XVI
Caesar returned to Rome by the end of July 46 B.C., after wrapping up Pompeian opposition in Africa and leaving four legions there. Back in the capital he attended to business and enjoyed the adulation of the crowds in a series of Triumphs for his victories in Egypt, Pontus, and Africa, and, by some accounts, also for Gaul. Because a Triumph could only be celebrated over foreign enemies, Thapsus was called a victory over King Juba of Numidia.
But worrying news had reached Caesar from Spain. When the Pompey brothers landed in Farther Spain, Caesar’s two legions based there, the 2nd and the Indigena, both former Pompeian units, had deserted Caesar’s commander, General Trebonius. They’d gone over to the brothers, linking up with the one Pompeian legion that had escaped from North Africa, the 1st. As Caesar recalled General Trebonius to Rome, his three other legions in Nearer Spain, the 21st, the 30th, and a new enlistment of the 3rd Legion raised in Cisalpine Gaul for Caesar and now led by General Pedius, Caesar’s relative and a subordinate in the Gallic campaign, together with General Quintus Fabius Maximus, were instructed not to engage the Pompeys until Caesar reached the scene with reinforcements.
The Pompeys quickly took Córdoba and were in the process of occupying most of Andalusia, attracting large local support and enrolling new recruits daily—their father had been widely popular in Spain. Caesar had reacted with a stream of movement orders. The 5th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 13th had all been shipped back across from Tunisia and were by this time camped in southern Italy. The 28th also had been brought out of Tunisia, but, being just five cohorts strong, it went to Syria. According to Appian, Caesar was already thinking about an operation against Rome’s old enemy in the East, Parthia, once he’d dealt with the Pompeians, and the 28th arrived in Syria with orders to commence preparations for that operation. The other six legions transferred out of North Africa were ordered to march to Spain. Meanwhile, the two cohorts of the 6th that had fought so well for Caesar in Egypt and Pontus had been resting in Italy, probably at Rome, where they would have participated in his triumphal parades, and they, too, were ordered to Spain.
It wasn’t until late December that Caesar himself set off. Appian says he made the journey to Spain in twenty-seven days. When he arrived in January, it was accompanied by just his staff officers and personal attendants. Almost certainly he made the last leg, from Marseilles to Tarragona, by sea, avoiding a crossing of the Pyrenees. But in doing so he’d been forced to leave behind his faithful German cavalry bodyguard, so he had dispatched a courier ahead to Generals Pedius and Fabius in Spain with orders to send him a cavalry detachment to act as his bodyguard once he arrived. Camped east of the Guadalquivir River, or the Baetis, as it was called in Roman times, the generals had barely received the message by the time Caesar landed.
Without waiting for an escort, or for his main cavalry force, which was still on its way from Italy with General Nonius Asprenas, Caesar hurried south and joined the legions camped on the border of Nearer and Farther Spain. His rush had been necessitated by stunning news awaiting him in Tarragona: when his veteran legions reached Spain as ordered, after marching from Italy and through southern France, three of them had defected to the Pompey brothers.
Caesar had blundered in sending Spanish legions back to their homeland, legions now four years past their discharge date, legions sick of promises of rewards that never materialized and with no wish to fight their own countrymen, legions that had already mutinied several times over the past few years. Probably inspired by the news that the 2nd and the Indigena had gone over to the Pompeys, the 8th and 9th Legions deserted Caesar and went over to the other side to fight for their own people in their own country. The 13th, the legion that had crossed the Rubicon with Caesar, followed them. Why, it’s unclear. The 13th’s enlistment wasn’t up for another three years. Maybe its legionaries from northern Italy were simply sick of Caesar’s endless unfulfilled promises. No doubt to Caesar’s great relief, his crack 10th and 7th Legions remained loyal to him.
The Pompeys were as surprised as Caesar by the defections. To be on the safe side, the younger Pompey, Sextus, who was now twenty-two, kept the 9th and 13th Legions with him at Córdoba. Only the 8th Legion joined his elder brother Gnaeus’s field army.
In late January 45 B.C., Caesar crossed the Guadalquivir River and advanced deep into Andalusia with the 3rd, 5th, 6th, 7th, 10th, 21st, and 30th Legions and local cavalry. As the Pompeian forces fought a series of delaying actions, gradually withdrawing ahead of Caesar’s legions, he drove relentlessly toward Córdoba, his provincial capital sixteen years earlier, scene of his first command, and the place where he’d raised the 10th Legion.
