Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (13 page)

Following Caesar’s lead, Roman cavalry and infantry broke out of the ring then swung about and attacked the rear of the relief force. Carnage ensued. The surprised troops of the Gallic relief force broke and ran.

Roman cavalry mowed them down in their thousands and captured many more. Caesar’s troopers were still chasing escaping tribesmen after midnight. Witnessing the rout, and seeing the futility of continuing to assault Caesar’s fortifications from within, Vercingetorix’s men disconsolately withdrew back up the hill to Alesia.

Tens of thousands of prisoners were taken by the Romans—possibly as many as seventy thousand—enough, Caesar claimed, for him to give every single legionary in his force one prisoner each as a slave. He restored another twenty thousand prisoners to their two tribes in exchange for their submission.

With the relief force dispersed and its survivors scurrying home, the men on the hill knew their fate was sealed. Rather than die of starvation, they surrendered. Caesar ordered them to lay down their arms and for their leaders to be brought to him, then seated himself in front of his fortifications for the surrender ceremony. Young Vercingetorix himself came to submit to Caesar. First putting on his richest armor and adorning his favorite horse with golden trappings, the commander of the Gauls rode out the gate of Alesia alone and came down to Caesar’s camp, where the men of the 10th and the other legions were lined up in their cohorts, standing as still as statues behind their standards, wearing their plumes and decorations. Only their eyes would have moved as the leader of the Gauls came trotting into their midst.

At the head of the 10th Legion stood Centurion Gaius Crastinus. Not only had he survived all the campaigns since the repulse of the Helvetii, seemingly so long before, but he had been steadily promoted through the grades of centurion, until, almost certainly during the British campaigns, c06.qxd 12/5/01 4:56 PM Page 60

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he had been promoted to join the first-rank centurions, the handful of
primi ordines
of the legion’s 1st Cohort. And everything points to Caesar personally appointing Crastinus
primus pilus
of the 10th Legion following the tough battle outside Gergovia a few months back
.
Literally meaning

“first spear,” this was the post of chief centurion of the legion. With just three years to go before he was due to retire, Chief Centurion Crastinus, now in his early thirties, had risen to the most powerful, most prestigious, most sought-after, and highest-paid rank an ordinary enlisted man could achieve at that time, roughly equivalent in authority to a present-day army captain, but without the status of the modern commissioned officer.

Now, Chief Centurion Crastinus and his men watched in silence—proud, triumphant, and no doubt a little intrigued to see their notorious adversary in the flesh for the first time. On his magnificent charger, the young Gaul completed a full circle of the seated Caesar, then brought his steed to a halt. He dismounted, handed the reins to a Roman groom, then walked to where Julius Caesar sat on a campaign chair in his armor and scarlet cloak. The Roman general was flanked by twelve lictors bearing his fasces of office, the rods and axes, and accompanied by his deputy commanders and staff officers, all standing, as his consular standard probably wafted a little in the breeze behind him.

Without a word, Vercingetorix removed his sword belt and handed it to Caesar. Caesar accepted the sword, then passed it to one of his staff.

Vercingetorix removed his helmet, with its distinctive Gallic crest, and passed it over. Then his armor, richly decorated with gold and silver—attendants helped him out of it, and then this, too, he presented to Caesar, who in turn passed it to subordinates. Then Vercingetorix sat himself at Caesar’s feet. There, in silence, he watched as his hungry, dejected troops came out of Alesia in a long stream with heads hung low, and piled their weapons and armor before the conquering Romans and were then led away into slavery. Finally, Vercingetorix, too, was bound with chains and taken away.

Kept a prisoner for six years, Vercingetorix would be exhibited at Caesar’s Triumph at Rome in 46 b.c., lashed, and then executed in the time-honored manner, garroted behind prison walls in the northwestern corner of the Forum, as the culmination of the triumphal parade through the city’s streets.

