Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (28 page)

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of Galatia to his force, he’d confronted the army of King Pharnaces, who’d recently occupied Pontus.

At the Battle of Zela on August 2, 47 b.c., almost exactly a year since his victory at Farsala, Caesar had crushed the charioteers and hapless infantry of Pharnaces. It was after this victory that Caesar sent his famous message back to Rome: “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Only then could he turn his attention to Mark Antony’s problems at Rome.

Those problems had started with the 10th Legion. Month in, month out, they had waited for Caesar to return to Rome, kicking around the camp beside the Tiber, bored, frustrated, and increasingly angry. Almost a year went by. Finally the patience of the men of the 10th snapped. Ignoring the commands and then the pleas of Mark Antony, and encouraged by two of their own tribunes, Gaius Avienus and Aulus Fonteius, and by several of their centurions, who all agreed with the men that they had been deprived of their just rewards, the men of the 10th had burst into the city and began looting the homes of the rich. Their thinking was obvious enough: if Caesar wouldn’t give them what he owed them, they’d take it for themselves. The 8th and 9th Legions had promptly joined them, but the 7th had stayed loyal to its officers and kept apart from the other legions.

According to Plutarch, the mutineers killed two former major generals in their rampage, the ex-praetors Cosconius and Galba, although no other author confirms their murders.

When Antony ordered the 7th to cordon off the city, the legion had obeyed. Rather than come to blows with their comrades, the men of the 10th, 9th, and 8th then turned away from the capital and went on a looting spree in the wealthy Campania region, south of the capital. The three out-of-control legions had then returned to camp with their spoils, not long before Caesar slipped back into Rome unnoticed.

Caesar had gone directly to see Antony, to obtain a firsthand account of the revolt. Over recent months he’d received countless letters from the leading citizens of Rome begging him to come home and bring his legions back into line, and few if any of the authors had been complimentary about the way Antony had handled the affair. Assured by Antony that he’d done everything in his power to keep the lid on the problem—which had been of Caesar’s creation, after all—and that these troops were in a murderous mood, Caesar began by having a detachment from the loyal 7th Legion surround and protect his own house on the Sacred Way in the heart of the city—the official residence of the
pontifex maximus,
high priest of Rome, which he’d occupied since his election to the post for life in 63 b.c.

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Reluctant to stand before these men whose help he’d sworn he no longer needed when he left them on the plain of Farsala and admit that he’d been wrong, Caesar sent one of his deputies, Gaius Sallustius Crispus—Sallust—to talk to the mutineers on his behalf. Sallust, whom Caesar would make a major general in the new year, was authorized to promise the men four thousand sesterces each to return to their standards and march to Sicily for the next stage in Caesar’s war against the Pompeians, an invasion of North Africa.

But when Sallust couldn’t come up with these four thousand sesterces on the spot, along with the money Caesar had promised them at the start of the war, plus the vague rewards he’d mentioned after the Battle of Pharsalus, including grants of land, he was rejected by the angry legionaries, most of whom wanted to go home just as much as they wanted their money. According to Appian, Sallust was to claim he only just escaped from the Field of Mars with his life.

Caesar had told these men that he didn’t need them, and for a year he’d stubbornly stuck to his word, employing Pompey’s former troops and the youngsters of the 27th and 28th to conquer Egypt and then regain Pontus. But intelligence reports that were now reaching him said that Scipio and King Juba of Numidia could muster fourteen legions between them, supported by tens of thousands of cavalry and auxiliaries and something like 120 war elephants. Like it or not, Caesar needed his best legions if he was to triumph in this war. He knew he had no option but to speak to the recalcitrant 8th, 9th, and 10th himself. And talk them around to his way of thinking. But what would he say?

Now, as the men of the mutinous legions answered the call to assembly, no doubt deliberately standing in loose formation rather than precisely in their ranks and files, a lean, balding, middle-aged officer in the scarlet cloak of a general appeared in their midst with several other officers. Walking purposefully to the tribunal, he climbed its steps. The troops instantly recognized the bareheaded man on the speaker’s platform.

