II
In the spring of 61 B.C., the staff at the governor’s palace at Córdoba would have stood anxiously awaiting the arrival of the new governor of the province of Baetica, so-called Farther Spain. Several of them had probably served under him eight years before, in 69 B.C., when he’d been the province’s quaestor, its chief financial administrator, under the then governor, Major General Vetus. They would have known him as a man with a phenomenal memory and an extraordinary grasp of detail. His name was Gaius Julius Caesar, and at the age of thirty-eight he was about to embark on a career that would make him one of the most famous men of all time.
That day, a small, lean, narrow-faced general alighted from a litter and strode purposefully up the steps into the palace. Almost certainly he would have remembered men he hadn’t seen in eight years and greeted them by name. His hair had thinned over those years. According to Suetonius, conscious of his growing baldness, Caesar brushed his hair forward to disguise it, not altogether successfully, and donned headwear whenever appropriate. Later, on official occasions, he would habitually wear the crown of laurel leaves that went with the honors granted him by the Senate. His skin was pale and soft, and it appears that despite all the time he would spend in the field in the coming years he would never acquire a deep tan.
Appian says Caesar’s overland journey from Rome took twenty-four days. Some might have wanted to rest after more than three weeks on the road, but impatience would be a recurring feature of the career of Julius Caesar, and he was in a hurry to begin making his mark on the world. Only the previous year, at age thirty-seven, he’d been appointed a praetor, which brought with it the equivalent modern-day military rank of major general. Most of his contemporaries had achieved a praetorship as much as eight years earlier in their careers. As for his great rival, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus—Pompey the Great—he had been a famous general at age twenty-three. And always in the back of Caesar’s mind was the example of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king who had conquered large parts of the known world when still in his twenties. Suetonius says that during his first posting to Spain, while gazing at a statue of Alexander the Great in Cádiz, Caesar was to lament to his associates that at his age Alexander had already conquered the entire world.
Caesar, determined to make up for lost time, promptly instructed his chief of staff, Lucius Cornelius Balbus, to raise a new legion in Farther Spain. Balbus, a local from Cádiz, would have reminded him that there were already two legions based in the province—the 8th and the 9th— quartered together just outside Córdoba. The always well-informed Caesar would have been aware of that fact, would have known that both units had been raised in Spain four years earlier by Pompey, the last of seven new legions he created with Senate approval in 65 B.C. But Caesar’s plans called for three legions. He issued orders for a new legion to be levied in his province without delay.
Recruiting officers were soon bustling around the province, drafting thousands of young men from throughout Baetica, which roughly corresponded with the modern-day region of Andalusia. Within days, the recruits assembled at Córdoba. Following the pattern set by Pompey, Caesar gave the new legion the number ten. And Legio X was born.
For its emblem, the 10th took the bull, a symbol popular in Spain then as it is now. The bull emblem would appear on the shield of every man of the legion, and on the standards of the legion. Romans were firm believers in the power of the zodiac and were greatly influenced by horoscopes, and the unit’s birth sign, the sign of the zodiac corresponding with the time the legion was officially formed, also would appear on every legionary standard. In the case of the 10th Legion, which apparently was formed in March, the sign would have been the fish of Pisces or the ram of Aries.
Caesar took a personal interest in the appointment of the legion’s six tribunes, all young colonels in their late teens and twenties, and of the middle-ranking officers, the sixty centurions of the legion. Within thirty years the role of the tribune would change, but for now the tribunes appointed by Caesar would share the command of the legion among them. On rotation, one would lead the legion, while the other five each commanded two of the ten cohorts or battalions of the 10th. All were members of the Equestrian Order, an order of knighthood and second only in status to membership of the Roman Senate, and as such were well-educated young men from respectable, wealthy Roman families.
But as far as Caesar was concerned, the centurion was the backbone of the army, and he was to rely heavily on his centurions throughout his career. During the heat of battle in Gaul a decade later, he would call to all his centurions by name to urge them on. He came to know not only the names but also the strengths and weaknesses of his junior officers. His centurions, he knew, were his future. If they performed well, the legion would perform well. And if the legion performed well, their general’s reputation was made.
The centurions appointed to the 10th by Caesar would have come from the 8th and 9th Legions. The most senior, the so-called first-rank centurions, already held centurion rank. The junior centurions, and there were eleven grades of centurion, came out of the ranks of the ordinary enlisted men. It was not uncommon for legionaries to be promoted to centurion after four years as a private, in these and later times. Centurions controlled the lives of their men, enforcing tight discipline with the business end of a vine stick. Tacitus tells of a centurion serving in the Balkans in the first century who was nicknamed “Bring Another” by his troops, because when he broke a vine stick across the back of a legionary he was disciplining, as he regularly did, he would bellow, “Bring another!”