Southeast of Córdoba, in the Salsum River valley, Gnaeus Pompey and General Labienus, the irrepressible cavalry commander from the campaigns in Albania, Greece, and North Africa, tried to hold Caesar back by camping between the hill towns of Ategua and Ucubi and building fortifications across the river. As Caesar surrounded Ategua and began to lay siege to the town, there was a series of engagements along the valley floor. After one such encounter, the people of Ategua slit the throats of Caesarian POWs and threw their bodies from the town wall. The war was becoming dirtier by the day. But Caesar’s pressure told, and on February 19 the town surrendered.
Pompey and Labienus moved their camp closer to Ucubi, and Caesar followed. Men were by now deserting from both sides daily, although the tide was increasingly in Caesar’s favor. A few men from the recalcitrant 8th Legion actually deserted back to Caesar at this point. A battle now took place for a hill in the valley, five miles from Ucubi. It had no name that anyone recorded. It was like a hill in the Korean or Vietnam Wars of the twentieth century—it had no real strategic value, but it was there, and both sides decided they wanted it. On March 5 a desperate battle was fought on the slopes of the anonymous hill in southwestern Spain. Young Gnaeus Pompey’s forces took the hill, and held it against all Caesar’s counterattacks. Both sides suffered more than five hundred casualties. The Pompeians’ success was to give them the courage for what followed.
From his right wing, Caesar took a long, thoughtful look from the back of his horse out over the helmeted heads of the men of the 10th Legion in front of him as March 17 dawned still and warm. Satisfying himself that the Pompeian units across the valley had settled into their final positions, he turned to his cavalry commander, General Asprenas, who had by this time arrived from Italy with the German, Gallic, and Spanish cavalry and now commanded eight thousand riders, the largest mounted force Caesar ever put into the field. Caesar would have told him that he intended trying to turn the enemy’s left wing, using the 10th Legion, and instructed Asprenas to be ready to go in with his cavalry and capitalize on the gains made by the 10th when the time came. Asprenas acknowledged his instructions and then rode to his position on the wing.
For two weeks Gnaeus Pompey had given ground, burning several towns as he retreated. The previous day, he’d set up camp on the plain not far from the hill town of Munda. Caesar had arrived with his legions after nightfall and set up his own camp, five miles away. Then in the early hours of the morning, Caesar was awakened with the news that young Pompey was forming up his troops in battle order. As Caesar rose he would have noted that young Pompey had chosen the festival day of the god Liber, the Liberalis, for his great battle. This was the day that young Romans who had come of age traditionally donned the toga virilis, the symbol of manhood, for the first time. Perhaps Gnaeus had hopes of coming of age as a general on this day. Not if Caesar could help it.
Certainly, Pompey was not shy about pitting himself against the mighty Caesar. Pompey would have been conscious of the fact that his father had made his name at his age. Son of a general and grandson of a general, young Gnaeus had already shown he had military skill and daring—a few years back, he’d been the one who’d commanded the fleet that had devastated Caesar’s shipping at its Adriatic anchorages, cutting off Caesar in Greece. Gnaeus had proven to be a young man with an old head on his shoulders. And it seems he’d had enough of these backpedaling skirmishes that only sapped the enthusiasm of his troops and strained the loyalty of the locals. Thirty years later, the Roman poet Horace was to write, “Seize today, and put as little trust as you can in tomorrow.” On the retreat, and with more and more Spanish towns expressing doubts about the Pompey boys’ ability to beat Caesar, Gnaeus Pompey had decided to seize the day and settle the matter with a full-scale battle, before he lost his grassroots support.
Caesar had been glad to oblige, and ordered his flag to be hung out, the symbol for battle. As the trumpets sounded “To Arms” throughout Caesar’s camp, he’d issued a new watchword for the day: “Venus.” His watchword on the day of his victory over Pompey Sr. at Pharsalus had been “Venus, Bringer of Victory,” so he was sticking with a good thing and hoping that Venus would bring him his famous luck yet again. For his part, young Pompey had issued the watchword “Piety.”