He is said to have been hailed by the men in the traditional manner, but perhaps it was only legionaries of the loyal 7th who spoke up. With many soldiers no doubt standing with arms folded defensively, eyeing their commander with a mixture of guilt and suspicion, he looked around the sea of faces, waiting for everyone to fall silent. And then, when the mumble of voices faded away, with perhaps just the faint sound of a light breeze rippling around them and the distant hum of life from the city that never slept, he paused a little longer still, stretching the tension as the thousands of soldiers wondered what he would say to them. Then, at last, he spoke. According to Appian, this is what transpired.

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“What is it you want?” Caesar began. “State your demands.”

No one answered at first. Appian says that none of them had the courage to ask for money and so one or two men began to call out for their discharge. They had been detained in the legions illegally, they said, and they wanted to go home. There were loud choruses of agreement.

“Very well,” Caesar responded, “I discharge you. All of you.”

There was a stunned silence.

“And,” he went on after a judicious pause, “I will pay you everything I promised you,
after
I win this war with other legions, and after
they
have had their just rewards.”

The men looked at him in astonishment, waiting for him to say more.

But he didn’t. He just looked out at them, his face expressionless. The strained silence was painful, so painful that his staff officers standing beside the tribunal begged Caesar to say something more, not just dismiss with a few harsh words these troops who had been through so much with him over the years.

Caesar nodded slowly, then began, with a single word: “Citizens . . .”

The thousands of upturned faces were expectant. The men waited for him to continue, but Caesar paused, and waited. And as he paused, the true effect of that lone word sunk into his troops. Normally, generals began addresses to their troops with “Soldiers” or “Fellow soldiers.” Caesar habitually began with “My soldiers.” And now he was addressing them as citizens, as if they were no longer soldiers, just men off the street.

“No!” men began to cry out. “We’re still your soldiers, Caesar!”

The cries grew into a deafening tumult. Caesar turned to leave the dais, but legionaries crowded around the steps and wouldn’t let him step down.

“Stay, Caesar!” the voices chorused. “Punish the wrongdoers among us.

The rest are ready to serve.”

He turned back to the assembly and raised a hand. The voices faded away. In the new silence he began again. “I will not punish any man here,” he declared. He turned his gaze to the familiar faces of the men of his favorite 10th Legion. “I am,” he said, “pained that even the 10th Legion, which I have particularly honored over the years, could be involved in agitation of this kind. This legion alone I discharge from the army. But when I return from Africa after defeating the Pompeians, I shall reward the men of the 10th Legion along with the rest, just as I have promised. And the land I distribute to my soldiers will not be confiscated property, but public land, and my own land, and land bought for the purpose of distribution to my veterans.”

All the men of the 9th and the other mutinous legions clapped and cheered, but the men of the 10th were far from happy at being left out.

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Their centurions called for Caesar to have the men of the 10th draw lots, and every tenth man would be put to death for mutinying, as he had proposed at Farsala. After making an appearance of reluctance, he said that he would not even punish the men of the 10th, and he would allow them to continue to march with him. Now the men of the 10th cheered and applauded as well.

The men of the three legions had just allowed themselves to be art-fully talked into fighting, and perhaps dying, in yet another campaign, and they were pleased about it. As Tacitus was to write, the turnaround had been achieved by a single word. That, and the personal charisma of Julius Caesar.

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XV

:

THE NORTH AFRICAN

CAMPAIGN

n the fall of 47 b.c. the legions began to assemble in Sicily for Caesar’s next big amphibious operation. Why didn’t the civil war
I
end with the death of Pompey? Quite simply, he had been elected Rome’s military commander in chief by the majority of the Senate, to fight the rebel Caesar, and on his demise the exiled senators merely elected a new commander in chief, Pompey’s father-in-law, Scipio, to continue the struggle against Caesar. And now Scipio had assembled an army in North Africa theoretically large enough to reclaim Rome. Caesar could wait for them to invade Italy, or he could take the war to them by invading North Africa. As always, Caesar would take the initiative.

