XIV
Caesar is here! Caesar is here!” The word swept through the camp like fire before a hot north wind. As the men of the 10th Legion emerged from their tents on the Field of Mars, the trumpets of the legion began sounding “Assembly.”
More than a year had passed since they’d seen Caesar riding out of the camp on the plain of Farsala for the last time, in pursuit of Pompey. He’d spent nine of the past thirteen months in Egypt locked in a life-and-death struggle with the Egyptians, who, after he’d arrived there on October 2, had decided to eliminate him the way they’d eliminated Pompey. Reacting quickly, Caesar had kidnapped young King Ptolemy. Joined by Ptolemy’s sister and rival Cleopatra, Caesar and his small force had barricaded themselves in part of the royal palace at Alexandria. Trapped, and with just his eight hundred cavalrymen, the nine hundred men of the 6th Legion, and the twenty-three hundred inexperienced legionaries of the 28th, Caesar had battled King Ptolemy’s twenty-two thousand troops for months, the contest involving savage street fighting and desperate battles for control of the dock area. He’d sent to Asia for the 36th and 37th Legions, the two units created using former members of Pompey’s army after the Battle of Pharsalus, but the 36th was caught up in strife in Pontus, and only the 37th answered his call. Later, Caesar’s friend Mithradates of Pergamum had marched to his relief with an army made up of allied troops plus the 27th Legion, the unit that had remained stationed in southern Greece all this time. In a battle beside the Nile, Caesar had defeated Ptolemy’s army. The king himself drowned while trying to escape, allowing Caesar to install Cleopatra, by now his mistress, as queen of Egypt. Caesar had then marched with the 6th Legion cohorts and his cavalry to Pontus, where, adding the 36th Legion and the remnants of two units of King Deiotarus of Galatia to his force, he’d confronted the army of King Pharnaces, who’d recently occupied Pontus.
At the Battle of Zela on August 2, 47 B.C., almost exactly a year since his victory at Farsala, Caesar had crushed the charioteers and hapless infantry of Pharnaces. It was after this victory that Caesar sent his famous message back to Rome: “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Only then could he turn his attention to Mark Antony’s problems at Rome.
Those problems had started with the 10th Legion. Month in, month out, they had waited for Caesar to return to Rome, kicking around the camp beside the Tiber, bored, frustrated, and increasingly angry. Almost a year went by. Finally the patience of the men of the 10th snapped. Ignoring the commands and then the pleas of Mark Antony, and encouraged by two of their own tribunes, Gaius Avienus and Aulus Fonteius, and by several of their centurions, who all agreed with the men that they had been deprived of their just rewards, the men of the 10th had burst into the city and began looting the homes of the rich. Their thinking was obvious enough: if Caesar wouldn’t give them what he owed them, they’d take it for themselves. The 8th and 9th Legions had promptly joined them, but the 7th had stayed loyal to its officers and kept apart from the other legions.
According to Plutarch, the mutineers killed two former major generals in their rampage, the ex-praetors Cosconius and Galba, although no other author confirms their murders.
When Antony ordered the 7th to cordon off the city, the legion had obeyed. Rather than come to blows with their comrades, the men of the 10th, 9th, and 8th then turned away from the capital and went on a looting spree in the wealthy Campania region, south of the capital. The three out-of-control legions had then returned to camp with their spoils, not long before Caesar slipped back into Rome unnoticed.
Caesar had gone directly to see Antony, to obtain a firsthand account of the revolt. Over recent months he’d received countless letters from the leading citizens of Rome begging him to come home and bring his legions back into line, and few if any of the authors had been complimentary about the way Antony had handled the affair. Assured by Antony that he’d done everything in his power to keep the lid on the problem—which had been of Caesar’s creation, after all—and that these troops were in a murderous mood, Caesar began by having a detachment from the loyal 7th Legion surround and protect his own house on the Sacred Way in the heart of the city—the official residence of the pontifex maximus, high priest of Rome, which he’d occupied since his election to the post for life in 63 B.C.
Reluctant to stand before these men whose help he’d sworn he no longer needed when he left them on the plain of Farsala and admit that he’d been wrong, Caesar sent one of his deputies, Gaius Sallustius Crispus—Sallust—to talk to the mutineers on his behalf. Sallust, whom Caesar would make a major general in the new year, was authorized to promise the men four thousand sesterces each to return to their standards and march to Sicily for the next stage in Caesar’s war against the Pompeians, an invasion of North Africa.