The men of the 10th Legion stood in their now customary position on Caesar’s right wing. Unlike the 8th and 9th and like the 7th, they’d remained loyal to Caesar; they hadn’t deserted. To them, demanding what was due to them was one thing, but deserting to the enemy was out of the question. Their numbers were well down according to the author of The Spanish War, a work likely to have been written by a junior officer in Caesar’s army—a veteran centurion, it’s been suggested, a distinct possibility judging from the language and tenor—before being edited by Hirtius and Balbus. Typically, Hirtius edited out the circumstances of the defection of the 8th, 9th, and 13th Legions. In The Spanish War they suddenly materialize on the other side in Spain, fighting against Caesar.
The 10th Legion, which was due for discharge this very month, was probably at considerably less than half strength after the toll taken on it by the Gallic campaign and the civil war. Its surviving battle-hardened veterans, perhaps two thousand of them now, were aged between thirty-three and thirty-six, and they would have been hoping that this would be their last campaign, that unlike their former comrades of the 8th and the 9th they would be allowed to take their discharge now that it was due. Just one last battle, they would have told themselves, echoing the words of Chief Centurion Crastinus three long years before.
The 5th Legion had been positioned on Caesar’s left. It was the “famous 5th” now, after its daring deeds against Scipio’s elephants at Thapsus. Following the battle, Caesar had granted the 5th the right to bear the elephant symbol on its shields and standards, and according to Appian two hundred years later the 5th Legion would still be famous for Thapsus, would still bear elephants on its standards. Beside the 5th stood the new recruits of the 3rd Legion from Cisalpine Gaul. Caesar’s remaining four legions filled the line between the 3rd and the 10th. On his flanks he’d positioned the cavalry and several thousand auxiliaries. All told, he fielded eighty cohorts of legionaries and auxiliaries, although many of the legionary cohorts were, like those of the 10th, well understrength. There were literally only hundreds of 6th Legion men here, last survivors of the legionaries who had signed up with Caesar after Pharsalus and gone on to cover themselves in glory at Alexandria, the Nile Delta, and Zela. The total number of Caesar’s infantry was no more than thirty thousand men.
All around them were rolling hills, but here on the valley floor the terrain was flat, good for both infantry and cavalry maneuvers. But first Caesar’s men had a long hike to reach the enemy. In their path lay a shallow stream that dissected the plain. Well away to the right, the stream drained into a boggy marsh. The author of The Spanish War, an eyewitness on the day, indicates he and his fellow Caesarians felt sure the Pompeians would come down off the hill and meet them in the middle of the plain. If not, Caesar’s troops would have to cross the stream, then traverse another stretch of flat, dry turf to reach the hill where the other side waited.
Because he’d chosen the battlefield, young Pompey had taken the high ground. For added support, the town of Munda was on the hill behind him, surrounded by high walls dotted with defensive towers manned by locals. Gnaeus Pompey had lined up his men on the slope below Munda. Estimates of his total troop numbers vary between fifty thousand and eighty thousand. His most experienced legions were the 1st and the 8th, and they probably took each wing, supported by the 2nd and the Indigena.
His center was occupied by nine legions of raw recruits drawn from throughout western Spain and Portugal, mere teenagers with no experience and little training. Pompey’s wings were covered by cavalry supported by six thousand light infantry and the same number of auxiliaries. Pompey himself commanded, with General Labienus as his chief deputy. General Varus, who’d escaped from North Africa with Labienus, commanded one of the divisions, probably the Pompeian left, opposite the 10th.
The author of The Spanish War says that Caesar’s men were both delighted that the longed-for opportunity for a decisive battle was being given to them and apprehensive about how Fate would treat them over the next hour or so.
Both generals delivered their traditional prebattle addresses, and although we don’t know their exact words, Caesar apparently told his men to stay in tight formation and not under any circumstance charge before he gave the order, a command stimulated by the undisciplined opening to the Battle of Thapsus. Then, at last, he gave the command to advance. His flag inclined forward, and the trumpets of the legions sounded “Advance at Marching Pace.”
Caesar’s legions marched in step across the plain as, on the flanks, the cavalry also moved forward, at the walk. Caesar himself and his staff officers rode in the middle of the 10th Legion’s formation. Ahead, Pompey’s troops didn’t budge, didn’t advance to meet them in the normal fashion, a repeat of Pompey Sr.’s tactics at Farsala. Caesar’s men splashed across the stream.