Other leaders of the uprising had mixed fates. The turncoat King Commius of the Atrebates escaped to the north, but many of his fellow leaders were either executed or submitted themselves and their tribes to Caesar. Some Caesar treated better than others. All were required to offer c06.qxd 12/5/01 4:56 PM Page 61

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up hostages to ensure their good behavior in the future, and to provide auxiliaries for the conquering army. These young men from the tribes of Gaul would become the backbone of the auxiliary arm of the Roman armed forces in the decades and centuries to come.

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The 10th and Caesar’s nine other legions went into camp in Gaul for the winter of 52–51 b.c.. But the Gallic War was not yet over. Some tribesmen needed to be convinced they were beaten. With the defeat in the south, the tribes of the north decided that instead of massing against Caesar, as Vercingetorix had, they should attack his forces at a number of places at once. Guerrilla warfare.

In late December, when Caesar received intelligence at his headquarters at Bibracte, on Mount Beuvray, twelve miles west of Autun, that the Bituriges tribe of Bourges in west-central France was reassembling to launch raids on his forces, he set out on December 29 with the nearest available legions, the 11th and 13th, and in a forty-day campaign took the Bituriges by surprise and ended all thoughts they had of continued resistance. As he returned to Bibracte, in lieu of booty Caesar promised the men of these two legions two thousand sesterces each—almost three months’ pay—and two hundred sesterces to each centurion. We never hear whether the promise was kept.

Caesar had been back at headquarters just eighteen days when trouble flared again with the Carnutes, neighbors of the Bituriges. This time he marched with the 14th Legion and a newly arrived legion that had been camped with it, the 6th. The 6th Legion was another Spanish legion raised by Pompey the Great back in 65 b.c. along with the 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th, and 9th. It had operated in eastern Spain all these years while its brother legions had been serving under Caesar. Although he remained at Rome, Pompey had made a deal with Caesar and the elder Crassus, forming what historians later were to call the First Triumvirate, which had carved up the empire, extending Caesar’s command in Gaul, giving Crassus command in the East, and Pompey control in Italy and Spain. Caesar asked Pompey for reinforcements in 52 b.c., when the Vercingetorix Revolt blew up and fully stretched his resources. Pompey promptly sent him the 6th, which in 52 b.c. marched up over the Pyrenees and into France from its base in Nearer Spain.

The 6th was a veteran legion, well trained, highly experienced, and, in theory, as good as the 10th or any other in Caesar’s army. But Caesar, who c06.qxd 12/5/01 4:56 PM Page 62

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was to show a tendency toward pettiness at times, had relegated the newly arrived 6th to guarding baggage trains and harvesting wheat with the understrength and, to Caesar’s mind, unreliable 14th Legion, for no reason other than that the 6th was one of Pompey’s legions. Caesar only called on it now because the 6th and the14th were the closest units to the latest hot spot. The two legions quickly marched north through appalling winter weather and occupied Orléans, the Carnute capital, as the Carnutes themselves fled in all directions.

Almost immediately, Caesar had more trouble to contend with—news arrived that King Commius had brought together several tribes in eastern France to continue the resistance against Rome. With the 10th Legion the farthest from the trouble, Caesar this time called out the 7th, 8th, and 9th, added the 11th to the task force, and marched against six rebellious tribes gathering to the east.

It was still only February, the weather was icily cold, and the ground wet and difficult to travel, as the three Spanish legions spread out on a broad front and advanced side by side across the French countryside.

Behind came the baggage train, with the 11th Legion bringing up the rear.

When he found the congregating tribes camped on a hill above marshy ground, Caesar had his legions build a fortress opposite the Gallic camp.

His effort was unusually elaborate—its towers were three floors tall, with galleries linking one to the other so there were defenders on two levels.

Caesar says this was to make the Gauls think he was afraid of them, but it’s just as likely he was only flexing his engineering muscles after they had won him the battle at Alesia.

For days, skirmishes went on outside the camps between foraging parties. Caesar held off assaulting the Gallic camp because he had sent a dispatch to General Trebonius to join him with three legions, which were wintering farther south. When the tribes heard that another Roman army was on the way, they sent away their women, children, and old people and prepared for an all-out battle. In a frenzy of construction activity, Caesar built causeways to higher ground and threw up a new camp. Commius then created a wall of flames in front of his camp one night, and, screened by this, his troops hastily withdrew to a new position ten miles away.

