Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (3 page)

The weight of responsibility for success in this battle would lay with his four veteran legions.

There was his father’s elite 1st Legion, the Pompeian equivalent of Caesar’s 10th. The loyal, tough 1st had taken part in all the major battles of the civil war, but unlike the undefeated 10th Legion, it had been forced to fight its way out of one disaster after another. There were the 2nd and Indigena Legions, both originally Pompeian units that had gone over to Caesar, only to defect back to the Pompeys when Gnaeus and Sextus arrived in Spain the previous year. Then there was the 8th Legion, a brother unit of the 10th and one of three Caesarian legions to recently desert to the Pompeys. Young Gnaeus’s suspicions had been raised by these mass defections and he’d only retained the 8th, sending the other two turncoat legions, the 9th and the 13th, to his brother at Córdoba.

The previous day, young Pompey had set up camp on the plain near Munda. Caesar had arrived with his legions after nightfall and set up his own camp five miles away. Then, in the early hours of the morning, Pompey had formed up his army in battle order on the slope below the town, determined to bring Caesar to battle. Pompey had decided to venture all and capitalize on his numerical superiority before his supporters tired of retreating and deserted the cause. As Pompey’s advisers had no doubt suggested, Caesar had been quick to accept the invitation to fight. “To Arms”

had sounded throughout his camp shortly after scouts woke him with news of young Pompey’s preparations for action outside Munda.

Standards held high, Caesar’s legions marched in step across the plain with a rhythmical tramp of sixty thousand feet and the rattle of equipment. Discipline was rigid. Not a word was spoken. On the flanks, the cavalry moved forward at the walk. Caesar and his staff officers rode immediately behind the 10th Legion’s front line.

As they advanced, the men of the 10th would have warily scanned the landscape ahead. All around them were rolling hills, but here on the valley floor the terrain was flat, good for both infantry and cavalry maneuvers. But first they had a five-mile hike to reach the enemy. In their path lay a shallow stream that dissected the plain. They would have to cross that then traverse another stretch of dry plain to reach the hill where the other side waited. Because he’d chosen the battlefield, young Pompey had taken the high ground. For added support, the town of Munda was on the hill behind him, surrounded by high walls dotted with defensive towers manned by local troops.

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As they narrowed the distance between the two armies, the legionaries of the 10th could see that Pompey’s wings were covered by waiting cavalry supported by light infantry and auxiliaries—six thousand of each.

The men of the 10th would have been anxious to make out the identity of the legion on the flank directly facing them, hoping it wouldn’t be their brother Spaniards of the 8th. The 10th and the 8th had been through thick and thin together over the past sixteen years. It would not be easy to fight and kill old friends. But they would do it. For Caesar. The men of the 10th understood why their hard-done-by comrades of the 8th had defected, and as they had in the past, they sympathized with them. But when it came down to it, the legion’s loyalty to Caesar would prevail.

As Caesar’s men broke step and splashed across the stream, then reformed on the far side and continued to advance at marching pace, their commander realized that Pompey expected him to come up the hill to come to grips with his troops. There was nothing else to do. It was either that or back off. When his front line reached the base of the hill, Caesar unexpectedly called for a halt. As Caesar’s men stood, waiting impatiently to go forward to the attack, Caesar ordered his formations to tighten up, to concentrate his forces, and limit the area of operation. The order was relayed and obeyed.

Just as his troops were beginning to grumble that they were being prevented from taking the fight to the opposition, Caesar gave the order for

“Charge” to be sounded. The call was still being trumpeted when the standards of his eighty cohorts inclined forward. With a deafening roar, Caesar’s lines charged up the hillside.

With an equally deafening roar, Pompey’s men let fly with their javelins. The shields of the attackers came up to protect their owners. The missiles, flung from above, scythed through the air in unavoidable masses and cut swathes through Caesar’s front-line ranks, often passing through shields. The charge wavered momentarily, then regained momentum.

Another volley of javelins blackened the blue sky. And another, and another. The attackers in Caesar’s leading ranks, out of breath, with their dead comrades lying in heaps around them, and still not within striking distance of the enemy, came to a stop. Behind them, the men of the next lines pulled up, too. The entire attack ground to a halt.

Caesar could see defeat staring him in the face for the first time in his career. Real defeat, not a bloody nose like Gergovia, Dyrrhachium, or the Ruspina Plain, or the skirmishes among the Spanish hills over the past few weeks. He’d broken all the rules—only an amateur would make his men march five miles, make them ford a river, then send them charging c01.qxd 12/5/01 4:50 PM Page 5

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up a hill like this. An amateur, or a man who had become accustomed to victory, who had underestimated his opponents, who was impatient to bring the war to an end. If the Pompeians charged down the hill now, there was every possibility that Caesar’s men would break—even the vaunted legionaries of the mighty 10th. And, veterans or not, they would run for their lives.

Swiftly dismounting, Caesar grabbed a shield from a startled legionary of the 10th in a rear rank, then barged through his troops, up the slope, all the way to the shattered front rank, with his staff officers, hearts in mouths, jumping to the ground and hurrying after him. Dragging off his helmet with his right hand and casting it aside so that no one could mistake who he was, he stepped out in advance of the front line.

According to the classical historian Plutarch, Caesar called to his troops, nodding toward the tens of thousands of teenage recruits on the Pompeian side: “Aren’t you ashamed to let your general be beaten by mere boys?”

Greeted by silence, he cajoled his men, he berated them, he encouraged them, while his opponents smiled down from above. But none of his panting, sweating, bleeding legionaries took a forward step. Then he turned to the staff officers who’d followed him.

“If we fail here, this will be the end of my life, and of your careers,”

Caesar said, according to Appian, another classical reporter of the battle.