When his front line reached the base of the hill, Caesar unexpectedly called for a halt. The advance froze. As his men then stood, waiting to go forward to the attack, and enemy formations on the hill reshuffled to meet them, Caesar ordered his formations to tighten up, to concentrate his forces and limit the area of operation. The order was relayed and obeyed. Just as his troops were beginning to grumble impatiently, Caesar gave the order for “Charge” to be sounded. With a deafening battle cry, Caesar’s eighty cohorts charged up the hillside.
With an equally deafening roar, Pompey’s men let fly with their javelins. The volley of missiles, flung from above, scythed through the air and cut swathes through Caesar’s ranks. The charge wavered momentarily, then regained momentum. Another volley blackened the blue sky. And another, and another. The attackers in Caesar’s front ranks, with their dead comrades lying in heaps around them, out of breath, and still not within striking distance of the enemy, stopped. The following lines of breathless, perspiring men followed suit. The entire attack ground to a halt.
Swiftly dismounting, Caesar grabbed a shield from a startled legionary of the 10th in a rear rank in front of him, then barged through his troops, up the slope, all the way to the front rank, with his staff officers, hearts in mouths, jumping to the ground and hurrying after him. Dragging off his helmet with his right hand and casting it aside so that no one could mistake who he was, he stepped out in advance of the front line.
According to Plutarch, he called to his troops, nodding toward the tens of thousands of raw teenaged recruits on the Pompeian side: “Aren’t you ashamed to let your general be beaten by mere boys?”
Greeted by silence, he went on to cajole his men, to berate them, to encourage them. But none of his panting, sweating, bleeding legionaries took a forward step. Then he turned to the staff officers who’d followed him.
“If we fail here, this will be the end of my life and of your careers,” Appian says he told them, before he drew his sword and resolutely strode up the slope, proceeding many yards ahead of his troops toward the Pompeian line.
On Pompey’s side, men within range of Caesar loosed off a volley of javelins in his direction—so many that not even the famously lucky Julius Caesar could possibly survive the hail of missiles. His men held their breath.
Caesar dodged some missiles, and took others on his shield. They jutted from the ground all around him and hung limply from his shield—two hundred of them, according to Appian. But, amazingly, Caesar himself remained unscathed. He turned back to his watching troops. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he demanded.
“Come on!” one of Caesar’s staff officers called to his companions— probably Colonel Pollio—and the officers all grabbed shields from 10th Legion men in the ranks or from corpses lying at their feet and ran up to join Caesar, forming a protective wall of shields around him.
This movement forward was a catalyst for the necessary courage and momentum along the whole front line. With a roar, Caesar’s troops charged up the slope once more. Men of the 10th swept past Caesar and his officers, and closed the gap between them and the enemy. With a crash of shields, the opposing lines came together. Pressed forward by those in the rear ranks pushing up the hill behind them, those in front had no choice but to go forward.
Soon it was a stalemate along the line, with neither side gaining an advantage—except on Caesar’s right wing. Caesar himself was in the thick of it all with the legionaries of the 10th, wielding his sword, urging his men forward. They had a reputation to uphold, and with Caesar there on the spot urging them to superhuman efforts, fighting uphill, toe-to-toe, shield-to-shield, the veterans of the 10th gradually pushed back the Pompeian troops opposite, one bloody step at a time.
To counter this and bolster his hard-pressed left, and probably urged by the alert General Labienus—just as he’d advised Caesar on the time and place of crucial troop movements at Alesia and other battles in the past— Gnaeus Pompey gave the order for one of his other legions to swing across from the opposite wing.
Ever the opportunist, and seeing this move under way, Caesar ordered one of his staff officers to find General Asprenas, his cavalry commander, and tell him he was to concentrate his cavalry on the opposite wing, where it had been weakened by Pompey’s withdrawal. The young colonel pushed his way though the sea of soldiers, back down the hill. Finding the cavalry commander, the colonel passed on the message. General Asprenas personally led several thousand cavalry in a wheel against young Pompey’s weakened right.
Meanwhile, as Pompey’s legion was moving over from his right wing to his left, the inexperienced young troops in Pompey’s center, not knowing the strategic purpose of the move, misread it as a retreat. More and more teenagers in the center ceased to fight. Before long, thousands were streaming back up the hill, many throwing away their weapons. Panic spread among the Pompeian recruits. The center of the line dissolved as men fled in their thousands, some to Munda, others out onto the plain.
