VIII
While it was camped at Narbonne in the south of France in January, the 10th Legion had said farewell to Chief Centurion Crastinus and his fellow senior centurions. The sixteen-year enlistments of these men had expired, and, thinking the civil war would soon be over, General Fabius had obviously seen no reason why they shouldn’t be allowed to receive their discharges and go into retirement. Fabius had been governor of the province of Asia in 58–57 B.C., and, like Mark Antony, had been one of Caesar’s subordinates in Gaul since 54 B.C. An unremarkable man who appears to have played things by the book, Fabius may have been in declining health at this time, as indications are he was to die this same year, of natural causes.
The retiring centurions of the 10th were quickly replaced by centurions of the 61 B.C. enlistment, who were promoted up a grade or two by General Fabius to fill their vacant positions, men including Gaius Clusinas, Marcus Tiro, and Titus Salienus.
Where the retiring centurions went after leaving the legion we don’t know. Most, if not all, would have been, like Gaius Crastinus, natives of Spain. But Spain was in Pompeian hands at the time, so it’s unlikely they went home just yet, as they could be expected to be drafted into Pompey’s army. It’s more likely they waited around Narbonne until the civil war dust settled.
Between mid-January and mid-March, recruiting officers were busy for Caesar in Italy. Males of military age were drafted in the thousands into thirteen hastily created new legions. Another two new legions would be created the following winter for service in the Balkans. These fifteen new legions were named the 21st through the 35th. Once Caesar turned away from Brindisi empty-handed in the second half of March and decided to take Spain from Pompey’s forces, he issued a stream of movement orders as he journeyed to Rome to take over the reins of government. Plutarch was to write that Caesar was gifted above all men with the faculty for making the right use of everything in war, and Caesar’s plans for the Spanish operation were detailed and precise as always.
While General Fabius led the 10th and his two other legions from Narbonnne to Spain to pave the way for Caesar, another three legions were ordered to head for Spain from Italy, crossing the Alps and then the Pyrenees on their march. There they were to link up with the advance force. Meanwhile, the six-hundred-year-old city of Massilia, modern Marseilles in southern France, had closed its gates to Caesar’s emissaries, and Caesar dispatched a further three legions to lay siege to the city, led by General Gaius Trebonius. At the same time, to make up for the loss of Labienus’s three thousand cavalry, Caesar couriered dispatches to all the subject tribes of Gaul, instructing them to send their best mounted fighters to Spain to join his army there, giving each a specific quota and even naming individual nobles of the tribes as men he required to serve.
The upshot of all this was that the 10th and its two fellow legions marched rapidly west and easily cleared the Pyrenees passes of Pompeian guards left there, and as spring blossomed, six legions and three thousand Gallic cavalry congregated in eastern Spain with General Fabius, waiting for Caesar to arrive from Rome to take over operational command. These legions, in addition to the 10th, were the 7th and the 9th, brother Spanish legions of the 10th, plus the 14th, another of Caesar’s veteran units from Gaul, as well as the 21st and 30th, two newly raised Italian legions that hurried over the Alps from Italy ahead of Caesar’s arrival. To handle the siege of Marseilles, it seems that Caesar allocated his experienced 11th Legion to head the task, supported by another two new legions, almost certainly the 22nd and the 23rd. The last of Caesar’s original legions, the 16th, appears to have been left on garrison duty in central France, with the daunting task of keeping all of Gaul in check.
By early spring Caesar was in Rome, and between April 1 and 3 he held a meeting of the much-reduced Senate, appointing a number of new senators to replace the hundreds who had departed the capital with Pompey. During this sitting Caesar settled affairs of state to his satisfaction, including the appointment of governors and military commanders to various regions.
While his focus was now on Spain, Caesar was concerned by reports from the Balkans. Towns in the province of Illyricum, just across the Adriatic, which he’d governed now for a decade, had closed their gates to his officials. Some towns had been taken over by Pompeian supporters, others by local “bandits” professing a desire for independence. So before he left the capital, Caesar set in motion an operation that would send Mark Antony’s younger brother Gaius with the new 24th Legion and half the new 28th Legion to make a surprise amphibious landing on the coast of Illyricum and restore Caesar’s control of the province. The number of troops involved in the operation, about seventy-five hundred, seems to have been dictated by the number of ships Caesar’s supporters could rake together for the landing.
