Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (21 page)

Pompey’s latest plan came together in early July after two major defections from Caesar’s camp. Roucillus and Egus were brothers from the Rhône valley in southeastern France. The sons of Adubucillus, chief of the Allobroges tribe, they had been commanders of Caesar’s Gallic cavalry for the past ten years, and even appear to have been enrolled in the Senate at Rome the previous year by Caesar in reward for their service.

According to Caesar, when they heard rumors that complaints had been laid against them accusing them of embezzling cavalry funds the pair went over to Pompey, although it’s likely Caesar invented this to explain away their change of loyalties.

Whatever their motivation, the two cavalry generals knew Caesar’s dispositions, the strong points and the weak points of his encirclement, and the weaknesses of the various units. And Pompey welcomed them. He paraded the two senior defectors around his camp for all his men to see, and he talked with them for hours at a time about Caesar’s camp and his army. And then he made careful preparations.

At dawn on the still morning of July 7, the Spanish legionaries of Caesar’s 9th Legion manning the western side of the entrenchments, by the sea, found themselves suddenly under sustained attack. Just like the last time Pompey launched a perimeter assault, heavy clouds had hidden the moon, and again legionaries and archers who had crept into position in the predawn darkness were all over Caesar’s defenses in moments.

Roucillus and Egus, the high-placed defectors, had told Pompey that the fortifications at this point in the encirclement, just below those manned by the 8th Legion, were incomplete, that the Spanish legionaries of the c10.qxd 12/5/01 5:21 PM Page 106

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9th Legion occupying this sector were overdue for their discharge and not very happy about their continued service, as demonstrated by their mutiny at Piacenza the previous fall, and that the 9th’s commander, Major General Lentulus Marcellinus, was unwell and often in his sickbed. These were weaknesses that begged exploitation. Pompey also knew that the sector commander was Mark Antony, and he’d never had any respect for Antony’s military abilities.

Now, while some of Pompey’s legionaries made a frontal attack, filling in the ditches in front of the Caesarian wall, then bringing up assault ladders and artillery pieces, archers worked their way around the flanks. The only form of missile that the men of the 9th possessed was stones. Pompey’s intelligence was so good he even knew this fact, and he’d equipped his storm troops with special wicker coverings for their helmets that created faceguards to protect their faces from flying stones.

The legionaries who carried out this dawn assault stuck to their task and Pompey’s well-planned attack overwhelmed the men of the 9th, who were all mature soldiers, in their midthirties or older. Most of their senior centurions fell. The eagle of the 9th was almost gained by the attackers before its dying eagle-bearer passed the standard to other hands. General Marcellinus sent reinforcements, but they were beaten back by Pompey’s determined assault force. Urgent smoke signals were sent to Caesar to bring help, and they were relayed from fort to fort around the miles of entrenchments by burning flares.

At the nearest fort, Mark Antony assembled a relief force, then rushed down the hill with twelve cohorts from the 7th and 8th Legions, both of which formed part of his command. These reinforcements stabilized the situation to the south, but Pompey’s troops still managed to break out to the sea where they had overrun the 9th Legion. The 9th’s fort had been taken and the double walls of the encirclement were breached in numerous places along the shoreline so that Pompey’s cavalry could get out and seek fodder, and ships could land supplies.

As Caesar himself hurriedly arrived with more reinforcements, a Pompeian unit of legion strength was seen to occupy a deserted Caesarian camp three hundred yards from the sea; the camp had originally been built by the 9th Legion at Mark Antony’s direction weeks before. At the time they had been forced to give it up by constant attack from Pompey’s archers and auxiliaries, and the camp, out in no-man’s-land, had become untenable for both sides. Things were different now that Pompey had pushed back the 9th from its position on the water’s edge; the deserted camp was his for the taking.

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It seems that the men who now occupied this camp were from Caesar’s former 24th Legion, the unit that the previous year had defected to Pompey at Corfu. As they took up defensive positions on the ramparts of the camp, Caesar could see that these troops would be able to cover supplies coming to the beach. If he was to seal the hole in his encirclement and prevent Pompey from landing supplies coming up from Corfu, he had to dislodge the men now holding that camp.

