Julius Caesar (25 page)

While the assembly of Pompey’s fleet at Brundisium and the mustering of his forces continued, Caesar was still trying to renew negotiations. In
The Civil War
he reiterates how much he wanted peace, and to spare the country the horrors that must inevitably follow if no agreement could be reached. When one considers the necessity for self-justificatory propaganda and remembers (as one must always remember in Caesar’s writings) that he is not the dispassionate historian but the totally involved participant, then other reasons must present themselves as to why he wanted to keep negotiations going on as long as possible. First of all, he knew the fighting capabilities and the morale of his own soldiers, and he knew by the desertions the state of things on the other side. This must have suggested to him that in Italy he could win. On the other hand, he knew that Pompey had seven legions under trusted legates in Spain and that a determined push into Gaul could overwhelm the legions he himself had left there. The Gauls would then rise, and a triumphant army, reinforced by Gauls, could sweep into Italy behind his back if he were to follow Pompey east. He would in any case have found it very difficult to follow Pompey into Greece or even farther east, for Pompey had the ships (and would leave few or none behind), and his troops had also stripped Italy of stores and weapons as they retreated. If he could not come to an agreement with Pompey—or defeat him before he left—then his first concern would have to be the elimination of the threat from Spain.

25

Rome, Marseilles, Spain

CAESAR’S attempts to negotiate with Pompey and, in the process, detach him from his
Optimate
friends, had all failed. His triumphant march through Italy had not brought him the one thing he wanted. This was the acceptance by all those officially in authority—the senate, exconsuls and jurists such as Cicero—that he was not acting outside the law but had right on his side. This was more important to him than bringing Pompey to battle (something which he seems genuinely to have wanted to avoid), but his enemies were equally determined that he should be made to appear in the wrong at all cost. Pompey’s withdrawal from Italy, along with most of the senate, was one way of ensuring this, and Pompey managed it very successfully. In mid-March he skillfully extricated himself from Caesar’s investment of the port of Brundisium, having deceived Caesar into thinking that most of his forces were inside the walls when, in fact, they had nearly all left. Both the consuls had already sailed for Dyrrachium (Durazzo), while the bulk of the senate and many of the young patricians accompanied him. As far as he was concerned this whole move (which he had long planned in the event of an attack by Caesar) was not a retreat but a tactical example of
reculer pour mieux sauter.
Following the example of Sulla, he would make for the East where so much of his strength lay and reorganize his forces before invading Italy. Not only the East was his, but Africa and Spain, leaving Caesar with only Italy itself and Gaul (a dubious asset perhaps).

Caesar was now master of all the homeland, but the war itself had not yet begun. He was faced with a further problem. Not only Africa, but Sicily and Sardinia remained loyal to Pompey, and these were important grain-producing areas upon which Rome depended. With his control of the sea Pompey was in a position to strangle the lifelines to Rome; and Caesar knew well enough that, though the bulk of the people might now be in his favor, they would very quickly change their minds when their food supplies were threatened. In the sphere of action Spain must come first, but before moving westward he hoped to negotiate with such senators as were still in Rome, using as his credentials the two tribunes, Antony and Cassius. But he needed other respected senior figures to give him support, and he clearly thought that Cicero was worth a great deal for his oratory and his moral authority. A meeting was finally arranged and took place at Formiae (Formia) which in the event proved satisfactory to neither party: Caesar wanted authentication of his actions and Cicero was unwilling to provide it. His letter to Atticus of 29 March 49 BC gives the picture:

I spoke so as to earn Caesar’s respect rather than his gratitude, and I persisted in my resolve—not to go to Rome. Where I was mistaken was in supposing he would be easy to handle—I never saw anyone less so! He said that my decisions amounted to condemning him, and that if I did not come others would be reluctant to do so… The upshot was that, by way of ending the interview, he asked me to think it over. To this I could not say no, and so we parted. The result is that I don’t think he is very pleased with me.

