Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (4 page)

And potatoes, tomatoes, bananas, and coffee were unknown to Romans.

But despite their diminutive stature, Roman legionaries were fighting fit. After tough training and daily arms and formation drill, they were capable of marching twenty-five miles a day with a pack weighing up to a hundred pounds on their back. Part of the legion training implemented by the consul Gaius Marius forty years earlier involved running long distances with full equipment. These men joining the 10th had to be fit—not only would they have to tramp thousands of miles over the coming years, but also some of their hand-to-hand battles would last not just hours, but days.

Right from the start, skills the young men of the 10th brought with them to the legion were exploited. Blacksmiths became armorers, carpen-

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ters built artillery and siege equipment, cobblers made military footwear, literate men became clerks. And if you didn’t have a skill, you were given one. You worked on the surveying officer’s team, or the road-clearing team, or became an artilleryman. But when the trumpets sounded “Prepare for Battle,” you formed up in your cohort like everyone else, fully armed and ready to go into action.

Once they had been equipped, allocated their special duties, and received their basic training, and once Caesar was satisfied that the men of the 10th were prepared for action, he put them in a column with the experienced 8th and 9th Legions, and marched out of Córdoba, crossing the Guadalquivir River, and headed north, into present-day Portugal. This part of the Iberian Peninsula—Lusitania, as the Romans called it—had yet to yield to Roman rule. Its hill towns closed their gates to Roman advances, its tribes actively and ferociously resisted Roman expeditions. Poorly led, poorly equipped, and poorly organized, the tribes of Lusitania provided the ideal opportunity for an able and ambitious commander like Julius Caesar to make his name.

Caesar had planned his campaign in advance and in detail. Over the next few months he led his force of eighteen thousand legionaries plus several hundred cavalry, supported by a baggage train involving thousands of pack animals and carts for his supplies, artillery, and heavy siege equipment, all managed by noncombatant muleteers, through the valleys of Portugal. Methodically, brutally, the men of the expeditionary force stormed one fortified hill town after another and destroyed all opposition. Rising before dawn, the legionaries would either go back to work besieging the walls of a Lusitanian town that had failed to yield, or, leaving a community in smoking ruins, they would march on to the next resistance point, tramping for an average of six hours until midday, then building a marching camp for the night.

While auxiliaries foraged for food, fodder, and firewood, the legionaries took entrenching tools from their backpacks and threw up a fortified camp—a new camp every day while they were on the march. Protected by advance infantry elements and cavalry patrols, surveying and road clearing parties commanded by a tribune proceeded ahead of the main body of the army and selected an elevated site, cleared it, and set out markers for the streets and tents of the new camp on a set grid pattern unaltered for centuries. After a few months of this, when the bulk of the legion arrived at the camp site the legionaries could construct the camp with their eyes closed.

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the trench. Polybius, who describes the construction of legion camps in fine detail, says the wall was normally twelve feet high, the trench twelve feet deep and three feet across. Caesar liked his trenches fifteen feet across.

Trees were felled, and four sets of wooden gates and guard towers were constructed on the spot and set up in the four walls—all would be burned when the legion resumed its march next day. The legion’s artillery was sited along the parapet. A space of two hundred feet left between walls and the tent line, calculated to prevent burning arrows from reaching the tents, was occupied by cattle, plunder, and prisoners.

The
praetorium,
Caesar’s headquarters tent, was erected first, followed by the quarters of his deputies, including General Balbus, the chief of staff, then those of the tribunes and centurions, each with a tent to himself. Next, legion workshops, the quartermaster’s department, and a camp market were set up. Finally the troops could erect their own ten-man tents, leather originally, but universally made of canvas by the first century, in streets designated for each individual cohort.