As preparations were set in train for the Illyricum operation, Caesar put Marcus Lepidus in charge at Rome and gave command of all troops in Italy to Mark Antony, who based himself at the key road junction of Placentia, modern Piacenza, on the southern bank of the Po River in central Italy. The legions under Antony’s command were strategically placed at Brindisi on the southeastern coast and towns in the Puglia region.
Caesar now set off for Spain. Precisely how long it took him to make the journey we don’t know. His journey from Rome to Córdoba carried in a litter in 61 B.C. had taken him twenty-four days. But now he was riding, accompanied by his now constant companions, the three hundred men of his mounted German bodyguard. On one occasion in the past, driving his own chariot, Caesar had made the trip from Rome to southern France in eight days, so, it’s likely he reached the Pyrenees within two weeks of leaving the capital. There, holding the passes in expectation of his arrival, were six hundred of Labienus’s troopers who had been detached to General Fabius at the beginning of the winter and who had remained loyal to Caesar. Adding these men to his fast-moving cavalry column, he crossed the mountains and advanced into eastern Spain to join General Fabius and his legions.
For some time after the event, Caesar was unable to bring himself to admit that three thousand of Labienus’s cavalry had defected to Pompey in Italy and were now in Greece with Labienus and Pompey. Everything points to Caesar dictating many of the chapters of his account of the civil war within days or weeks of their taking place, and to cover up the loss of Labienus’s cavalry he initially inflated the number of cavalry he had at his disposal in Spain by three thousand. Later, when dealing with the war in Albania and Greece, his memoirs talk for the first time of Labienus and his German and Gallic cavalry fighting for Pompey.
Riding in with his nine hundred cavalry, Caesar found General Fabius at the Río Segre, the Sicoris River, in northeastern Spain, facing an army of five Pompeian legions. Overall, against the six legions Caesar had sent to Spain were six of Pompey’s veteran legions and a seventh, which was hurriedly drafted on the 10th Legion’s home turf, the province of Baetica, and called, unimaginatively, the Indigena—the Native or Home-Grown Legion. These Pompeian heavy infantry units were supported by five thousand locally raised cavalry and large numbers of local auxiliaries. Initially in three separate armies, Pompey’s forces were now concentrated into two forces. The Indigena was left in western Spain with the governor of Baetica, the famous writer Marcus Terentius Varro, together with the 2nd Legion. The 2nd was one of Pompey’s original legions, dating back, like the 1st, to 84 B.C., when it was personally founded and funded by Pompey in the Picenum region of eastern Italy. More recently it had been reenlisted in Cisalpine Gaul.
To meet Caesar in eastern Spain, an army of five legions marched under the mature, plodding General Lucius Afranius and his deputy, hot-tempered General Marcus Petreius. Afranius was an old friend of Pompey’s, hailing from the same home territory, Picenum in eastern Italy. He had served under him in Spain and the Middle East at the height of Pompey’s military successes in the 70s and 60s B.C., before becoming a consul in 60 B.C. and governor of Nearer Spain in 55 B.C. And he was determined to do his best to defend Spain for Pompey.
General Afranius’s legions were the Valeria, another of Pompey’s originals, recruited in these times in Cisalpine Gaul; the 3rd, also from Cisalpine Gaul, and the 4th, 5th, and 6th. The latter three were all veteran Spanish legions, whose legionaries, aged between thirty-three and thirty-six, were due to receive their discharge this year, as their sixteen-year enlistments were now up. The 6th was the same legion that had served on attachment with Caesar’s army in Gaul in 52–50 B.C., loaned to Caesar by Pompey at the height of the Vercingetorix Revolt, before returning to eastern Spain.
General Afranius decided that the best territory in the northeast for infantry operations was around the town of Lérida, or Ilerda, as it was then known, in the present-day region of Catalonia about eighty miles west of Barcelona. Sitting on a hill, the town was on the right bank of the Segre, not far from where it joined the Ebro River. Moving his forces into the area, Afranius occupied the walled town and also built a fortified camp nearby. By the time Caesar reached General Fabius at the Segre in the second half of April there had already been a number of skirmishes between the two armies, but no major engagements had taken place.