The meeting of the rump of the senate, legally summoned though it was by the tribunes Antony and Cassius, was a sorry affair and poorly attended. It was clear that Caesar would not be able to run the country with such senators as remained and that, against his wish, he would have to do it on his own—illegally or not. Having come to this conclusion he committed himself to the use of force against the sacred treasury held in the temple of Saturn, which the Pompeian consuls in their undignified flight from the city had omitted to take with them. Thousands of bars of gold and silver as well as millions of coins were transferred into Caesar’s keeping, his argument being that he needed the money to prosecute the war. “And so,” as the poet Lucan wrote, “Rome was for the first time poorer than Caesar.” But he left the city in a very bad humor for the senate had contributed nothing toward any feeling of legality to his cause, while even his popularity with the common people had taken an abrupt fall after his looting of the treasury.

Before leaving for his Spanish campaign he secured the grain so urgently needed in Italy by having Sicily occupied and Sardinia taken under protection. Mark Antony was left in command of the troops in the peninsula, and the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian seas were held by fleets under reliable friends. After the initial impetus of his invasion everything had turned into frustration and inaction, but Caesar now felt cheerful again and joked that he was about to take the field against an army without a leader, and that when he returned he would deal with a leader without an army. However first he was to meet an unexpected and unwelcome event on his route to Spain. Rome’s ancient ally Massilia (Marseilles), that famous Greek city-state, had declared for neutrality in the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. No fault could have been found with this decision, but it was reached by senior citizens who, while maintaining that their state was equally indebted to Pompey and Caesar, now clearly demonstrated that they preferred Pompey’s cause. Furthermore, they even admitted Domitius, Caesar’s defeated enemy from Corfinium, into their harbor with a squadron of ships and put him in charge of defense measures. The importance of Massilia, lying on the flank of his route to Spain, was obvious enough, and Caesar immediately began to beseige it with three legions, as well as ordering the construction of a number of ships to enforce a blockade. Although he began supervising all the details himself, eager to see Massilia reduced before he left, so tough were the walls and the resistance that things dragged on and he could no longer delay.

In Spain six of his legions from Gaul were awaiting his orders. With his legate, Gaius Fabius, in command they were stationed near the fortified town of Ilerda, facing the five legions of Afranius and Petreius, the two most experienced of the Pompeian generals. Caesar had superiority over them in his excellent Gallic cavalry, 3,000 of them, all Celtic noblemen selected by Caesar himself (a method which served to distribute honor and at the same time keep their country quiet). For a time, however, his plans were upset by a flood disaster; bridges upon which he was dependent for supplies were swept away, and his enemies, experienced in the local terrain, were having some success. At Massilia, too, things were not going well for the besiegers, and all the signs—as they were read at Rome—seemed to indicate that in these first stages of the war fortune was favoring Pompey. There were a number of surprising political desertions and the rumor, which had no substance in truth, that Pompey was moving round by North Africa to march through Spain amid the cheers of the Spanish people caused a heavy fall in Caesar’s stock. Then Caesar managed to get his forces in Spain out of their predicament—largely by building a number of small leather boats (of the coracle type such as he had seen in Britain) by which means he secured his supply position. At the same time affairs took a turn for the better in Massilia, where Decimus Brutus, in command of Caesar’s new blockading fleet, successfully held the ring around the city against a desperate attempt by the besieged to break out.

This improvement in events led to a number of the Spanish communities, particularly those north of the Ebro, declaring for Caesar, which in its turn led to the two Pompeian leaders deciding to shift their basis of operations into territory where they felt the magic of Pompey’s name still held sway. Finally, after a long and grueling chase, Caesar came up with them near Ilerda, and it soon became evident that many of the officers and soldiers in the Pompeian army were only too eager to fraternize with the Caesarians. The heart of many of them was not in Pompey’s cause and when, Caesar having cut off their water supplies, they were forced to sue for peace in the hot Spanish summer, there could be no doubt that the policy of clemency which he had initiated at Corfinium would again yield dividends. For although men such as Domitius had gone straight to Massilia to fight against Caesar again, and other senators had gone on to join Pompey, the bulk of the centurions and the legionaries had come over to his side—and it was they who won battles. At Ilerda Pompey’s two legates, Afranius and Petreius, were allowed to go free while their troops were dismissed from service. Caesar’s one wish was to see these armies which Pompey had kept for so many years in Spain, solely with the aim of threatening his position, disbanded so that they could no longer be used against him. He had proved his ability to his own soldiers and to the rest of the Roman world in this second round of the civil war. In just forty days, he had defeated Pompey’s Spanish legions under his two best generals and at almost the same time the people of Massilia were forced to capitulate. It was the end of the long and fine history of an independent city-state and from now on Massilia would pay the penalty, losing much of its trade to Narbonne. In Farther Spain, where Caesar from his earlier activities had preserved a faithful following of clients, the whole province went over to him without demur. In so short a time had Pompey’s Spain—and Pompey’s legions in the west—fallen from his grasp. Those who, like Cicero, had at long last decided to commit themselves to Pompey’s cause must have felt a distinct shiver down the spine…