A Gallic cavalry ambush was soon after turned around by Caesar, who had been forewarned of it, and even before the legions could arrive on the scene, the Roman cavalry and auxiliaries had killed thousands of tribesmen. Shaken by this, the tribes now sent envoys asking to surrender. Again Commius escaped, first to Germany, and later to Britain, where he apparently ended his days.

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Now the 10th and its fellow legions spent the rest of the year mopping up the final resistance—like stamping out the last flickerings of flame at the edge of a smothered brush fire.

Recalcitrant tribes in the west and southwest were now punished. In the southwest, Caesar successfully besieged the town of Uxellodenum, near modern Vayrac. After it fell, tired of all these little revolutions springing up when his command in Gaul only had one summer left to run, he had the hands of every captured defender sliced off, as a warning to the rest of Gaul. In the north, General Labienus led a large cavalry force of several thousand troopers, who ended opposition from Treveri Germans around Trier.

With the Gallic War finally brought to a conclusion, the 10th and the other legions were quartered in northern France and Belgium for the winter of 51–50 b.c. The new year, 50 b.c., saw peace in Gaul for the first time in many years, peace that allowed Caesar to return to Italy to concentrate on political matters. For the men of the 10th, it was a year without fighting, a year without profit. After so many seasons full of action, many of them were probably bored to tears by the inactivity.

For their senior centurions—men such as Gaius Crastinus, who’d been enlisted back in 65 b.c.—it was a time to plan what they were going to do with their lives once their sixteen-year enlistments expired and their discharge fell due in the new year. For the younger centurions, men of the 61

b.c. enlistment, it was a time to jockey for the positions that would soon be left vacant by the senior men leaving the legion.

What would retirement bring Centurion Crastinus? He would have saved a tidy sum over the years, from his pay, from bonuses paid by Caesar after one campaign and another, from the profits on booty taken from enemy towns, camps, and men he had killed in battle, from the sale of slaves, from furlough fees that enlisted men paid to their centurions to exempt them from duty in camp. He might buy a farm back in Spain, perhaps a tavern. Nothing too shoddy. He was a chief centurion, after all, and that would rank him highly among the working class when he returned to civilian life. He could expect a place of honor in festival day religious processions in whatever place he settled. The highly status-conscious Romans had a saying, “Eagles don’t catch flies,” and Centurion Crastinus certainly would have felt that applied to him.

It’s a safe bet that like most old soldiers, he would miss the occasional good fight. But most of all he’d miss his comrades. He wouldn’t miss arrogant young tribunes, fresh from Rome, so wet behind the ears, so stupid they didn’t even have the brains to know they were stupid. And generals c06.qxd 12/5/01 4:56 PM Page 64

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whose hands he and his fellow centurions had to hold in the field, fools who didn’t know their ass from their elbow—he wouldn’t miss them.

Crastinus would have heard the talk circulating around the legion camp that fall about the looming possibility of a civil war. Caesar was being denied his just deserts by the Senate, the men would have been saying. It was all Pompey’s doing, they would have said, blaming Pompey for being jealous of a gifted rival such as Caesar. But Crastinus would probably would not have relished thoughts of Roman fighting Roman. His father’s generation had gone through a civil war, when Caesar was still only a youth, and too many good men had died for no good end in that war. Crastinus was probably looking forward to a long life, to dying in his own bed without a troubled conscience and with his sixty-year-old children gathered around him. And as they spoke of life in retirement, one of his first-rank centurion friends would have reminded him, with a wink, of another saying of the time: “Don’t make your physician your heir, and you’re sure to live to a ripe old age.”

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VII

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ENEMY OF THE STATE

s the winter of 50–49 b.c. descended on Europe and his troops in Gaul were generally thought to be going into into winter quar-

A
ters, 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.