Caesar crossed two bridges over the Segre just completed by General Fabius and marched the army to confront the Pompeian forces outside Lérida, where over the next seventy-two hours his legions built a fortified camp. He then led three of his legions on a surprise mission to seize a small hill that lay between the town and General Afranius’s camp, with the objective of dividing the Pompeian forces. Two of the legions involved were the 9th and the 14th. The identity of the third is unknown, but from subsequent events it was probably one of the new, untried Italian legions.
Realizing what Caesar was up to, General Afranius quickly dispatched his on-duty guard cohorts, which occupied the hillock before Caesar’s troops could reach it. Afranius soon brought up several legions in support. Caesar’s advance guard was beaten back, and then the understrength 14th Legion, occupying one of Caesar’s wings, coming under sustained attack and taking casualties, failed to hold its ground and retreated. This caused panic among the ranks of the raw recruits of the other legion, and Caesar had to personally lead up the 9th to stabilize the situation. The charge of the 9th sent Afranius’s troops reeling, and the men of the 9th chased them all the way to a ridge at the foot of the hill on which the town of Lérida stood. There, Afranius’s troops regrouped, and in a surprise move swept around the flanks and encircled the 9th Legion. The men of the 9th found themselves cut off on the ridge, which was just wide enough for three cohorts to form up side-by-side.
Over the next five hours Caesar tried to fight his way through to the 9th with infantry and cavalry reinforcements, while the men of the 9th fought desperately to hold their ground and not be overrun. Eventually, Caesar’s cavalry managed to climb the slope and inject themselves between the 9th and the other side, allowing the men of the 9th to withdraw before the cavalry also pulled out.
Afranius claimed the day’s fight as a victory for his side, and messengers hurried away to Italy with the news that Caesar had been bettered. Caesar was to admit to seventy dead in the first encounter at the hillock, including a first-rank centurion of the 14th Legion, as well as more than six hundred wounded, but he didn’t reveal how many men he subsequently lost in the five-hour fight outside Lérida. He claimed that the Pompeians lost more than two hundred legionaries that day.
Two days later, a storm brought the heaviest rainfall in memory to the region, washing away the two bridges behind Caesar, over which he was supplied. Afranius then led a raid in Caesar’s rear, inflicting more than two hundred casualties on a column bringing up supplies and reinforcements. After failing to repair the bridges because opposition troops occupied the opposite bank, Caesar had his men build light, flat-bottomed boats, of a kind he’d seen in Britain, and was able to spirit troops across the water in the night and drive Afranius’s men away from the bridge site. Once he was in occupation of both banks he was able to bridge the river and once more link up with his supply columns and foraging parties.
Slowly, as weeks passed, fortunes began to change at Lérida. Caesar’s cavalry cleared the countryside of Afranius’s foragers, and the Pompeian troops, locked behind the walls of camp and town, found themselves cut off from resupply, with dwindling resources. On the other hand, with five tribes of the region now voluntarily providing him with supplies, Caesar was sitting pretty. Rather than be starved into submission, Generals Afranius and Petreius agreed that they had to break out and make for the mountains to the north, where tribes loyal to Pompey would supply provisions and reinforcements.
The Pompeians discreetly made their preparations, and then one day in July, carrying enough rations to last them twenty-two days, they took Caesar by surprise and succeeded in their breakout. Initially, Caesar could only harry the column with his cavalry, but, as always, he reacted swiftly, and soon set off after it with five legions. Marching at a cracking pace, he overtook Afranius five miles from the mountains. Both sides built camps, but Caesar then worked his way around, across rough country, giving the appearance of a withdrawal but in reality aiming to skirt Afranius’s position in a wide arc and place his forces in the other side’s path at the foot of the mountains.
When Afranius saw Caesarian troops between him and his destination he quickly left his camp and marched his troops for the mountains at the double, leaving behind much of his equipment, but Caesar’s troops won the race and formed up ahead of him. A force of two thousand auxiliaries subsequently sent by Afranius to take high ground for him was cut off and wiped out by Caesar’s cavalry, and the Pompeian army withdrew to the protection of its last camp and regained its equipment.