At the same time, not everything upon the great canvas of the war showed in Caesar’s favor. Curio, who had successfully secured Sicily for him, had gone on from there to North Africa where he had been defeated and killed by Juba, the pro-Pompey King of Numidia. At sea, the old master of the naval arm had triumphed over one of Caesar’s lieutenants, the brother of Mark Antony, in the Adriatic. The worst news of all, however, came from northern Italy itself, an area where Caesar normally felt secure in the affection of its people and its legions. A mutiny had broken out among the troops at Placentia (Piacenza). It is worth observing that there is no evidence of this important and unusual event in Caesar’s
Civil War:
the whole incident is passed over as if it never happened. Appian and Dio Cassius tell the story which Caesar clearly preferred not to record. The mutiny began in the Ninth Legion, which had suffered badly in Spain and was dissatisfied with the very limited spoils which had come out of that campaign. The legionaries who had served in Gaul had been able to amass considerable private fortunes (and slaves to carry them) but in the Spanish campaign, fighting against fellow Romans and conforming to Caesar’s new policy of generosity toward the Pompeian enemy, the ordinary soldier found that a hard-fought campaign had yielded very little profit. Furthermore, Pompey’s defeated troops had gone off happily to return to their homes, while they, the victors, only saw a never-ending road of war stretching ahead of them—with very uncertain returns.

Caesar’s relationship with his legionaries was a very personal one. It stood or fell by the fact that there was mutual trust and that, in return for their allegiance, he would see that they enjoyed the spoils of war and, ultimately, the gift of suitable farmland on which to retire. At the same time his command as
imperator
had to be respected and obeyed implicitly. Arrived at the scene of the mutiny, Caesar addressed the mutineers and pointed out that long-established military usage held that there was only one answer to their crime: decimation. One man in every ten accordingly should be taken from the Ninth Legion and executed. At this the whole legion begged to be allowed to remain in his service, and the officers fell at his feet in supplication. Caesar, who could ill spare a single man, granted them stay of execution but insisted that 120 ringleaders should be handed over, twelve of whom were chosen by lot to be put to death. When one of these twelve was able to prove that he was absent at the time of the conspiracy, Caesar had the centurion who had accused him put to death in his place. Discipline and respect were maintained: the mutiny was over.

Just before the trouble at Placentia Caesar had received the agreeable news that he had been nominated dictator by order of the people, on the grounds that—both consuls being away from Italy—the affairs of the republic required a dictator to provide a legally constituted authority. This nomination earned the praetor Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who had proposed him on the people’s behalf, the governorship of Spain. Caesar could now, for the first time since crossing the Rubicon, feel that he had constitutional authority on his side and, as dictator, he had the right to hold consular elections. He was now lawfully elected to the consulship for the following year together with one of his close supporters. For the moment, however, the significance of the dictatorship was that it gave him the power to deal with the greatest national emergency of all—the state of the economy. The chaotic conditions of the past half century had meant that more and more citizens had fallen into debt and, since the outbreak of the civil war, all financial transactions had come to a standstill. The wealthy, alarmed that their money might be seized, had simply ceased to put any into circulation. Nothing could be borrowed, debtors refused to pay, and creditors were driven to every possible means to attempt to recover their loans. In such a situation it was hardly surprising that there were those who, remembering Caesar’s own financially unstable past, hoped that he would make a clean sweep by the general cancellation of all debts.