So now Caesar had his 10th Legion. Six tribunes, all young gentlemen. Sixty centurions, all originally from the ranks. And 5,940 enlisted men and noncommissioned officers—in Caesar’s time, the ten cohorts of the legion each contained six hundred men. In Caesar’s time, too, the legionary was a conscript aged between seventeen and twenty, who was enrolled for sixteen years’ military service. Roman legionaries averaged just five feet four in height, primarily because of their diet—which was based around bread. Meat and vegetables were considered mere supplements. And potatoes, tomatoes, bananas, and coffee were unknown to Romans.
But despite their diminutive stature, Roman legionaries were fighting fit. After tough training and daily arms and formation drill, they were capable of marching twenty-five miles a day with a pack weighing up to a hundred pounds on their back. Part of the legion training implemented by the consul Gaius Marius forty years earlier involved running long distances with full equipment. These men joining the 10th had to be fit—not only would they have to tramp thousands of miles over the coming years, but also some of their hand-to-hand battles would last not just hours, but days.
Right from the start, skills the young men of the 10th brought with them to the legion were exploited. Blacksmiths became armorers, carpenters built artillery and siege equipment, cobblers made military footwear, literate men became clerks. And if you didn’t have a skill, you were given one. You worked on the surveying officer’s team, or the road-clearing team, or became an artilleryman. But when the trumpets sounded “Prepare for Battle,” you formed up in your cohort like everyone else, fully armed and ready to go into action.
Once they had been equipped, allocated their special duties, and received their basic training, and once Caesar was satisfied that the men of the 10th were prepared for action, he put them in a column with the experienced 8th and 9th Legions, and marched out of Córdoba, crossing the Guadalquivir River, and headed north, into present-day Portugal. This part of the Iberian Peninsula—Lusitania, as the Romans called it—had yet to yield to Roman rule. Its hill towns closed their gates to Roman advances, its tribes actively and ferociously resisted Roman expeditions. Poorly led, poorly equipped, and poorly organized, the tribes of Lusitania provided the ideal opportunity for an able and ambitious commander like Julius Caesar to make his name.
Caesar had planned his campaign in advance and in detail. Over the next few months he led his force of eighteen thousand legionaries plus several hundred cavalry, supported by a baggage train involving thousands of pack animals and carts for his supplies, artillery, and heavy siege equipment, all managed by noncombatant muleteers, through the valleys of Portugal. Methodically, brutally, the men of the expeditionary force stormed one fortified hill town after another and destroyed all opposition. Rising before dawn, the legionaries would either go back to work besieging the walls of a Lusitanian town that had failed to yield, or, leaving a community in smoking ruins, they would march on to the next resistance point, tramping for an average of six hours until midday, then building a marching camp for the night.
While auxiliaries foraged for food, fodder, and firewood, the legionaries took entrenching tools from their backpacks and threw up a fortified camp—a new camp every day while they were on the march. Protected by advance infantry elements and cavalry patrols, surveying and road clearing parties commanded by a tribune proceeded ahead of the main body of the army and selected an elevated site, cleared it, and set out markers for the streets and tents of the new camp on a set grid pattern unaltered for centuries. After a few months of this, when the bulk of the legion arrived at the camp site the legionaries could construct the camp with their eyes closed.
With one cohort from each legion on guard, other legionaries dug a trench around the site, using the earth excavated to build a wall beside the trench. Polybius, who describes the construction of legion camps in fine detail, says the wall was normally twelve feet high, the trench twelve feet deep and three feet across. Caesar liked his trenches fifteen feet across.
Trees were felled, and four sets of wooden gates and guard towers were constructed on the spot and set up in the four walls—all would be burned when the legion resumed its march next day. The legion’s artillery was sited along the parapet. A space of two hundred feet left between walls and the tent line, calculated to prevent burning arrows from reaching the tents, was occupied by cattle, plunder, and prisoners.
The praetorium, Caesar’s headquarters tent, was erected first, followed by the quarters of his deputies, including General Balbus, the chief of staff, then those of the tribunes and centurions, each with a tent to himself. Next, legion workshops, the quartermaster’s department, and a camp market were set up. Finally the troops could erect their own ten-man tents, leather originally, but universally made of canvas by the first century, in streets designated for each individual cohort.
While engaged in construction work, a legionary could stack his shield and javelin and remove his backpack and helmet, but otherwise he had to wear full armored jacket, sword, and dagger, on pain of death if caught improperly attired, to enable him to go into action immediately in the event of an enemy attack. Once the camp was complete, and Josephus was to say a new legion camp blossomed like a small town in no time, a set number of sentries occupied specific posts, for watches of three hours’ duration, with four troopers from the legion’s cavalry unit assigned to patrol the posts at night and report any sentry asleep or absent—both being crimes punishable by execution.