With a long march ahead of them through southern France and Italy, the 13th and 14th Legions set off from eastern Spain, where they’d been stationed since Caesar’s victory there in the spring of 49 b.c. Ahead of them, also marching from Spain, went Spanish cavalry accompanied by the 5th Legion. Pompey’s 5th had been disbanded by Caesar in 49 b.c., but he’d enrolled a new enlistment of the legion in western Spain shortly after. Always a fan of Spanish legionaries, he’d summoned the new 5th for his next offensive.

The two legions that had been garrisoning Sicily for some time, the 19th and the 20th, were not to be included in the invasion force. Made up mostly of former Pompeian troops who’d surrendered at Corfinium in February of 49 b.c., they’d been left behind when Gaius Curio had taken their two ill-fated brother legions to Tunisia and led them to their destruction by the Bagradas River. After that performance, Caesar showed no interest in the two untried units. One had been based for some time at Messina, on the island’s northeastern coast—somewhat belatedly after
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Admiral Nasidius’s unopposed visit—and as the legions of the invasion force began to arrive at Sicily, the other joined it at the Messina garrison.

Legions hardened by battle experience and emboldened by success, this was what Caesar wanted. The 25th, 26th, and 29th, legions that had taken part in the mutiny after the Battle of Pharsalus, were brought down from their bases in southern Italy, sailing from Reggio to Messina, then marching along the northern coast of Sicily. Caesar had initially left the 28th Legion in Egypt with the 27th and the 37th after he’d placed Cleopatra on the throne, but this legion was now shipped from Alexandria to Sicily to join the task force. And the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th Legions packed up their tents on the Field of Mars and began the march from Rome. Meanwhile, the men of the 10th Legion who’d been left behind in their sickbeds at Brindisi in January of 48 b.c. and had been stationed at Brindisi and Vibo in southern Italy after their recovery, now also headed for Sicily. With a head start of a week or so on the main body of the legion, these troops reached their destination before the rest of the 10th.

Caesar had lost faith in Mark Antony, particularly after the inept way he’d handled the mutiny of the 10th, 9th, and 8th Legions at the capital.

Antony’s high and mighty attitude annoyed Caesar and many others. Typically, Antony had contracted to buy Pompey’s former house at Rome after it had been confiscated by Caesar, but complained bitterly when required to pay up—he thought Caesar should make a gift of it to him. (The house, in the “Keels” district, would subsequently come into the possession of the emperor Augustus and become an imperial residence used by, among others, Tiberius prior to his becoming emperor.) Antony was sidelined by Caesar, who now appointed himself and Marcus Lepidus as the consuls for the next year and left Antony behind as he set off to commence his latest military campaign. According to Plutarch, Antony later wrote that he’d chosen not to go to North Africa with Caesar, with the excuse that his former services hadn’t been recompensed as they deserved.

Other officers also had come to displease Caesar, while others still had parted company with him to take up senior appointments in the territories he now controlled. But three of his faithful staff officers—Oppius, Pollio, and Sallust—were to accompany him to Africa.

Nothing ever happened quickly enough for Julius Caesar. At least part of his audacity can be attributed to impatience. On December 17 he arrived at the embarkation point, Marsala, Roman Lilybaeum, on the west coast of Sicily. He pitched his tent on the beach, then fretted increasingly as the days passed. The weather was unfavorable. His legions were arriving in Sicily in dribs and drabs, with the majority of his best troops still days and c15.qxd 12/5/01 5:29 PM Page 151

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weeks away. The supplies ordered by his new quartermaster, General Granius Petro, were coming in too slowly. And he was limited by insufficient transports to ship his entire force across the Mediterranean to North Africa in one hit. Yet, despite all this, he was determined to commence the offensive on the eve of winter, when the other side wasn’t expecting him. Within a week, good weather arrived. That was all Caesar needed.