While Afranius and Petreius were away from their camp, supervising the digging of a line of entrenchments to safeguard their water supply, troops from Caesar’s 10th, 9th, and 7th Legions began to fraternize with their fellow Spaniards of the 4th, 5th, and 6th Legions on the other side. Many were fellow townsmen, some were even related, and before long men from Caesar’s legions were in the Pompeian camp, sitting and talking and sharing food and camaraderie with their countrymen, all agreeing that it was crazy that they should be fighting each other. Officers from the Pompeian camp even went to Caesar and proposed setting up talks to negotiate the surrender of their army.
When they heard about this, Generals Afranius and Petreius hurried back to their camp. An assembly was called, and Petreius led the army in swearing an oath reaffirming their loyalty to Pompey and vowing that they would not give up the fight. Petreius then ordered men who had troops from Caesar’s army in their tents to produce them at once. Those who were given up, men of the 10th Legion among them, were put to death on the parade ground in front of the assembled Pompeian legions.
Generals Afranius and Petreius now conferred on their best course of action. It was obvious that Caesar was not going to let them reach the mountains. One alternative was to try to reach the port of Tarraco, modern Tarragona, on the east coast, where Pompey’s fleet could supply them from vast grain supplies being held at Gades, present-day Cádiz, farther south, which was still firmly in Pompeian hands. If need be, they could even be evacuated from Tarragona and join Pompey in Greece. But Tarragona was at least a week’s march away under present conditions, and while their legionaries still had a few days’ rations, their auxiliaries had already exhausted all their supplies. The generals knew that many of the Pompeian troops were simply not up to a week’s march. They had left a little grain back at Lérida, and the other option was to retrace their steps there. This was a short-term option, as once that grain was exhausted, they were no better off. But this was the option the generals agreed on.
So they broke camp and marched their army back the way they’d come. Caesar harried them all the way, so that they covered only four miles on the first morning, before, exhausted, the Pompeian troops set up a new camp. Caesar built a camp of his own two miles away. Now the Pompeians slaughtered all their baggage animals, for food, and because they had no fodder for them.
Caesar began to build earthworks around the opposition camp, with the intention of completely surrounding it, the way he’d surrounded Vercingetorix at Alesia in Gaul three years before. The Pompeians strengthened their defenses and watched the Caesarians work for three days until, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, General Afranius led his whole army out of camp and formed his units up in battle order, his five legions in the first two lines, his auxiliaries behind. Caesar marched out with his legions and formed up facing Afranius. Caesar placed four cohorts from each of his five legions in his front line, and three in each of his second and third lines. Almost certainly the 10th Legion was stationed on Caesar’s right wing.
There the two armies stood, staring at each other in silence, with Spaniard unwilling to fight Spaniard and neither side prepared to make the first move, until the sun went down. The two armies then marched back to their respective camps. Over the next few years Caesar would not be so reticent about committing to battle, but at this early stage in the civil war he was apparently very conscious of being accused of taking the lives of fellow Romans. At this point “chivalry,” “magnanimity,” and “leniency” were still words with a place in his lexicon. Besides, he could see that the men on the other side, out of food and short of water in the baking heat of the Spanish midsummer, many having already demonstrated they’d lost the heart for a fight, were nearing the end of their tether. There had already been surrender overtures; capitulation was obviously on the cards. It was just a matter of waiting.
Caesar didn’t have long to wait. The next day, August 2, Generals Afranius and Petreius sent envoys to Caesar, seeking a peace conference. But they wanted the conference to be out of the hearing of their men. Caesar would only agree to discuss their surrender out in the open, within earshot of the troops, and Pompey’s generals resignedly agreed, giving up Afranius’s son, who was probably in his late teens, as a hostage and token of their good faith.
Caesar marched up to the Pompeian camp, and his legions formed up as if on the parade ground, with helmet crests and shining decorations in place. Afranius and Petreius’s troops lined the ramparts of their camp and watched anxiously as their generals went out the praetorian gate and met Caesar in the open. Speeches were delivered by both sides, loud enough for the troops to hear, with Afranius admitting defeat and humbly seeking favorable terms of surrender.
In response, Caesar berated Afranius and his senior officers for taking the side of his enemies, but in the end he stipulated several lenient conditions for surrender: Afranius and his officers were to agree to play no further part in the war, their troops were to lay down their arms, their units were to be disbanded, and they were to go home. Hearing this, the troops behind Afranius and Petreius, who had been expecting Caesar to punish them for opposing him, began to shout their approval of the proposal. General Afranius had no choice. He agreed to the surrender terms.
