others, and would have had his officers approach them first of all in the POW camp. These men of the 6th, little more than nine hundred of them, made a deal with Caesar—a short-term deal, based around financial incentives. Perhaps they agreed to march with him for six months, or twelve. But agree to march for Caesar they did. The only other condition stipulated by the proud Spaniards seems to have been that they continue as the 6th Legion, marching behind their own eagle, and not be assimilated into another Caesarian unit.

Within hours, Caesar rode away from the Enipeus with his eight hundred cavalry, heading northeast. Suspecting that Pompey would try calling in debts in Asia and Syria before heading for Egypt as Marcus Brutus had surmised, Caesar was bound for the Dardanelles, and the eastern states beyond. He himself tells us that at the same time he dispatched orders to General Fufius in the south of Greece to send him his five cohorts of the 28th Legion—twenty-three hundred men by Caesar’s reckoning, recruited in Italy the previous year, with limited experience, but unaffected by the mutiny at Farsala and probably even unaware of it.

Over the next few days, while Caesar’s legions mooched around camp, his quartermaster, General Quintus Cornificius, rearmed the 900 men of the 6th Legion and loaded a baggage train with the best kit, supplies, and ammunition available. The 6th Legion then set off, marching northeast to keep their part of their bargain with Caesar.

When he wrote his memoirs, Caesar could not bring himself to reveal the details of the mutiny of his entire army, and attempted to explain away the fact that none of his own legionaries marched with him after the Battle at Pharsalus with the excuse that all twenty thousand survivors had been overcome by their wounds in the battle or by the toil of their long march to the battle site—even though they’d been there several weeks before the battle, had plenty of time to recover from the march, and completely ignoring the fact that the men of the 6th had arrived after his troops and had less time to recover, yet were still fit to follow him.

Over the coming days, another ten thousand of Pompey’s surrendered men in the POW camp accepted the terms offered by Caesar’s officers. They swore loyalty to Caesar and volunteered to serve in two new Caesarian legions created there on the plain of Farsala, the 36th and the 37th. Once they were rearmed and ready to march, these two new legions set off after Caesar. By early October they would be encamped in Asia, where they awaited further orders. The remaining POWs marched for the west coast in company with Mark Antony and Caesar’s nine legions, including the 10th.

One of those prisoners heading west with Antony was a veteran soldier of seventeen years’ service by the name of Titus Flavius Petro, whose hometown was Sabine Reate in central Italy. Originally joining one of Pompey’s legions in the mass enlistments of 65 B.C., he’d distinguished himself fighting for Pompey in the East in his youth. Probably a centurion by the time of his retirement early in 49 B.C., he’d soon been recalled by Pompey, and shipped out of Brindisi in the March evacuation. Serving with one of the three new Italian legions, he’d fought at both Durrës and Farsala before his surrender on August 9. Centurion Petro had seen enough fighting, and didn’t volunteer to serve under Caesar. Pardoned and allowed to go home once he reached Italy, he became a debt collector at Reate after the war and raised a family. His son would work as a farmer’s agent in Asia in his youth, later returning home to Reate to set up in business as a small-time moneylender. Centurion Petro’s grandson would also become a soldier. Rising to the rank of lieutenant general, that grandson would subsequently become the ninth emperor of Rome, Vespasian.

In July and August, a Pompeian fleet under Admiral Decimus Laelius had lain siege to Brindisi, but when news of Pompey’s defeat in Thessaly arrived, it withdrew. Admiral Laelius soon reconciled with Caesar, so it’s possible he helped bring Mark Antony, his legions, and POWs back across the Adriatic from Epirus. One way or another, once Pompey’s ships evacuated his fleeing troops from Buthroton to Tunisia, the Pompeian naval threat on the Adriatic ended until a raid by Admiral Marcus Octavius the following year, giving Antony a clear run back to Italy during these days of the late summer of 48 B.C.

Once they were shipped over to Brindisi, the disgraced legions were dispersed. The 11th and the 12th seem to have soon lost their passion for revolt and were sent overland to Illyricum with General Cornificius to carry out the mission Gaius Antony had failed to accomplish the previous year. The three Italian legions, the 25th, 26th, and 29th, stayed in southern Italy, in the Puglia region. The Spanish legions, the 7th, 8th 9th, and 10th, all marched up the Appian Way to Rome with Mark Antony and set up camp on the Field of Mars just outside the city, where Antony could keep an eye on them.

Antony was apparently under strict orders not to let the men of the four Spanish legions left behind in their sickbeds the previous year, and who’d since recovered and fought off enemy raids on Brindisi and Vibo, where they were now based, mix with the Pharsalus mutineers and be polluted by their rebellious ideas. Meanwhile, the men of the 10th and three other legions now at Rome were told that Antony didn’t have the authority to give them their discharge or bonus payments. Only Caesar could do that. And Caesar was busy right now. Chasing Pompey.

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