Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (33 page)

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 c16.qxd 12/5/01 5:32 PM Page 173

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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.

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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, irrevoca-bly, 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.

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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.

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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 c16.qxd 12/5/01 5:32 PM Page 176

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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 ap-pointee 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 c16.qxd 12/5/01 5:32 PM Page 177

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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 peti-tioners 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.