On August 4, the men of the 4th and 6th Legions, now disarmed, were formally discharged by Julius Caesar and told to go home. The men of both legions had been due for their discharge this year anyway, so this suited them just fine. The discharged men of Pompey’s two legions tramped away to their homes in eastern Spain. Before long Caesar also discharged the men of the 5th Legion, but in the meantime he set the 3rd and Valeria Legions on the road to the Var River in southern France. A few miles west of Nice, the river formed the border between Transalpine Gaul and the two legions’ home territory of Cisalpine Gaul. Caesar promised the men of these two Pompeian legions that once they reached the river, they, too, would be paid off and discharged.
This column bound for the Var was led by two of Caesar’s own legions, the 7th and the 9th. Caesar chose the escort units quite deliberately. Both were Spanish legions, they were in their home territory, and both, like the 4th, 5th, and 6th, were due for discharge this year. In fact, they were now six months past their due discharge date. From subsequent events it is apparent that when they saw Pompey’s Spanish legions receiving their discharges the men of the 9th in particular began to grumble among themselves that they couldn’t see why they couldn’t go home, too. They considered themselves just as entitled to their discharges, if not more so— they were on the winning side, after all. But, determined to keep his best troops in the field as long as it took to defeat Pompey and win the war, Caesar ignored the unhappy undercurrent and sent the 7th and the 9th to the Var. They marched with instructions to continue on to Italy once they’d completed the discharge of the 3rd and Valeria, and to report to Mark Antony at his headquarters at Piacenza on the Po, there to await further orders.
The legions Caesar retained with him in Spain for the moment were the 10th, 14th, 21st, and 30th. The 10th wasn’t due for discharge for another four years, and the 14th not for seven years, while the other two legions had only been recruited that year, so Caesar knew he could rely on all of them to serve without the complaints coming from the 9th and the 7th.
Caesar also now set free General Afranius and General Petreius and their senior officers, accepting their word that they would take no further part in the civil war, then turned toward the southwest, setting his sights on the last two Pompeian legions in Spain, the 2nd and the Indigena at Córdoba with General Varro. Leaving the 10th and the 14th in the east with the bulk of the cavalry, he sent General Quintus Cassius Longinus marching on Córdoba with the 21st and the 30th while he took six hundred cavalry via a separate route. At the same time, he sent messages to all the major towns of western Spain, urging them to throw out their Pompeian garrisons.
Meanwhile, Varro, an old friend of Caesar’s but also a man who felt bound by his oath to serve Pompey, decided to march his two legions to Cádiz to safeguard the grain and shipping there. On the march, the Indigena Legion pulled out of his column and withdrew to Hispalis, modern Seville. The people of Córdoba behind him and those of Cádiz then threw out his garrisons, and Varro, left with just Pompey’s loyal 2nd Legion and nowhere to go, sent word to Caesar that he was prepared to hand over the 2nd to him. Caesar sent his distant cousin Sextus Caesar to take over the 2nd Legion, and Varro went to Córdoba to meet Caesar and pass over public money and property.
In this way, Caesar’s conquest of western Spain was achieved without the shedding of a drop of blood. Assimilating the 2nd and Indigena Legions into his armed forces, he left them to garrison the province together with the 21st and the 30th, under General Cassius Longinus, brother of the Cassius who would be one of Caesar’s assassins. Caesar himself acquired a dozen Pompeian ships at Cádiz and sailed up the coast to Tarragona. There, throngs of deputations from throughout Spain awaited him, as did some disagreeable news.
The main account of this episode was removed from Caesar’s memoirs by his editors, but from remaining references in his and other works it is possible to piece together what took place. While Caesar had been in the west, Generals Afranius and Petreius had come to Tarragona. At the same time, a squadron of eighteen Pompeian warships commanded by Admiral Lucius Nasidius had pulled into the port.
Admiral Nasidius had been sent from Greece by Pompey with sixteen cruisers and battleships to help the people of Marseilles in southern France hold out against Caesar’s legions. The squadron had arrived in Sicily at Messina, which Caesar’s commander there, Curio, had left undefended. Taking a warship out of the docks at Messina and adding it to his little fleet, the admiral had then crossed the Mediterranean to Marseilles. There, his ships had joined forces with a squadron of eleven warships built by the people of Marseilles and gone to battle against the Caesarian fleet led by Caesar’s longtime naval commander Decimus Brutus. The battle had been a victory for Admiral Brutus, who sank five Marseillaise vessels and captured another four. One of the surviving ships joined Admiral Nasidius’s craft, all of which were still intact, after which Nasidius decided to withdraw to Nearer Spain.