Some units, like the proud 1st Legion, survivors of Pharsalus and Thapsus, stood and fought, even though they soon were surrounded and cut off. Outnumbered, these men either died or surrendered. Most died. Like Napoleon’s Old Guard at Waterloo in 1815, the 1st Legion went down fighting. And if they were offered quarter, many veterans of the 1st probably uttered the cry familiar to every man in the ranks, “Abi in malam crucem!” (Go and be hanged!).
It was estimated that thirty thousand of Pompey’s rank and file were killed in the rout outside Munda, and up to three thousand officers. Among them, the feisty General Labienus—surrounded, and cut down from his horse, he died there outside Munda, fighting to his last breath, as did General Varus. Both were buried on the battlefield, minus their heads, which, according to Appian, were presented to Caesar. As for Caesar’s losses, they were estimated at a thousand. Many of these would have died in the early stages of the battle, when the outcome was still uncertain.
For Caesar, Munda was, as Wellington was to remark about Waterloo, a near run thing. Both Plutarch and Appian report that later, in the wake of the battle, Caesar confessed to his officers and friends, “I have often fought for victory, but this was the first time I fought for my life.”
Gnaeus Pompey was wounded but managed to escape, accompanied by a bodyguard of 150 cavalry and infantry. But he was in the minority. With thousands of Pompeians taking refuge in the town of Munda, and the last of the enemy being dealt with on the plain by pursuing cavalry, Caesar ordered the town surrounded by entrenchments. To convince the 14,000 sheltering in Munda to surrender, he had the bodies of Pompeian soldiers killed in the battle heaped one on top of the other as part of the entrenchments, forming a gory wall around the town. Just to add to the sickening sight, the heads of many of the dead were lopped off and placed on sword points facing the town. Leaving a small force to seal off Munda, the victor marched the bulk of his army off to Córdoba to finish the business.
Gnaeus Pompey hurried south toward the port of El Rocadillo, then called Carteia, not far from present-day Gibraltar, where he had warships and a garrison. But Pompey had been wounded in the shoulder and the leg, and also had sprained an ankle. Eventually too weak to ride, and unable to walk, he was eight miles from his destination when he could go no farther under his own steam and a litter was sent for him from El Rocadillo. He was carried into the town.
A few days later, young Pompey sailed with ten warships, but after three days’ sailing he was forced to put into the Spanish coast for water and supplies. After his little fleet was trapped there by Caesar’s admiral Gaius Didius, Pompey fled inland with several hundred men. Admiral Didius pursued him with men from his ships, surrounding his position in the rocks. During hectic fighting, Pompey, who’d been immobilized by his wounds, was cut off from most of his men. Tipped off by a prisoner, Didius’s men located Gnaeus hiding in a gully. They killed him on the spot. The severed head of Pompey the Great’s brave but doomed eldest son was subsequently put on public display in Seville.
Ironically, Admiral Didius, the man who ended Gnaeus Pompey’s life, was himself killed by Pompey’s men, who kept fighting for several more days despite the death of their leader and caused considerable damage and mayhem before they were mopped up by Caesar’s forces.
Caesar subsequently took Córdoba, the provincial capital, which was being held by two of his former legions, the 9th and the 13th. The 13th defended the town, but the 9th went back over to Caesar at the last minute and began fighting their former comrades in the city. Caesar’s forces won the day and the city, with twenty-two thousand supporters of the other side dying in Córdoba. Sextus Pompey managed to slip out of the city before it fell, but if he had thoughts of regrouping the Pompeys’ supporters for a renewed offensive, he was to be sorely disappointed. The momentum of the campaign had swung Caesar’s way, powerfully, irrevocably, and the heart went out of the Pompeian resistance. One by one, the last Spanish towns in Pompeian hands were stormed or surrendered. Munda, too, surrendered. Caesar spared the lives of all fourteen thousand sheltering there.
After Gnaeus Pompey’s death, his brother Sextus disappeared into the countryside with a handful of followers, determined to continue a guerrilla war, and pursued by Caesar’s aide Colonel Pollio. In a peace deal set up by Mark Antony the following year, the Senate would pay Sextus fifty million sesterces in compensation for his father’s lost estates and give him command of a Roman fleet. For the time being this ended the influence of the Pompey family on Roman history. But not for long. In time Sextus would use the fleet to his own advantage, becoming a pirate and a thorn in the side of Roman administrations, eventually trying to seize Sicily. After some initial success he would be killed by one of Mark Antony’s generals when forced to flee to the East, ten years after the Battle of Munda.
