VII
As the winter of 50–49 B.C. descended on Europe and his troops in Gaul were generally thought to be going into into winter quarters, Julius Caesar returned to northern Italy from Gaul by way of the Alps. Accompanied by the five thousand legionaries of the 13th Legion stationed in Cisalpine Gaul and his now normal escort of three hundred tall, menacing German auxiliary cavalrymen, he arrived unannounced at the naval base at Ravenna, in northeastern Italy, which was at the southern boundary of his allotted area of responsibility.
The choice of the 13th Legion for this mission had been almost accidental. A couple of years earlier, Caesar had based the 15th Legion in Cisalpine Gaul at the urgent request of its citizens, after bandits had crossed the Alps in his rear and raided the city of Trieste. Then, in 50 B.C., a strange thing happened. Caesar received an instruction from the Senate to hand over one of his legions, to take part in a punitive operation in the Middle East against the Parthians, who had wiped out Crassus, father and son, and their legions, at the Battle of Carrhae in Turkey. Pompey also had been required to hand over a legion for the operation, and as Caesar hesitated, suspecting some plot behind the order, Pompey had allocated the one legion he’d maintained under arms in Italy, the 1st—personally raised by him, and to Pompey what the 10th was to Caesar.
Prompted by this, Caesar decided to hand over the 15th Legion to the Senate, and sent it back to Rome in wary compliance of the Senate’s order. Then the Senate suddenly canceled the Parthian plan. It then not only gave Pompey back his 1st Legion, it also gave the 15th over to his command. Both were now in camp in the Puglia region, Roman Apulia, south of Rome. A roundabout way of depriving Caesar of one of his legions and an act that was out of character for Pompey, the scheme had probably been hatched by several of his small-minded supporters just to peeve Caesar. And they succeeded in their objective: Caesar had been incensed by the whole affair.
To replace the 15th on garrison duty in northern Italy, Caesar had pulled the 13th out of central Gaul in 50 B.C., so that this was the legion he picked up as he proceeded down to Ravenna. There, in the fourth week of December, with the legion camped outside the city, Caesar conferred with a tribune of the Plebians—a civil, not military post—one Gaius Scribonius Curio. In his thirties, Curio had been one of his supporters in the Senate ever since Caesar paid off his substantial debts. Curio, a handy man to have in your pocket as the civil tribunes had the power of veto over votes in the Senate, had come galloping up from Rome for the clandestine meeting. Caesar sent Curio scurrying back to the capital. Appian says he covered 270 miles in three days of hard riding. He arrived back at Rome with a written ultimatum from Caesar for the senators, some of whom had been angling to remove him from command in Gaul now that his term of office was due to expire. Caesar said he would give up his army if Pompey gave up his. If not, Caesar would advance into Italy and, in his own words, “Bring succor to my homeland and myself.”
It wasn’t as if Pompey had been acting like a tyrant. Pompey was much admired, even loved by many of the people of Rome. Certainly he’d used every trick in the book, including strong-arm tactics, to achieve his political ends in the past, but he had mellowed with age, and now the famous general was a benevolent power broker who was as responsible as any man for Rome’s preeminent place in the world. Without Pompey’s support, Caesar would never have maintained his governorship of Gaul for these past nine years. But Pompey stood in Caesar’s way. After years of sharing the empire with Pompey, and with the conquest of Gaul all tied up, Caesar had his eye on bigger things. He wasn’t satisfied with just a slice of the cake, he wanted the whole thing. Deny a strong man his due, and he will take all he can get—so, a hundred years later, would write the poet Lucan in his Civil War, admirably describing the motivation of Julius Caesar.
In Caesar’s path stood a Senate whose members were substantially against him and loyal to Pompey. A Senate that was stunned by the ultimatum delivered to it by Gaius Curio on January 1, 49 B.C. Many senators considered Caesar’s “offer” a declaration of war. Despite the protests of Curio and another tribune of the Plebs loyal to Caesar, his friend Mark Antony, and led by the influential, impartial, and respected Marcus Porcius Cato, Cato the Younger, the Senate of Rome now put its support solidly behind Pompey. It appointed him Rome’s military commander in chief, voting him the powers necessary to mobilize an army of 130,000 men. And it declared Julius Caesar an enemy of the state.
Julius Caesar stood beside the stream in the darkness, looking pensively into the rippling waters as the first rays of the new dawn pierced the eastern sky. This was the Rubicon River, an otherwise insignificant waterway in eastern Italy that marked the boundary between the province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy.