This campaign was the ideal baptism of fire for the young men of the 10th. The exertions of building a new camp day in day out after marching twenty-five miles, the strict regulations and severe punishments, all added to the swift military education of the youngsters of the 10th Legion even before they came to grips with the Portuguese tribesmen, toughening them up, preparing them for the bloody hill town assaults when they arrived. In Lusitania many legionaries killed their first man, and saw how the tight, often brutal discipline their centurions enforced paid dividends when Caesar’s orders came and they obeyed without thinking. In those months of the spring and summer of 61 B.C., marching, digging, charging, breaking down gates with battering rams, going over walls on scaling ladders, storming through towns and villages, cutting down anyone who stood in their way, raw recruits became soldiers, and the 10th Legion became a killing machine.
In those few short, hot months, the 10th Legion helped Caesar subdue the tribes of the western Iberian Peninsula between the Tagus and Douro Rivers, tribes such as the Calaeci, and the Lusitani, who gave their name to the region, driving all the way to the Atlantic on the northwest coast—“the Ocean,” as Romans called it. One after the other the towns fell, and thousands of tribespeople were killed or taken prisoner. Captives were sold at auctions to the slave traders who trailed the legions along with other scavenging camp followers. These included merchants and prostitutes who made their living from the legions, as well as the de facto wives and illegitimate children of the legionaries and the personal servants of the officers—hordes who at times were known to outnumber the men of the army they trailed.
Under the Roman army’s rules of plunder, if a town was stormed, the spoils were divided among the legionaries. But if a town surrendered, the fate of the spoils was decided by the generals, who disposed of them as they saw fit. Generals also decided whether prisoners were executed or sold into slavery. As for the proceeds of the sale of slaves, Tacitus indicates that money from the sale of captured fighting men went to the legionaries, while that from the sale of nonmilitary prisoners did not. Smart COs such as Caesar would have made sure the rank and file always received a share of the spoils no matter what.
Most prisoners sold into slavery would die as slaves. A few would eventually be set free by generous masters, and it was the custom for some slaves to be granted freedom in their owners’ wills. With wealthier Romans each owning up to twenty thousand slaves at their numerous estates, it was no sacrifice to free a hundred or two. There are one or two instances on record of captives being enslaved for set periods, such as thirty years, on the orders of their Roman captors. As for the slave traders, theirs could be a perilous existence, camping in unprotected tents outside the fortified camps of the legions. There are several first-century examples of unarmed camp followers being massacred in large number during enemy attacks on legion bases.
As the 8th, 9th, and 10th Legions returned victoriously to their winter quarters outside Córdoba in the fall of 61 B.C. with minimal casualties and a hefty share of the booty from the campaign, Caesar was already being hailed by his troops as a great general and back at Rome as a new Roman hero.
His appointment in Farther Spain had been for just one year, and in the new year he parted company with the 10th, no doubt going around to all the centurions to bid them farewell individually. Then he would have called for a parade, and stood on the camp tribunal, the reviewing stand always set up in front of the quarters of the legion’s tribunes, and thanked his assembled legionaries for their brave and loyal service. He would have particularly thanked the 10th Legion, which he had quickly come to consider his own. From later events, it’s likely he even promised the men of the 10th that if ever again he had the opportunity to lead troops in the service of Rome, he would send for the 10th Legion. And not just to march in his vanguard, but also to act as his personal bodyguard. Caesar would have left the legion camp for the last time and embarked on the road journey back to Rome with the cheers of his troops ringing in his ears.
As he returned to the capital, he was faced with a dilemma. To his mind, his highly successful military operations in Spain qualified him for a Triumph. The Triumph was one of the highest accolades a Roman general could receive, entitling him to a parade through the streets of Rome in a golden chariot followed by troops from his army and his spoils of war, receiving the cheers of the crowds lining the route of the procession. So he sent aides on ahead to demand that the Senate grant him a Triumph. Word came back to Caesar that he was being considered for a consulship. But he couldn’t have both.
To be awarded a Triumph, a candidate had to wait outside Rome for the Senate vote to be taken. To be elected a consul, the candidate had to be in the city. When forced to choose between pursuing the consulship or the Triumph, Caesar went for the former. The two consuls appointed each year were the highest Roman officials in the land in these late days of the Republic. Power before glory, that was Caesar’s tenet. He duly achieved a consulship in what turned out to be a hard-fought election in 59 B.C., his promotion elevating him to the equivalent rank of lieutenant general.
But Caesar wasn’t finished with the 10th Legion. Their partnership had only just begun.