Caesar, smarting at having been outmaneuvered by Pompey, planned a counterattack. Setting some troops to work very visibly extending defensive walls and trenches to cover his troop buildup in the area, he soon launched a surprise attack on the camp recently occupied by Pompey’s cohorts. In two lines, thirty-two cohorts, including legionaries from the 7th and 8th Legions and all the surviving men of the 9th Legion, swept up the slope toward the camp, supported by cavalry.

Pompey’s men put up a furious fight from the camp’s walls, even though they were outnumbered three to one. Here Caesar gives praise to one of Pompey’s officers. Centurion Titus Puleio, who had served bravely with Caesar’s legions in Gaul before being assigned to the 24th, had been among Gaius Antony’s troops when they were intercepted on the Adriatic. Puleio had been the one who convinced them all to go over to Pompey. Now Puleio fought like a demon, inspiring his men.

Led by Caesar himself, the left wing of his assault force broke into Puleio’s camp. But the men of the 8th and 9th Legions on the right wing became lost in the confusing entrenchments. Caesar’s cavalry followed the men on the right wing, filing along a narrow passageway between trench walls. At this moment Pompey himself appeared, at the head of five legions, coming to the support of his men at the camp. The 1st Legion was almost certainly at the forefront of this force. Pompey always kept the elite legion close by him. The other four legions were probably the 15th and the three legions recruited in southern Italy before Pompey’s withdrawal to Greece.

Encouraged by the sight of their commander in chief coming up with the experienced legions, Puleio and his troops fighting for their lives in the camp regained the initiative and charged Caesar’s men, driving them back. Seeing this sudden change of fortune, Caesar’s cavalry panicked.

They tried to go back the way they had come, down the narrow alley. The troops of the right wing, seeing the cavalry turning and fleeing, seeing Pompey coming with thousands of reinforcements, hearing their comrades inside the camp in trouble, and fearing that they were going to be cut off, jumped into a ten-foot trench that they thought would provide an escape c10.qxd 12/5/01 5:21 PM Page 108

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route. Hundreds of Caesar’s men were trampled to death in this trench as their own desperate colleagues jumped in on top of them in an attempt to escape.

Seeing the cavalry in wide-eyed flight, Caesar tried to stop them, but they ignored him. He grabbed standards to stem the flood, but the standard-bearers simply let go of them and kept going. Appian even writes of a frantic standard-bearer trying to stab Caesar with the pointed bottom tip of his standard in his desperation to get away—and being cut down by men of Caesar’s bodyguard. As the infantry also now flooded in confusion back toward their own lines, the stragglers being overtaken and cut down by the men of Pompey’s legions, Caesar had no choice but to retreat himself.

At this point Pompey had the opportunity to turn a success into a victory. With thousands of Caesar’s troops retreating, many in panic, he could have continued on with his five legions, and with his cavalry just then starting to come up, he could have overrun the siege works and rolled up Caesar’s army. But he ordered his troops not to pursue the fleeing Caesarians. Pompey himself never explained why.

Caesar later speculated that the scope of Pompey’s success on the day was far beyond his expectations—Pompey had merely wanted to break out to the sea so his supplies could reach him. Caesar was sure that Pompey was afraid of being led into an ambush. No one had ever seen Caesar’s troops run before. It had to be a trap. Some reports have Caesar later belittling Pompey, saying the enemy could have had a victory that day if they’d possessed a general who knew how to gain it.

In this encounter, which historians were to call the Battle of Dyrrhachium, Pompey’s troops captured thirty-two standards from the 9th Legion and other units involved in the right wing of Caesar’s counterattack and from the Caesarian cavalry. Pompey and his men justifiably celebrated the outcome of the battle as a success. But it could have been so much more.

A chastened Caesar admitted to losing 960 legionaries, the majority of them from the 9th Legion, as well as 36 officers—4 of the rank of general and 32 tribunes and centurions. And he had hundreds more wounded; Caesar never revealed exactly how many, but the number was substantial enough, together with the fatalities, to reduce the effectiveness of the 8th and 9th Legions to the point that Caesar later combined the two. But had Pompey followed up on his success, Caesar could have lost the war. Yet again, Julius Caesar’s luck prevailed.

