Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (18 page)

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 c08.qxd 12/5/01 5:18 PM Page 88

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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 pop-ping 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 Pia-

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cenza, 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.

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IX

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THE RACE FOR DURRE

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n his day, and long after it, men spoke of Julius Caesar’s great luck. Caesar wouldn’t have felt so lucky as he climbed the tribu-

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nal this chill day in December of 49b.c.and looked out over the thousands of legionaries assembled in front of him at the Brindisi embarkation camp. The only subject of conversation at the camp over the past few days would have been the dreadful news from North Africa. Gaius Curio, his two legions, and his cavalry had been wiped out in Tunisia, primarily by the forces of Pompey’s friend and ally King Juba of Numidia.

The men of Curio’s legions, almost certainly the 17th and 18th, had been former Pompeian recruits from the Marsi and Paeligni areas of central Italy who had come over to Caesar after the fall of Corfinium in February. The news of their annihilation—probably brought to Caesar by Colonel Pollio, who had been on Curio’s staff and was among the few to escape from Tunisia alive—had been so unexpected, and was so potentially shattering to the morale of his men, particularly the new, inexperienced recruits, that Caesar knew he had to address them—and make an impression.

In front of him stood the men of eleven legions plus several hundred cavalrymen. The 10th and 11th Legions had been the last to arrive. They’d had the farthest to march. Some of the other units had been camped here at Brindisi, the rest in the Puglia region, right through the summer and fall. Now they had been divided into two groups. These would be the two waves of his invasion force. At Piacenza, after the news of the loss of Gaius Antony’s ships, Caesar would have done a rapid mental calculation and reckoned that with the transports he had left to him he might have to invade Greece in three waves, sending the ships back twice after the initial landing for the subsequent waves. But now it looked as if just two
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convoys would be required. Hacking coughs coming from the ranks would have been evidence of the cause of change in logistical plans.

The same malady that had affected Pompey’s troops at Brindisi in February and March had reappeared in southern Italy in the autumn with a vengeance, and now gripped Caesar’s army, laying low his men in their thousands and making the embarkation camp one large melancholy hospital. Few if any tents would have been without a man or two lying, moaning, perspiring, coughing, in his bed. In an era when there were no antibiotic drugs, the sickness had reduced the legions to less than half their normal numbers of able-bodied men.

Caesar had chosen the 10th Legion to accompany him in the first wave of the landing, along with the other veteran troops of the 11th and 12th Legions. The rest of the first wave would be made up of the 25th, 26th, and 27th Legions, and the men of the five cohorts of the 28th Legion left behind when Gaius Antony embarked on his ill-fated Illyricum operation, all of them untried recruits drafted in January and February. Caesar’s first wave was a deliberate mixture of youth and experience.

The second wave, which would be commanded by Mark Antony, would comprise the mutinous 7th and 9th Legions, plus the reliable 8th, Spanish legions all, and the Italian youths of the newly formed 29th.

“My soldiers,” Caesar began. Caesar himself recorded the words he used this day, words that would have been repeated by centurions for those in the rear ranks who could not hear him directly. According to Suetonius, Caesar pitched his voice high when speaking in public, and used impassioned gestures in a theatrical style that impressed his audience.

Cicero was to write that he knew of no more eloquent speaker than Caesar, and that his style was grand, even noble.

“We have come almost to the end of our toils and dangers,” Caesar went on. “You may therefore leave your slaves and baggage behind in Italy with easy minds. You must embark with only basic kit to allow a greater number of troops to be put on board the ships available. When we win, my generosity in reward will answer all your hopes.”

When he asked if his troops were with him, a chorus of agreement would have swelled up from more than twenty-five thousand voices.

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In the dead of night, the convoy ran before a favorable wind. Aboard their transports at the forefront of the first wave, the men of the 10th c09.qxd 12/5/01 5:19 PM Page 92

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Legion stood tense and silent in their squads, gripping onto their weapons, to the sides of their lurching ships, to their neighbors. Some were sardined down in the holds; others were crammed on deck. Most would have been seasick. We hear of the prevalent seasickness of troops involved in later amphibious operations, here on the Adriatic and on the Mediterranean, and this crossing would have been no different.

