Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (15 page)

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 c07.qxd 12/5/01 5:12 PM Page 71

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 Sul-mona, 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 c07.qxd 12/5/01 5:12 PM Page 72

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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 c07.qxd 12/5/01 5:12 PM Page 73

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 c07.qxd 12/5/01 5:12 PM Page 74

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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 sym-pathizers, Caesar reached the waterfront to find that Pompey had outwit-ted 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 administra-

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tion 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.

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VIII

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BROKEN PROMISES

hile it was camped at Narbonne in the south of France in January, the 10th Legion had said farewell to Chief Centurion
W
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
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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.