The unexpected appearance of the little fleet of friendly warships at Tarragona was a godsend as far as General Afranius was concerned. He and his officers had subsequently hurried around the homes and haunts of the surrendered and discharged men of the 4th and 6th Legions in the region and rounded up some thirty-five hundred of them—enough to make three cohorts of one and four of the other. Contemptuous of their oath of neutrality to Caesar, they loaded the remobilized troops on board Nasidius’s warships and set sail from Tarragona to join Pompey in Greece.
Annoyed that Afranius and the others had broken their word to him and that thousands of Pompey’s veteran Spanish legionaries had escaped from Spain, Caesar determined to concentrate on the nearest problem, the siege of Marseilles just around the Mediterranean coast, which General Trebonius had yet to bring to a conclusion despite operating against the city with three legions and Brutus’s naval forces since April. Leaving the depleted 14th Legion in Nearer Spain, Caesar marched on Marseilles with the 10th Legion.
Never willing to let go of experienced troops, Caesar would have disapproved when he heard that General Fabius had let the senior centurions of the 10th Legion take their discharges back in January. Now, as he marched from Spain with the 10th, Caesar sent out recalls to every one of them. Under the terms of their original enlistment they had to make themselves available for up to four additional years’ service if their general required them and had to hand in their names and addresses to the local authorities wherever they went in their retirement.
Legally, these retired centurions had no choice but return to their unit. Many, in fact, were probably itching to get back into harness. Chief Centurion Gaius Crastinus responded to the recall. We don’t know exactly where he was when it reached him, but Crastinus was back with the 10th by the time it marched into Brindisi several weeks later.
Caesar and the 10th arrived at Marseilles in early October, just as the city finally capitulated to General Trebonius, and after the Pompeian commander, General Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, had escaped by sea. This was the same Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus who had commanded at Corfinium, the same man Caesar had let go free after accepting his word he would take no further part in the war. Domitius had promptly gone to Marseilles to help the locals against Caesar’s forces. After being let down by Afranius, Petreius, and now Domitius, Caesar would not be quick to pardon opposing generals in the future.
Caesar was, of course, delighted to have taken control of Marseilles, but more bad news reached him here. From Appian we know that Mark Antony sent a dispatch from Piacenza to tell him that the 9th Legion, which had joined him at the Po as ordered after escorting the 3rd and Valeria to the Var, was demanding its overdue discharge and a bonus Caesar had promised it at the outbreak of the civil war, and had gone on strike, refusing to obey its officers until its demands were met. The 7th Legion, influenced by the 9th, had then followed suit. Antony told Caesar that nothing he’d done or said had satisfied the two mutinous legions, and now he begged Caesar to come and solve the problem.
That problem had been partly of Antony’s creation. Plutarch says he was too lazy to pay attention to complaints and listened impatiently to petitions, and he would have dismissed the grumbles of the 9th without giving them the courtesy of a hearing. It was an attitude that would have fanned discontent until it flared into mutiny.
Before he left Marseilles, Caesar finalized his campaign plans, then issued a mass of troop movement orders. Gaius Curio, holding Sicily with four legions, had already been ordered to invade Tunisia in North Africa by sea, leaving Sicily under the command of General Aulus Albinus. To inspire his troops to rapid success, Curio told them that Caesar had just conquered all of Spain within forty days of first coming into contact with the enemy. It was a flagrant lie; his Spanish operations had taken him months. The tactical value of this North African operation is questionable. Pompey’s own forces in the province of Africa, as Tunisia and western Libya were collectively known, were limited, and there was no indication that Pompey’s ally King Juba of neighboring Numidia intended sending him further reinforcements in Greece—he’d already sent him several thousand light infantry, and he had internal problems to contend with at home. The operation could have been designed to deny Pompey’s strong naval forces based in North Africa, but neither Caesar nor other classical writers offer this as a motive for the invasion. Strategically, however, it would secure a rich wheat-growing area, and add to Caesar’s prestige.