Even though they probably weren’t particularly popular with his men, Caesar had a penchant for amphibious landings and night operations. He liked the way an amphibious assault could deliver a mass of troops to one place at one time. He also liked to use the element of surprise that darkness provided, recognizing, as Appian has Caesar say, that “the mightiest weapon of war is surprise.” In modern times, Caesar would have been a great exponent of the use of paratroops and the U.S. Marine Corps for troop insertions. Always at night, of course.

It was the night of January 4, 48 b.c. This was before Caesar adjusted the Roman calendar, so it was then running two months behind our own calendar, making January a month in late autumn. Just the same, by all accounts the weather was wintry this January, and the spray coming over the prows of the ships and licking the faces of seasick Spaniards of the 10th as the landing craft bucked through the Adriatic troughs would have been refreshingly icy cold.

This operation was yet another new experience for the men of the 10th. They’d fought in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Britain, and Spain; they’d recently marched the length of Italy, the center of the Roman universe, to reach the embarkation camp just days before the year ended; and now they were on their way to invade Greece. What stories they’d have to tell their grandchildren—if they lived that long. These men had been through amphibious landings before. They’d invaded Britain twice, after all. But that had been different. There had been no opposition naval forces lurking in the darkness when they crossed the English Channel. Now, somewhere out there in the night, picket ships of Pompey’s navy might appear at any moment. Pompey possessed six hundred warships of various classes, spread among five fleets. And many of them were based here on the Adriatic.

Everyone on board the ships of the convoy was conscious of the fate of Gaius Antony and his men of the 24th and 28th Legions who had been caught on the Adriatic by Admiral Octavius the previous year. But that botched operation and its timing had not been unexpected. At least this time the Pompeians weren’t expecting visitors. Sure, everyone on both sides of the Adriatic knew that sooner or later Caesar might invade c09.qxd 12/5/01 5:19 PM Page 93

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Greece, but even the men of 10th would have thought that Caesar would wait until the spring. No one launched a major operation like this on winter’s eve. No one except the ever-audacious Julius Caesar.

The darkness was their chief ally. It negated Pompey’s naval advantage. If the convoy was spotted, it would be through bad luck. And everyone in his army knew about Caesar’s famous good luck. Caesar had planned it so the landing would take place unseen, in the early hours of the morning. The empty transports would then dash back across the Adriatic to Brindisi, clearing the coast of Greece well before dawn, returning the following night with the next wave. And with Pompey’s navy none the wiser.

The epidemic had reduced all eleven legions of the task force, so that now fifteen thousand legionaries from the seven legions of the first wave and five hundred German and Gallic cavalrymen were crammed aboard the landing ships, with thousands of their comrades still in their sickbeds back at Brindisi. The intent was that once they recovered, the victims would be ferried over to join their legions in Greece aboard later convoys.

As it transpired, those men would remain in Italy, garrisoning the ports of the southeast and southwest, fighting off Pompeian commando raids, and even serving as marines in an Adriatic sea battle before rejoining their legions two years later.

Like foot soldiers in all wars in all times, the men of the 10th Legion wouldn’t have been told exactly where they were going. But they would have guessed that the landing zone was somewhere between the Pompeian naval bases at Durrës and Corfu, almost directly opposite Brindisi, near the present-day border between Greece and Albania. Landing there, right under the noses of the enemy, was a dangerous proposition, but the very audacity of it would have boosted the confidence of the men of the 10th.

Caesar had originally intended launching the operation on New Year’s Day, and the men of the 10th and the other first-wave units had filed down to the docks through the narrow streets of Brindisi on January 1 and climbed the gangplanks to their ships, only to be told to disembark again after a couple of hours’ standing, waiting for the outgoing tide. The weather out on the Adriatic had deteriorated rapidly, and Caesar had reluctantly canceled the operation, forcing the troops to tramp back along the cobbled lanes to the embarkation camp, to wait for a better day. That better day had come.

There was much about Caesar’s 48 b.c. amphibious invasion of Greece that would be mirrored by the Allied landing in Normandy two thousand years later, in June 1944, and in the same way that Caesar had to put off c09.qxd 12/5/01 5:19 PM Page 94