While engaged in construction work, a legionary could stack his shield and javelin and remove his backpack and helmet, but otherwise he had to wear full armored jacket, sword, and dagger, on pain of death if caught improperly attired, to enable him to go into action immediately in the event of an enemy attack. Once the camp was complete, and Josephus was to say a new legion camp blossomed like a small town in no time, a set number of sentries occupied specific posts, for watches of three hours’

duration, with four troopers from the legion’s cavalry unit assigned to patrol the posts at night and report any sentry asleep or absent—both being crimes punishable by execution.

This campaign was the ideal baptism of fire for the young men of the 10th. The exertions of building a new camp day in day out after marching twenty-five miles, the strict regulations and severe punishments, all added to the swift military education of the youngsters of the 10th Legion even before they came to grips with the Portuguese tribesmen, toughening them up, preparing them for the bloody hill town assaults when they arrived. In Lusitania many legionaries killed their first man, and saw how the tight, often brutal discipline their centurions enforced paid dividends when Caesar’s orders came and they obeyed without thinking. In those months of the spring and summer of 61 b.c., marching, digging, charging, breaking down gates with battering rams, going over walls on scaling ladders, storming through towns and villages, cutting down anyone who stood in their way, raw recruits became soldiers, and the 10th Legion became a killing machine.

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In those few short, hot months, the 10th Legion helped Caesar subdue the tribes of the western Iberian Peninsula between the Tagus and Douro Rivers, tribes such as the Calaeci, and the Lusitani, who gave their name to the region, driving all the way to the Atlantic on the northwest coast—“the Ocean,” as Romans called it. One after the other the towns fell, and thousands of tribespeople were killed or taken prisoner. Captives were sold at auctions to the slave traders who trailed the legions along with other scavenging camp followers. These included merchants and prostitutes who made their living from the legions, as well as the
de facto
wives and illegitimate children of the legionaries and the personal servants of the officers—hordes who at times were known to outnumber the men of the army they trailed.

Under the Roman army’s rules of plunder, if a town was stormed, the spoils were divided among the legionaries. But if a town surrendered, the fate of the spoils was decided by the generals, who disposed of them as they saw fit. Generals also decided whether prisoners were executed or sold into slavery. As for the proceeds of the sale of slaves, Tacitus indicates that money from the sale of captured fighting men went to the legionaries, while that from the sale of nonmilitary prisoners did not. Smart COs such as Caesar would have made sure the rank and file always received a share of the spoils no matter what.

Most prisoners sold into slavery would die as slaves. A few would eventually be set free by generous masters, and it was the custom for some slaves to be granted freedom in their owners’ wills. With wealthier Romans each owning up to twenty thousand slaves at their numerous estates, it was no sacrifice to free a hundred or two. There are one or two instances on record of captives being enslaved for set periods, such as thirty years, on the orders of their Roman captors. As for the slave traders, theirs could be a perilous existence, camping in unprotected tents outside the fortified camps of the legions. There are several first-century examples of unarmed camp followers being massacred in large number during enemy attacks on legion bases.

As the 8th, 9th, and 10th Legions returned victoriously to their winter quarters outside Córdoba in the fall of 61 b.c. with minimal casualties and a hefty share of the booty from the campaign, Caesar was already being hailed by his troops as a great general and back at Rome as a new Roman hero.

His appointment in Farther Spain had been for just one year, and in the new year he parted company with the 10th, no doubt going around to all the centurions to bid them farewell individually. Then he would have c02.qxd 12/5/01 4:52 PM Page 12

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called for a parade, and stood on the camp tribunal, the reviewing stand always set up in front of the quarters of the legion’s tribunes, and thanked his assembled legionaries for their brave and loyal service. He would have particularly thanked the 10th Legion, which he had quickly come to consider his own. From later events, it’s likely he even promised the men of the 10th that if ever again he had the opportunity to lead troops in the service of Rome, he would send for the 10th Legion. And not just to march in his vanguard, but also to act as his personal bodyguard. Caesar would have left the legion camp for the last time and embarked on the road journey back to Rome with the cheers of his troops ringing in his ears.