Meanwhile, the main target was still Pompey, in Greece. Caesar chose twelve legions and his best cavalry for an invasion of Greece, and soon orders were going out to specific legions to assemble at the embarkation camp at Brindisi. As a part of that operation, the 10th Legion was ordered to march for Brindisi, accompanied by the 11th, which had been part of the siege army operating against Marseilles. The 22nd and 23rd were to stay at Marseilles as a force of occupation, keeping the locals under firm control. The 31st and 32nd, two more new legions, were ordered to eastern Spain, to join the 14th Legion. Marcus Lepidus would take up General Afranius’s former appointment as Governor of Nearer Spain. Caesar himself then set off for Rome, via Piacenza.
It was probably when he reached the Po that Caesar received yet more bad news. Mark Antony’s little brother Gaius had launched the planned Illyricum amphibious operation, using either Brindisi or Otranto, Roman Hydruntum, as his jumping-off point. But his forty transports had been intercepted on the Adriatic by a fleet of Pompeian warships from the Achaea region of southern Greece commanded by Admiral Marcus Octavius. Led by Centurion Titus Puleio, the men of the 24th and 28th Legions on board young Antony’s ships had voted to go over to the other side rather than fight, and had put into the Pompeian naval base at the Greek island of Corfu.
It’s unclear precisely what happened to Gaius Antony. He may have given his parole not to take any further part in the war and was released by Admiral Octavius, or he was kept a prisoner in Greece, being released after Caesar’s victories the following year. The former is more likely, as young Antony held no more military commands during the war, next popping up as a civil tribune at Rome three years later. The seventy-five hundred legionaries on the transports were assimilated into Pompey’s army in Greece. The men, and equally the ships, would be sorely missed by Caesar.
In a mean mood after digesting the news of this setback on the Adriatic, Caesar called an assembly of the legions encamped at Piacenza with Mark Antony. The men of the 7th and 9th Legions warily fell in, and Caesar stepped up onto the tribunal.
“My soldiers,” he began, looking stern. As Appian tells us, Caesar proceeded to remind the mutinous troops of the two legions how quickly he worked, that he was not one to drag his feet. The war was going slowly because the enemy had run away, he said, not because of anything he had done or hadn’t done. “You swore to follow me for the whole war, not just part of it,” he declared. “And yet now you abandon us in midcourse and mutiny against your officers. No one can doubt how much regard I have held you men in up to now. But you give me no choice. I shall put into practice our ancient custom. Since the 9th Legion chiefly instigated the mutiny, lots will be drawn for every tenth man in the 9th Legion to die.”
His audience was staggered. Every tenth man to be executed for the mutiny? No one could remember the last time a Roman legion had been officially decimated like this. A groan of despair went up from the men of the 9th. When the legion’s officers came to him and begged him to reconsider, Caesar relented a little. He ordered the 9th Legion’s centurions to name the 120 ringleaders of the mutiny. These 120 were then required to draw lots. One in ten of them drew the death card. When it was proved that one of the final 12 condemned men hadn’t even been in camp at the time of the mutiny, the vindictive centurion who gave in his name was dragged forward to take his place.
After the 12 men were beaten to death by their own comrades using wooden staves, or clubs, Caesar informed the 7th and the 9th that he had selected them to take part in the next major operation of the war, and ordered them to prepare to march to Brindisi to join the task force assembling there. It seems that the 13th Legion was also at this camp at Piacenza, having probably come up from Brindisi during the spring to give Mark Antony some experienced muscle and to help train new legions. The 13th would have been one of the twelve legions that Caesar had in mind for the Greek operation, but now that he had lost forty ships in the disastrous Illyricum operation, his reduced shipping capacity caused him to reduce the number of the legions allocated to the invasion of Greece by one. The 13th Legion was ordered to join the 14th, 31st, and 32nd in eastern Spain.
Caesar then hurried down to Rome, where he briefly used the title and powers of Dictator, originally a temporary appointment in times of emergency for up to six months. In effect, the exceptional emergency powers of martial law as we know them today were now wielded by Caesar, making him answerable to no one. He spent the next eleven days consumed with business of state at Rome.
In the late fall, accompanied by Mark Antony as well as a host of experienced generals, Caesar left the capital and set off for the embarkation camp at Brindisi, his mind consumed with the minutiae of the operation that lay ahead.