The day before, January 10, Caesar had secretly sent a commando force across the Rubicon. According to Plutarch, and apparently on the authority of the written account of Caesar’s staff officer Gaius Asinius Pollio, this force was commanded by Colonel Quintus Hortensius. Made up of tribunes, centurions, and picked men of the 13th Legion, the small force had entered Italy with farmers’ cloaks disguising their military uniforms and hiding the swords on their hips, and the men had spent the night at the nearest major town, the port of Rimini, or Ariminum as the Romans called it, a little way farther down the coast. That same night, having watched gladiators in training during the afternoon, Caesar had dined at Ravenna with his staff officers.
His companions were men such as the thirty-six-year-old Sallust, who’d recently fled to Caesar after being expelled from the Senate for immorality and who would prove a poor soldier, only to become famous as a writer of influential style. And the blindly loyal Hirtius, who’d recently acted as Caesar’s envoy to Pompey and who would later edit his chief’s writings. There was Oppius, who’d served with Caesar through much of the Gallic campaign and who would later produce vitriolic works about Caesar’s foes. Then there was the Spaniard Lucius Balbus, nephew of his former chief of staff of the same name. And Sulpicius Rufus, whom Caesar would make a general the following year.
Caesar was a solitary man. He knew his own mind, and while he accepted counsel, he never needed it. And, essentially, he trusted few men. About to undertake the greatest venture of his life, Julius Caesar confided his plans only to those who needed to know. Shortly after dusk, with the lie that he was not feeling well and intended getting an early night, he had left the others at dinner, and then, swathed in an ordinary cloak, departed the dining hall.
Waiting for him outside was a small, covered, two-wheeled carriage hitched to two horses. Caesar took his seat in the carriage, and the driver urged his horses into action. So he wouldn’t attract attention he first drove west, before pointing his horses down the road to the south, toward Italy proper. According to Suetonius, the carriage became lost for a time in the night. Appian makes no mention of this, telling us only that the carriage linked up with the three hundred German cavalrymen of Caesar’s personal bodyguard, who were waiting down the road for him as per his confidential orders.
The cavalry was under the command of twenty-eight-year-old Colonel Gaius Pollio. Appian tells us the troopers then trailed Caesar at a distance as the carriage bumped through the night toward the Rubicon, holding back so no one would link the shadowy occupant of the carriage with the military column and raise the alarm south of the Rubicon that Julius Caesar was heading for the Italian border with his troops.
Despite his promises to the 10th years before that he would make the legion his bodyguard, Caesar had instead come to use big, bearded, physically daunting, and highly mobile Trever and Batavian cavalrymen from the Rhine in that role. They were mercenaries in every sense of the word. While Caesar paid them well, they remained faithful—not to his army, not to Rome, but to Caesar personally—and they would serve him loyally throughout his career. Even when his legions turned against him, he would always be able to count on these troopers from the Rhine. Now, in the early hours of January 11, the Germans waited quietly in the saddle behind him as Caesar stood on the riverbank by a small bridge with the sun beginning to rise out over the Adriatic.
As usual, Caesar had planned this operation down to the last detail. Sealed orders had been sent to his commanders. Two legions that had crossed the Alps and spent the winter in the west of Cisalpine Gaul, the 12th and the 8th, had been ordered to strike camp and join him in Italy. Caesar’s deputy, General Titus Labienus, encamped near the Rhine with his main cavalry force, made up of thirty-seven hundred German and Gallic troopers, was also to move out, bringing the bulk of his cavalry down over the Alps to link up with him as he marched on Rome. Caesar’s six remaining legions, the 7th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 14th and 16th, which had been camped in Belgium and northern France for the past year, had been brought down into central and southern France with six hundred of Labienus’s cavalrymen for the winter. Three of those legions, including the 10th, had based themselves in and around Narbonne, on France’s Mediterranean coast, under General Gaius Fabius. From there they could stand in the way of Pompey’s six legions based in Spain and prevent them from reaching Italy in support of their commander, while being in a position to reinforce Caesar in Italy if he found the going a little hot.
Many authors have suggested that this pause on the northern bank of the Rubicon in the predawn darkness was to allow Caesar to reflect on the grave act he had in mind before he took an irretrievable step. It’s just as likely he was doing no more than waiting for daylight. Caesar, the blinkered pragmatist, had planned this move for many months in advance. He knew that once lost, opportunity, like virginity, can never be regained.