As he returned to the capital, he was faced with a dilemma. To his mind, his highly successful military operations in Spain qualified him for a Triumph. The Triumph was one of the highest accolades a Roman general could receive, entitling him to a parade through the streets of Rome in a golden chariot followed by troops from his army and his spoils of war, receiving the cheers of the crowds lining the route of the procession. So he sent aides on ahead to demand that the Senate grant him a Triumph.

Word came back to Caesar that he was being considered for a consulship.

But he couldn’t have both.

To be awarded a Triumph, a candidate had to wait outside Rome for the Senate vote to be taken. To be elected a consul, the candidate had to be in the city. When forced to choose between pursuing the consulship or the Triumph, Caesar went for the former. The two consuls appointed each year were the highest Roman officials in the land in these late days of the Republic. Power before glory, that was Caesar’s tenet. He duly achieved a consulship in what turned out to be a hard-fought election in 59 b.c., his promotion elevating him to the equivalent rank of lieutenant general.

But Caesar wasn’t finished with the 10th Legion. Their partnership had only just begun.

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III

:

SAVAGING THE SWISS,

OVERRUNNING THE

GERMANS

aesar was thoughtful for a moment, looking at the dust-covered faces of the cavalry scouts. He himself would write of what took
C
place this eventful day, in his memoirs.

Turning to his quartermaster, he asked: “How many days’ rations do the men have left?”

“Two days’ rations, Caesar,” the quartermaster replied.

Caesar nodded. One scout had told him that he was seventeen miles from Bibracte, capital of the Aedui tribe. Another told him the massive column of the Helvetii tribe from Switzerland that he’d been following across eastern France for weeks was still in the camp they’d established three miles from his the previous day. “We march for Bibracte,” Caesar announced.

He would have looked over at Major General Titus Labienus, his second-in-command, a man in his midthirties, and informed him of his intention to secure the army’s food supply from the Aedui before he concerned himself any further with the Helvetii. And then he issued the order for the trumpets to sound “Prepare to March.”

It was the summer of 58 b.c., and Julius Caesar had kept his word to the men of the 10th Legion. As soon as he’d taken up his new appointment as governor of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum at the beginning of the year, a command soon extended by the Senate to also cover Transalpine Gaul on the death of its governor, he sent for the 10th Legion, and it marched from Spain to new quarters in the south of France.

At the same time, with the authority of the Senate—at the instigation of Pompey—to command four legions for five years, Caesar had sent for
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the other two legions he’d led three years before, the 8th and 9th, plus the 7th, another Spanish legion raised by Pompey, and posted them all to the city of Aquileia in the northeast of Italy, near present-day Venice, so they were midway between his provinces. But before the winter was over he received reports that the huge Helvetii tribe of Switzerland had decided to migrate to the south of Gaul, modern France, where Rome had a large and prosperous province. The Helvetii had sent out messages to all their clans and four other tribes who intended joining their march, to mass at the Rhône River on March 28, then cross the bridge at Geneva and pass down into France. Caesar was determined to stop them.

He had quickly marched the 10th Legion to Geneva, destroyed the Rhône bridge, then had his legionaries build a sixteen-foot earth wall for eighteen miles along the bank of the Rhône from Lake Geneva to the Jura Mountains. For weeks the Helvetii had tried to cross the river using boats and rafts, even wading and swimming, usually at night, but the legion and the walls between them turned the tribesmen away, and the Helvetii had diverted to another route, marching between the Rhône and the Jura Mountains, and swarming down into the territory of the Aedui people of eastern France—present-day Burgundy, between the Saône and the Loire Rivers. The Aedui had sought Caesar’s help in repelling the invaders, and he hadn’t been slow to respond. Quickly recruiting two new legions in northern Italy, the 11th and 12th, he’d combined them with his existing legions and marched into southern France to do battle with the Helvetii.