But when Sallust couldn’t come up with these four thousand sesterces on the spot, along with the money Caesar had promised them at the start of the war, plus the vague rewards he’d mentioned after the Battle of Pharsalus, including grants of land, he was rejected by the angry legionaries, most of whom wanted to go home just as much as they wanted their money. According to Appian, Sallust was to claim he only just escaped from the Field of Mars with his life.
Caesar had told these men that he didn’t need them, and for a year he’d stubbornly stuck to his word, employing Pompey’s former troops and the youngsters of the 27th and 28th to conquer Egypt and then regain Pontus. But intelligence reports that were now reaching him said that Scipio and King Juba of Numidia could muster fourteen legions between them, supported by tens of thousands of cavalry and auxiliaries and something like 120 war elephants. Like it or not, Caesar needed his best legions if he was to triumph in this war. He knew he had no option but to speak to the recalcitrant 8th, 9th, and 10th himself. And talk them around to his way of thinking. But what would he say?
Now, as the men of the mutinous legions answered the call to assembly, no doubt deliberately standing in loose formation rather than precisely in their ranks and files, a lean, balding, middle-aged officer in the scarlet cloak of a general appeared in their midst with several other officers. Walking purposefully to the tribunal, he climbed its steps. The troops instantly recognized the bareheaded man on the speaker’s platform.
He is said to have been hailed by the men in the traditional manner, but perhaps it was only legionaries of the loyal 7th who spoke up. With many soldiers no doubt standing with arms folded defensively, eyeing their commander with a mixture of guilt and suspicion, he looked around the sea of faces, waiting for everyone to fall silent. And then, when the mumble of voices faded away, with perhaps just the faint sound of a light breeze rippling around them and the distant hum of life from the city that never slept, he paused a little longer still, stretching the tension as the thousands of soldiers wondered what he would say to them. Then, at last, he spoke. According to Appian, this is what transpired.
“What is it you want?” Caesar began. “State your demands.”
No one answered at first. Appian says that none of them had the courage to ask for money and so one or two men began to call out for their discharge. They had been detained in the legions illegally, they said, and they wanted to go home. There were loud choruses of agreement.
“Very well,” Caesar responded, “I discharge you. All of you.”
There was a stunned silence.
“And,” he went on after a judicious pause, “I will pay you everything I promised you, after I win this war with other legions, and after they have had their just rewards.”
The men looked at him in astonishment, waiting for him to say more. But he didn’t. He just looked out at them, his face expressionless. The strained silence was painful, so painful that his staff officers standing beside the tribunal begged Caesar to say something more, not just dismiss with a few harsh words these troops who had been through so much with him over the years.
Caesar nodded slowly, then began, with a single word: “Citizens . . .”
The thousands of upturned faces were expectant. The men waited for him to continue, but Caesar paused, and waited. And as he paused, the true effect of that lone word sunk into his troops. Normally, generals began addresses to their troops with “Soldiers” or “Fellow soldiers.” Caesar habitually began with “My soldiers.” And now he was addressing them as citizens, as if they were no longer soldiers, just men off the street.
“No!” men began to cry out. “We’re still your soldiers, Caesar!”
The cries grew into a deafening tumult. Caesar turned to leave the dais, but legionaries crowded around the steps and wouldn’t let him step down.
“Stay, Caesar!” the voices chorused. “Punish the wrongdoers among us. The rest are ready to serve.”
He turned back to the assembly and raised a hand. The voices faded away. In the new silence he began again. “I will not punish any man here,” he declared. He turned his gaze to the familiar faces of the men of his favorite 10th Legion. “I am,” he said, “pained that even the 10th Legion, which I have particularly honored over the years, could be involved in agitation of this kind. This legion alone I discharge from the army. But when I return from Africa after defeating the Pompeians, I shall reward the men of the 10th Legion along with the rest, just as I have promised. And the land I distribute to my soldiers will not be confiscated property, but public land, and my own land, and land bought for the purpose of distribution to my veterans.”
All the men of the 9th and the other mutinous legions clapped and cheered, but the men of the 10th were far from happy at being left out. Their centurions called for Caesar to have the men of the 10th draw lots, and every tenth man would be put to death for mutinying, as he had proposed at Farsala. After making an appearance of reluctance, he said that he would not even punish the men of the 10th, and he would allow them to continue to march with him. Now the men of the 10th cheered and applauded as well.
The men of the three legions had just allowed themselves to be artfully talked into fighting, and perhaps dying, in yet another campaign, and they were pleased about it. As Tacitus was to write, the turnaround had been achieved by a single word. That, and the personal charisma of Julius Caesar.