With the end of resistance in Spain that summer of 45 B.C., the civil war, which had cost hundreds of thousands of lives, came to a close. Julius Caesar was now ruler of all he surveyed.
As summer drew to an end, the men of the 10th Legion were allowed to take their discharge, which had become due in the spring. Like all the legionaries who had remained loyal to Caesar, they received substantial bonuses now that the war was over. According to Suetonius, it was twenty-four thousand sesterces per man—the twenty thousand initially promised, plus the four thousand promised the previous year outside Rome. They also received land grants in Spain. The previous fall, Caesar had put the necessary legislation before the Senate to provide land for all his veterans in Italy and Spain, and now the process began.
At the same time, Caesar ordered that a new enlistment be raised to fill the ranks of the 10th and all his other legions then undergoing discharge. Plutarch says he was well into the planning of his next military operation, an invasion of Parthia, to punish the Parthians for wiping out his fellow triumvir Crassus and his legions at Carrhae eight years before, and even had his eyes on India. As recruiting officers bustled around western Spain drafting new enlistments of young recruits, some veterans of the 10th decided that farming was no life for them. They signed on for another sixteen years with the legion. All those men staying with the legion were allocated to the leading cohorts, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. This would become standard practice in the future, with those men volunteering to serve a second or even a third enlistment going into the leading cohorts.
The 10th Legion remained in Spain for the time being as its new recruits were assembled, equipped, and trained. Before long the legion would come under the command of Lieutenant General Marcus Lepidus, consul with Caesar the previous year, who would shortly become Governor of Nearer Spain, with four legions under his immediate control.
Caesar was on his way back to Rome. According to Appian, when friends urged Caesar to “have the Spanish cohorts as his bodyguard again”— a reference to the 7th Legion, which had lately been transferred to Italy as part of the buildup for the Parthian offensive, and which had acted as Caesar’s bodyguard in Rome in 47 B.C. at the time of the rampage of the mutinous 10th, 9th, and 8th Legions. Caesar declined, saying there was no worse fate than to be continuously protected, for that meant a person was constantly in fear, a sentiment expressed by many a leader down through the ages.
Caesar left Colonel Pollio in western Spain with two legions to continue the search for Sextus Pompey. Although he failed to catch young Pompey, Pollio would be made a major general by Caesar in 44 B.C. He would become a consul in 40 B.C., conduct a successful campaign against tribes in the Balkans in 39 B.C., and live to the age of seventy-eight or seventy-nine, dying in A.D. 4 a wealthy and respected general, statesman, and writer.
Caesar was back in the capital by September of 45 B.C. and was soon granted the title of Dictator for Life by a cowed Senate. Republican ideals had given way to rule by one man. And even though Caesar spurned the title and trappings of a king, there were many who felt he was now the king of Rome in everything but name. And they were not happy about it.
Six months later, in the middle of March 44 B.C., at a time when he was finalizing preparations for his invasion of Parthia, Caesar called a meeting of the Senate in Rome. The sitting was to take place in a meeting hall at the eastern end of a theater complex built on the Field of Mars by Pompey the Great, and would be the last before Caesar departed Rome four days later to take command of the army of six legions now waiting in Syria in readiness for the Parthian operation.
Sixty senators were a party to what followed, among them some of Caesar’s closest associates, including General Trebonius; Servius Galba, who had been one of his generals in Gaul; and Caesar’s chief admiral and appointee as Governor of Transalpine Gaul, Decimus Brutus Albinus; and men he had pardoned and promoted, such as Pompey’s admiral Gaius Cassius.
At about ten o’clock on the morning of March 15, Caesar left his home on the Sacred Way and was carried in a litter toward the Forum, heading for the Pompeian Meeting Hall and the gathering Senate. There was a legion in the city at this time, without doubt the 7th, quartered on the island in the middle of the Tiber River, and as one of Caesar’s best and most loyal units almost certainly preparing to accompany their commander in chief to Syria for the Parthian campaign. But as he had shunned armed guards, Caesar went without an escort apart from his twenty-four lictors, attendants who cleared the way bearing his fasces of office.