Caesar then drew his sword and strode up the slope, proceeding many yards ahead of his men toward the Pompeian line.

A junior officer on Pompey’s side yelled an order, and his men, those within range of Caesar, loosed off a volley of missiles in his direction.

According to Appian, two hundred javelins flew toward the lone, exposed figure of Caesar. The watching men of the 10th held their breath. No one could live through a volley like that. Not even the famously lucky Julius Caesar. . . .

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IMPATIENT FOR GLORY

n the spring of 61 b.c., the staff at the governor’s palace at Córdoba would have stood anxiously awaiting the arrival of the new
I
governor of the province of Baetica, so-called Farther Spain. Several of them had probably served under him eight years before, in 69 b.c., when he’d been the province’s quaestor, its chief financial administrator, under the then governor, Major General Vetus. They would have known him as a man with a phenomenal memory and an extraordinary grasp of detail. His name was Gaius Julius Caesar, and at the age of thirty-eight he was about to embark on a career that would make him one of the most famous men of all time.

That day, a small, lean, narrow-faced general alighted from a litter and strode purposefully up the steps into the palace. Almost certainly he would have remembered men he hadn’t seen in eight years and greeted them by name. His hair had thinned over those years. According to Suetonius, conscious of his growing baldness, Caesar brushed his hair forward to disguise it, not altogether successfully, and donned headwear whenever appropriate. Later, on official occasions, he would habitually wear the crown of laurel leaves that went with the honors granted him by the Senate. His skin was pale and soft, and it appears that despite all the time he would spend in the field in the coming years he would never acquire a deep tan.

Appian says Caesar’s overland journey from Rome took twenty-four days. Some might have wanted to rest after more than three weeks on the road, but impatience would be a recurring feature of the career of Julius Caesar, and he was in a hurry to begin making his mark on the world.

Only the previous year, at age thirty-seven, he’d been appointed a praetor, which brought with it the equivalent modern-day military rank of major
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general. Most of his contemporaries had achieved a praetorship as much as eight years earlier in their careers. As for his great rival, Gnaeus Pom-peius Magnus—Pompey the Great—he had been a famous general at age twenty-three. And always in the back of Caesar’s mind was the example of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king who had conquered large parts of the known world when still in his twenties. Suetonius says that during his first posting to Spain, while gazing at a statue of Alexander the Great in Cádiz, Caesar was to lament to his associates that at his age Alexander had already conquered the entire world.

Caesar, determined to make up for lost time, promptly instructed his chief of staff, Lucius Cornelius Balbus, to raise a new legion in Farther Spain. Balbus, a local from Cádiz, would have reminded him that there were already two legions based in the province—the 8th and the 9th—quartered together just outside Córdoba. The always well-informed Caesar would have been aware of that fact, would have known that both units had been raised in Spain four years earlier by Pompey, the last of seven new legions he created with Senate approval in 65 b.c. But Caesar’s plans called for three legions. He issued orders for a new legion to be levied in his province without delay.

Recruiting officers were soon bustling around the province, drafting thousands of young men from throughout Baetica, which roughly corresponded with the modern-day region of Andalusia. Within days, the recruits assembled at Córdoba. Following the pattern set by Pompey, Caesar gave the new legion the number ten. And
Legio X
was born.

For its emblem, the 10th took the bull, a symbol popular in Spain then as it is now. The bull emblem would appear on the shield of every man of the legion, and on the standards of the legion. Romans were firm believ-ers in the power of the zodiac and were greatly influenced by horoscopes, and the unit’s birth sign, the sign of the zodiac corresponding with the time the legion was officially formed, also would appear on every legionary standard. In the case of the 10th Legion, which apparently was formed in March, the sign would have been the fish of Pisces or the ram of Aries.

Caesar took a personal interest in the appointment of the legion’s six tribunes, all young colonels in their late teens and twenties, and of the middle-ranking officers, the sixty centurions of the legion. Within thirty years the role of the tribune would change, but for now the tribunes appointed by Caesar would share the command of the legion among them.

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in status to membership of the Roman Senate, and as such were well-educated young men from respectable, wealthy Roman families.

But as far as Caesar was concerned, the centurion was the backbone of the army, and he was to rely heavily on his centurions throughout his career. During the heat of battle in Gaul a decade later, he would call to all his centurions by name to urge them on. He came to know not only the names but also the strengths and weaknesses of his junior officers. His centurions, he knew, were his future. If they performed well, the legion would perform well. And if the legion performed well, their general’s reputation was made.

The centurions appointed to the 10th by Caesar would have come from the 8th and 9th Legions. The most senior, the so-called first-rank centurions, already held centurion rank. The junior centurions, and there were eleven grades of centurion, came out of the ranks of the ordinary enlisted men. It was not uncommon for legionaries to be promoted to centurion after four years as a private, in these and later times. Centurions controlled the lives of their men, enforcing tight discipline with the business end of a vine stick. Tacitus tells of a centurion serving in the Balkans in the first century who was nicknamed “Bring Another” by his troops, because when he broke a vine stick across the back of a legionary he was disciplining, as he regularly did, he would bellow, “Bring another!”

So now Caesar had his 10th Legion. Six tribunes, all young gentle-men. Sixty centurions, all originally from the ranks. And 5,940 enlisted men and noncommissioned officers—in Caesar’s time, the ten cohorts of the legion each contained six hundred men. In Caesar’s time, too, the legionary was a conscript aged between seventeen and twenty, who was enrolled for sixteen years’ military service. Roman legionaries averaged just five feet four in height, primarily because of their diet—which was based around bread. Meat and vegetables were considered mere supplements.