In full armor, helmet, and scarlet general’s cloak now—there was no longer any need to disguise himself—Caesar walked to where Colonel Pollio waited with a horse for his commander. The first of Caesar’s reinforcements, the men of the 12th Legion, were only several days march away, with the 8th not far behind. Any other general would have waited for them to arrive so that he entered Italy with at least three legions. But not Caesar. Two thousand years later, in 1944, American general George S. Patton would tell U.S. troops gathered in southern England for the invasion of Europe that his motto was “Audacity, audacity, always audacity.” The same motto could have been applied to Julius Caesar.
Curio would have informed him that already at Rome it was common knowledge that Caesar’s legions were on the move, and that everyone expected him to wait north of the Rubicon until he was joined by his entire army, and from that position of strength threaten his opponents at Rome. In December, when asked what precautions he had taken against an invasion of Italy by Caesar, Pompey had declared that he had ten legions ready. In fact, the only legions he had under arms in Italy were the 1st and the 15th, plus muster rolls to fill another eight with draftees and veterans eligible for recall from retirement. As was to become clear, Pompey never imagined that Caesar would be as adventurous as to go to war with his own country.
So Caesar knew that ahead of him Pompey could field only two experienced legions. Caesar was probably counting on the 15th, a legion he’d raised and trained and that he’d commanded for three of the past four years, coming over to him. He had no fears of any hastily raised, untrained levies Pompey might throw in his path—they could be expected to run at the first charge from his cavalry, in which case he only had the professionals of Pompey’s elite 1st Legion to worry about. With the 13th, his cavalry, and possibly bolstered by the 15th, if he could turn it, he figured he didn’t have to wait for reinforcements. He could get away with invading Italy with just the one legion.
Colonel Pollio was to write in his History of the Civil War, quoted by Appian and Plutarch, that as Caesar mounted up, he heard him make a remark, half to himself, in Greek. There are varying accounts of his actual words. Some suggest he said: “The die is cast.” Appian is one of those who reports that Caesar actually repeated a proverb of the time: “Let the die be cast.” Either way, it’s clear that Julius Caesar had now consigned his future into the hands of the Fates.
With Caesar and Colonel Pollio leading the way and Caesar’s personal standard flying proudly from the horse coming along behind him, the German cavalry clattered over the bridge spanning the Rubicon and entered Italy. With this act, Julius Caesar violated the Cornelia Majestatis Law, which made it illegal for a general to lead troops out of the province to which he had been assigned by the Roman Senate. In doing so he was considered to have committed an act of war against the Senate and the people of Rome. There was no turning back from here.
The mounted column pounded down the Aemilian Way to Rimini in the early morning light, and as it approached the main gateway, Colonel Hortensius and the men of the 13th Legion’s commando party were ready and waiting inside the city and opened the gates to them. Caesar and his troopers entered the city and took control of it before anyone in Rimini knew what was happening. A courier then galloped back to Ravenna to summon the 13th Legion and Caesar’s officers in the wake of his first, bloodless victory of the civil war.
On January 7, the two civil tribunes, Curio and Mark Antony, had slipped out of Rome, in a hired carriage and dressed as farmers, and headed northeast along the Flaminian Way to join Caesar. They found him at Rimini with the 13th Legion several days later. After experience as a cavalry commander under General Aulus Gabinius in Judea and Egypt, Antony, who would turn thirty-two or thirty-three this year, had served as a colonel and then as one of Caesar’s junior generals in the last few years of the Gallic campaigns. Antony was related to Caesar via his mother’s side of the family, and Caesar always entrusted the greatest responsibility to men he had personal connections with. While envoys dashed back and forth between Caesar at Rimini and Pompey at Capua just south of Rome, carrying offers, counteroffers, demands, and accusations that would have no material effect on Caesar’s decision to make war and Pompey’s intent to act as the Senate’s appointed military commander against him, Caesar gave five cohorts of the 13th to Antony and sent him west across the Apennines to secure Arretium, modern Arezzo, and guard his right flank.
One of the messengers who went back and forth between Caesar and Pompey during January was the younger Lucius Caesar, son of Caesar’s cousin, another Lucius Caesar—one of his generals during the latter years of the war in Gaul. Young Lucius went originally to Rimini on personal business; he probably delivered a letter from his father to Caesar. In the letter, the elder Lucius would have informed Caesar of his decision to either support Pompey or stay neutral in any conflict. This news must have stung Caesar to the quick.
While Mark Antony marched west into central Italy, Caesar and Curio proceeded to advance down the east coast with the remaining cohorts of the 13th Legion and their few cavalry, occupying Pesaro, Fano, Ancona, and Iguvium in swift succession. They then turned inland, to occupy Auximum—this acquisition would have given the sometimes petty Caesar particular pleasure, as Auximum was Pompey’s hometown, the place where he’d raised his first legion back in 84 B.C., when just twenty-three years of age.