He was joined on the journey across the Forum by Mark Antony. As in the past, Caesar had forgiven Antony for his transgressions and welcomed him back into his fold. Antony had been the first to go out and greet him on the Aurelian Way as he returned to Rome from Spain, and had been appointed consul with Caesar for 44 B.C.
According to Appian, Caesar paused en route while the city magistrates sacrificed a goat and examined its entrails for omens, as was required before each sitting of the Senate. When the omens were not good, Caesar ordered a second sacrifice. Again the augurs reported ill omens. Ignoring their caution about the advisability of attending the meeting, just as he had dismissed a soothsayer’s warning about this day, Caesar, impatient to have the business of government over so he could return to his military planning, resumed his journey.
As Caesar climbed from his litter outside the meeting hall, Mark Antony was waylaid by Albinus and Trebonius, who deliberately detained him in conversation. There were those among the conspirators who had wanted Antony to share the fate they had planned for Caesar on this, the Ides of March, but wiser heads had convinced them that to retain popular support for what they were about embark on they must be seen to strike down the despot alone, as a blow for democracy. Anything more would leave them open to accusations of acting in vengeance on behalf of the late Pompey the Great, which would without question turn Caesar’s fiercely loyal legions against them and sign their own death warrants.
Caesar, dressed in his quasi-regal scarlet robe and laurel crown of a Triumphant, as was required for the magistrates’ ceremony, went on alone, carrying a pile of petitions handed to him on the ascent of the meeting hall steps by a throng of waiting citizens. On top of the pile was a letter penned by Artemidorus of Cnidia, a teacher of Greek logic. As the scholar passed it over, he’d urged Caesar to read it in private. The letter contained details of a plot to murder Caesar, even naming the chief conspirators. It remained unopened as Caesar strode into the crowded meeting hall. Plutarch, Appian, and Suetonius all describe in complementary detail what followed.
The waiting senators rose to their feet as the Dictator entered and walked toward his throne of ivory and gold, which faced the semicircle of benches. As he did so, handing the petitions and the unread written warning to a secretary, a number of senators crowded around him. Senator Tillius Cimber pressed a petition on him as Caesar took his seat, pleading that his brother be allowed to return from exile. As other senators added their petitions in support of Cimber, Caesar impatiently advised that he would not consider leniency for Cimber’s brother, admonishing the petitioners for wasting his time and telling them to resume their seats. It was then that Cimber suddenly reached forward and pulled Caesar’s scarlet robe down over his arms, pinning them.
According to Suetonius, the astonished Caesar exclaimed, “This is violence!”
At the same moment, at Cimber’s side, Senator Publius Servilius Casca produced a dagger. He struck at Caesar’s neck. The blow was not well aimed and caused only a superficial wound. Caesar looked around at Casca in astonishment.
“Vile Casca!” Plutarch says Caesar cried, as he shook himself free of Cimber’s restraining grasp and grabbed at the knife to prevent Casca from striking a second time, and adding, “What’s the meaning of this?”
Casca, panicking, looked around for his brother, a fellow senator. “Brother, help!”
Casca’s brother and a score of others were drawing weapons from under their garments. They came at Caesar with blades raised, each determined to fulfill a vow to strike a blow against the Dictator. Twenty-three conspirators plunged swords or daggers into Caesar. Among them was Marcus Brutus, the young man Caesar had treated like a son and whose life he had spared after the Battle of Pharsalus.
Suetonius writes of some authorities claiming that as Brutus struck, Caesar gasped in Greek, “You, too, my child?” A line that would inspire Shakespeare.
In their frenzy, several of the assassins wounded each other. Caesar rose, staggering as he tried to escape the blows, attempting to strike back with his writing stylus, a mere pen-knife, according to Suetonius. At a later autopsy, Suetonius tells us, the physician Antistius concluded that a blow to the chest had been the fatal one—a blow by Brutus, Suetonius says, although Appian records that Brutus struck Caesar in the leg.
According to Plutarch and Appian, as the meeting hall emptied in a panic-stricken rush, Caesar fell at the foot of a statue of Pompey. And, like Pompey, he tried to cover his face with his cloak in his last moments. There, in his fifty-fifth year, and almost seventeen years to the day since he’d raised the 10th Legion and commenced his march to power, Gaius Julius Caesar, Dictator of Rome, perished.