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After the unaccustomed experience of failure at Durrës, Caesar decided to withdraw. The siege line had been broken, and Pompey could once again be supplied by sea. It was pointless for Caesar to keep his troops in the trenches, particularly when they were starving. First, with the men in marching order, he called an assembly, and from the tribunal publicly demoted standard-bearers who had fled during the battle.

Then, as his memoirs record, he told the assembled legions: “The setback we have sustained cannot be blamed on me. I gave an opportunity for battle on favorable ground. I took possession of the enemy camp. I drove the enemy out. Through your fear, or some mistake, or some stroke of fate, the victory that was as good as in our grasp was lost. So it falls to you to make an effort to repair the damage, through your valor. If you do, you will turn our loss to gain, as happened at Gergovia.”

Well did the listening men of the 10th Legion remember the siege of Gergovia, four years before, Caesar’s reverse during the Vercingetorix Revolt in central France. It had been the men of the 10th who’d saved the day for Caesar back then.

Caesar sent the baggage train on ahead just after sunset. As the wagons and pack mules moved out in the darkness, Caesar kept the bulk of his army in camp, with all the visible signs of occupation. In the last hours of darkness next morning Caesar then pulled out his main force. The troops were able to travel light and fast without the impediment of the baggage train, which had a start of eight hours or so. At forced-march pace they hurried east. In Macedonia and Thessaly there were towns friendly to Caesar. They, and their wheat fields, could provide the one thing his troops needed now: food.

Next morning, as soon as he realized that Caesar had pulled out, Pompey set off in pursuit. Leaving Cato the Younger in charge at Durrës with fifteen cohorts detached from his legions, he left his own baggage train behind to make its own progress; this would allow his infantry to make good time, and hopefully catch Caesar on the march. Encouraged by his subordinates, and more confident of the morale of his troops following the success at Durrës, Pompey was more inclined toward a pitched battle now.

His confidence spread through the army. His men would have shared jokes about what they would do to Caesar’s raw recruits when they got ahold of them.

A detachment of Pompey’s cavalry caught up with Caesar’s rear guard, which fought them off, and by the middle of the day the two armies prepared to spend the night at camps in eastern Albania. Again Caesar had a trick up his sleeve. Just when a number of Pompey’s troops departed c10.qxd 12/5/01 5:21 PM Page 110

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from his camp and marched out of sight to provide an escort for their baggage train, which was straggling up from the coast, Caesar suddenly set off again with his entire force. They covered another eight miles before making a new camp that night, leaving Pompey in their wake.

Each day after that, Caesar would send his baggage on ahead in the night, then follow later with the army. After four days of trying to pursue Caesar, Pompey gave up the chase. Instead, he diverted east to Thessaly to link up with his father-in-law, Metellus Scipio, who was camped with his two legions at the town of Larisa on the Peneus River.

Caesar made a halt at Apollonia, modern Pollina, then a famous center of learning. This stop was just long enough for Caesar to leave his wounded behind—several thousand men, mostly from the veteran Spanish legions that had been fighting for him for the past thirteen years.

Detaching a total of eight cohorts of fit legionaries, almost certainly from his newer Italian legions, he spread them between Apollonia and two other towns to maintain his hold on the region. He then continued east and linked up with the veteran legions under his general Domitius Calvinus, the 11th and 12th, which had been screening Scipio’s two legions in Thessaly.

Gomphi, a town in Thessaly, had gone over to Pompey after the news of his success at Durrës, and Caesar decided to make an example of it, to ensure the cooperation of other Greek communities. A little rape and pillage wouldn’t do the damaged morale of his men any harm, either. Surrounding the town, he sent his legions against its walls. They began the assault in the early afternoon. As the sun was setting, they broke into the town. Caesar gave his troops permission to plunder Gomphi. It was destroyed, and every one of its inhabitants killed.