As Caesar pushed on south through the Picenum region, the 12th Legion arrived from northern Italy to join him after a forced march. With fifteen cohorts of his seasoned legionaries now, plus local garrison troops who came over to him in increasing numbers, Caesar continued to advance, and occupied Ascoli Piceno, or Asculum, as the chief town of Picenum was then known, as Pompey’s large garrison there fled ahead of him.
All Pompeian resistance north of Rome was now concentrated at the town of Corfinium, on the Aterna River, the Roman Aternus, in central Italy, where Pompey’s generals Vibullius Rufus and Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus brought together eighteen thousand men, mostly new conscripts plus a few of Pompey’s old retired legionaries. As the men of the 13th and 12th Legions approached the river in the second week of February, opposition troops were encountered trying to break down the bridge across the Aterna. Caesar’s troops beat these men off, secured the bridge, then marched the three miles to Corfinium and made camp outside its stone walls and closed gates—gates possibly made of solid metal, as were those of substantial Italian cities of the time, such as Cremona.
Caesar had sent for Mark Antony, and, when he arrived from Arezzo with his five cohorts of the 13th, immediately dispatched him to take Sulmona, in the upper Pescara River valley, a town that would gain fame the following century as the birthplace of the poet Ovid. Antony took the town in a day, then rejoined Caesar outside Corfinium. Three days later, when the Spanish legionaries of his 8th Legion marched in from the north, Caesar had them build a camp for themselves nearby. His invasion force had now grown to three legions. The following day, realizing that Corfinium intended holding out against him, Caesar began to surround it with entrenchments.
General Domitius had managed to sneak a courier out of the town who had hurried southwest to Pompey at Capua, bearing a message urging him to march over and relieve Corfinium. The same courier apparently sneaked back through Caesar’s lines at night, bringing the message from Pompey that he hadn’t instructed Domitius to hole up at Corfinium and, suspecting that more of Caesar’s legions were drawing closer by the day, he wasn’t prepared to risk coming to his aid. He instructed Domitius to pull out and march his cohorts to link up with him south of Rome. But it was too late. By now, Corfinium was surrounded.
General Domitius lied to his men; he told them that Pompey was on the way with a relief force, and urged them to defend the town with all their might. At the same time, he made secret preparations to escape. But not secret enough—word leaked out about the general’s planned desertion of his troops. He was nabbed by his own soldiers, in civilian dress, trying to effect his escape. His men angrily made a prisoner of him, then, late in the day, sent a deputation of soldiers to Caesar, offering to come over to his side. At first Caesar seems to have suspected this was some sort of ruse. He had his men circle the town, each man standing within arm’s length of his neighbor, and kept them there like that all night with orders to make sure no one escaped from Corfinium.
The next day, February 21, General Publius Lentulus Spinther, Domitius’s deputy, came out to Caesar, and they agreed on surrender terms. All the senators and knights at Corfinium capitulated to him, and General Domitius was handed over in chains. When Domitius gave his word not to take any further part in the war, Caesar set him free. All his former troops in the town were then required to swear allegiance to Caesar, which they did. These surrendered troops were soon formed into legions. Combined with cohorts that Caesar also raised locally, there were enough men to make up four new legions, which Caesar called the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th. Putting them under the command of Gaius Curio, he would soon dispatch them south to occupy Sicily, sending the trusted Colonel Pollio on ahead with a fast-moving advance force.
Caesar spent seven days engaged in the siege of Corfinium, and by the time it was over he was surprised that General Labienus still hadn’t arrived from Gaul with the bulk of his cavalry. Now he was staggered by the news that Labienus had decided that Caesar had overreached himself in going against the Senate, and, while he had brought the Gallic and German cavalry down from the Rhine as ordered, he had offered the services of his troopers and himself to Pompey. Pompey of course welcomed him, appointing him commander of all his mounted forces.
Labienus’s defection, on top of that of Lucius Caesar, embittered Julius Caesar. Throughout his career, Caesar tended to be so single-minded that he failed to take into account the grievances of others, or even to recognize the fact that they had a grievance with him until it was too late, as evidenced by the mutinies and desertions of his troops during the civil war and by the assassination plot that resulted in his death.
Typically, Caesar’s ego would let him make no mention in his memoirs of how his once firm friend and loyal lieutenant Labienus had defected to Pompey. We simply find Labienus on the other side once battle was joined. Apart from his strong credentials as a professional soldier—he’d been made a praetor and major general by 59 B.C., so would have had seen extensive military service, probably in the East, before his nine notable years with Caesar in Gaul—Labienus was a wealthy, respected, and influential senator who had even established an entire town, Cingulum in Picenum, at his own expense. Stung by Labienus’s action, from this point on Caesar would only refer to his skilled and loyal deputy of nine years in the most sneering and derogatory terms. Labienus’s character assassination would be completed by Caesar’s supporters in their subsequent writings, with the cumulative result that Labienus would be cast into the basement of history. From this point, too, Mark Antony replaced General Labienus as Caesar’s deputy commander.
Pompey and the two current consuls had already left Rome, back on the night of January 17–18, joining the 1st and 15th Legions at their camp at Luceria in Puglia. As news of the debacle at Corfinium reached him, his officers informed him that all attempts to raise fresh troops north of Capua were proving fruitless, as much because of Caesar’s reputation as his rapid advance, a reputation, according to Plutarch, that credited Caesar with killing a million people during his nine-year conquest of Gaul and of taking another million prisoner and selling them into slavery. At most, said Pompey’s subordinates, they could muster three new legions of recruits and retired veterans. In light of this, the fifty-six-year-old Pompey, who had not led an army in more than a decade, made a far-reaching decision. He would abandon Italy, withdrawing to Greece using his strong naval superiority, and there he would regroup and rebuild his army with the half dozen Roman legions stationed in the East and the support of the many eastern potentates who were in his debt.
Pompey and his legions marched out of Luceria, heading for the port of Brundisium, modern Brindisi, on the southeastern coast. Contrary to Caesar’s probable expectation, the 15th Legion remained loyal to Pompey and marched with the 1st. Hundreds of senators and knights followed; Plutarch was to say that this was not because of any fear of Caesar, but rather out of loyalty and even devotion to Pompey. In fact, the most famous men of the day, including the great writers and orators Cicero, Cato the Younger, and Varro, all supported Pompey. Pausing briefly at the town of Canusium, probably to add General Labienus and his several thousand cavalrymen to the column, Pompey then hurried south down the Appian Way.
As soon as he heard that Pompey had barricaded himself behind the walls of Brindisi, Caesar marched his forces down to the port city. From Brindisi, while Caesar tried to blockade him on land with major earthworks and on the waters around the harbor using a series of rafts, all manned by the 8th, 12th, 13th, and three new legions raised in southern Italy, Pompey was able in early March to commence an amphibious evacuation. In the first wave, he shipped out two new legions he himself had raised south of Rome, together with General Labienus and his cavalry and the consuls and other leading citizens who had chosen to flee with him, while the 1st, 15th, and another new legion held the city.
The refugees crossed the Adriatic to Durrës, or Durazzo, as the Italians call it, the present-day chief seaport of Albania. Then called Dyrrhachium, the town was Rome’s principal port in the Epirus region. Ten days later, Pompey’s fleet slipped back into Brindisi, and on the night of March 17–18 began embarking Pompey and the last of his legionaries, who were under strict orders to make absolutely no noise as they withdrew from their positions and boarded the ships waiting at the docks around the antler-shaped inner harbor that gave the city its Latin name—Brundisium meant “stag’s head.” Only when it was too late did Caesar realize the city walls had been deserted and that the Pompeians were escaping in the darkness. He led the way as his troops scaled the walls and broke into the city. Guided through the blocked and booby-trapped streets by local sympathizers, Caesar reached the waterfront to find that Pompey had outwitted him. Two ships carrying men of Pompey’s rear guard were caught at the breakwater, and a few men were found at Pompey’s embarkation camp in the town, in their beds and too ill to move—a mystery illness had hit the camp over the winter, almost certainly an influenza epidemic. But their capture was small consolation—Pompey had succeeded in a Dunkirk-like evacuation of twenty-five thousand men from under Caesar’s nose, troops who would form the core of his new army.
Caesar had no naval forces to speak of, had no capacity to give chase. So many of his past campaigns had been completed in less than a single season, and, indeed, he had now taken control of Italy within seventy days of crossing the Rubicon. But the short civil war he would have been hoping for was not to be. Now, after putting his stamp on the administration at Rome, he knew that he would have to end the threat at his back posed by Pompey’s forces in Spain. Pompey had six veteran legions stationed in the two Spanish provinces, and his commanders there would soon raise a seventh locally.
Planning his troop movements with meticulous care as usual, Caesar sent orders to General Fabius at Narbonne to lead his three legions into Spain and secure the mountain passes across the Pyrenees ahead of his own arrival. The 10th Legion was about to enter onto the civil war stage to play a key part in the second act.