Julius Caesar (32 page)

By the end of January two veteran legions at last arrived from Sicily, together with 800 Celtic cavalry and 1,000 archers and slingers. Caesar still awaited two further legions, the Ninth and the Tenth (so conspicuous during the recent troubles in Italy), but he felt that he could now at least try to provoke Scipio to battle. The latter was, understandably, a cautious general when confronted by one of Caesar’s reputation, and in any case was unwilling to put things to the test when Juba, his legions and his invaluable cavalry were distracted by the Mauretanian attacks. Caesar moved south from the plateau where he had been encamped toward the town of Uzita, a main storage depot for Scipio’s army, and prepared to besiege it if Scipio was unwilling to give battle in its defense.

The weeks went by. Spring came to North Africa, and still the positional war dragged on. There was bad news from the East where there had been a mutiny among the legions in Syria. Urgent messages went to Sicily for the missing legions to cross to Africa—whatever the weather conditions. Scipio sent word to Juba that he must leave the fight for his own kingdom against his Mauretanian enemy, and promised him something that was in no way his to give—all the Roman possessions in Africa in return for victory. If Caesar won, he said, there would be nothing for any of them.

31

Thapsus and Triumph

As soon as he heard the unprecedented terms on which his help for securing victory would be repaid, Juba left his own affairs in Numidia and joined Scipio. He brought with him three legions, light infantry, a host of cavalry, and thirty elephants. Now was the moment when Scipio might well have accepted any challenge that Caesar offered for a set-piece battle but, cautious to the last, he refused to take the offensive and continued to hope that Caesar’s manpower and supplies would be worn away by the passage of time. He was right in one estimation, for it was the shortage of provisions that finally caused Caesar to make a major move. In the meantime he had at last received his two extra legions from Sicily, the Ninth and the Tenth. This in itself brought its problems, for Caesar knew that among these legions were disaffected officers, against whom he had taken no action at the time of the mutiny, but who were the last men he wanted in positions of command against the Pompeians. Fortunately for him they made the problem of their disposal comparatively easy.

When the two legions landed they were exhausted after a bad crossing, almost dying of hunger and thirst, and generally in a poor state of morale. However their senior officer, the tribune Avienus and his staff, arrived in great comfort, in a vessel appointed for their exclusive use. This in itself was enough to infuriate Caesar, who never spared himself when on campaign, and owed no little of his popularity with the rank and file to the fact that he always shared their discomforts and privations. He did not hesitate to make an example of the tribune, using the occasion also to get rid of the other officers known to have favored the mutiny and to be secret Pompeians. They were denounced in front of a general assembly of all officers and centurions and sent back to Italy under armed guard.

This increase in Caesar’s forces inevitably led to further problems in provisioning, and the fact that Avienus, perhaps deliberately, had not brought any grain ships with him to feed the two new legions added to the difficulties. He knew too that the arrival of Juba and his forces had already caused something approaching panic among his troops. He had put heart into them by deliberately and mockingly overstating the extent of the danger that these reinforcements represented, but he knew that now was the moment when, if ever, he must force an action. To the southeast of him lay the maritime city of Thapsus (Ras Dimas). Although it was not a natural harbor (rare enough in that part of North Africa) it was used because of the shelter that was afforded by an offshore island. Thapsus was well-garrisoned and a major depot for Scipio’s forces—indeed, Caesar’s ships had long been blockading it. The threat to the garrison, the stores, and the sheltered access to the sea, was something that not even Scipio could ignore. Caesar had now been in Africa for more than four months: his original intention to force an immediate battle and destroy the Pompeians had developed into a war of attrition. It was time to make an end.

“Realizing,” as Dio Cassius puts it, “that he could not get the enemy to engage him, Caesar marched on Thapsus, intending to give battle if they came to the aid of the town or to capture it if they would not come to its protection.” He calculated that, in view of his increased numbers, he must have a secure base, and one that could be revictualed and reinforced from the sea if need be. Thapsus would provide him with this—if Scipio and Juba did not elect to come to its rescue. But the Pompeians obliged, unwilling to see so strategically important a town together with all its stores fall to Caesar, and Scipio with all his available forces began to march toward the coast. Caesar, as usual, outdistanced his enemy and reached Thapsus first.

The town stood on a small rocky headland, protected offshore to the north by a long sickle-shaped island and from the west by a marshy lake, the only approaches to the town being through gaps a mile wide or less between this lake and the coastline. It was easily defensible then, but open to blockade from the sea, which, if backed by a strong attacking force ashore, must lead to its ultimate fall. By bringing up his army into the comparatively narrow area between lake and shoreline Caesar was apparently allowing himself to be caught like a fish in a net. And this, in effect, was the impression he intended to give; for only by inducing Scipio and Juba to come up and seal the ends of this net could he provoke that open battle which he so badly needed. (It is unlikely that he ever considered capturing Thapsus, withdrawing inside its walls and withstanding a long siege while being dependent on sea supplies. It would have been contrary to his character, and quite useless for ending the war in Africa swiftly.)

Jubilant at having trapped Caesar on the isthmus—as he thought—Scipio moved up the main body of the army to the north, blocking off the entrance near the town, while Juba and Pompey’s former lieutenant Afranius did the same to the south. This division of their forces proved fatal, and on the morning of 6 April Caesar moved out from his camp opposite the walls of Thapsus and his troops formed up facing Scipio, the nearest of his enemies. He had already instructed his blockading fleet to make a diversion on the side of Scipio’s camp (which seems to have caused some kind of panic among his men just as they were establishing their lines), and his troops now waited for the order to advance. They were drawn up in their usual three-line formation, with a fourth oblique line stationed behind on each wing to deal with the elephants that Scipio had deployed on the wings of his army. It was a crucial moment in the civil war. As at Pharsalus, as in Alexandria, as indeed even at Zela, one defeat would have meant the end for Caesar—and yet it seems that he failed to seize that essential flashing minute when everything called for action. It was left to the army itself, a trumpeter sounding the advance, to set all the cohorts in motion and precipitate an attack which proved fatal to the already disorganized Pompeians.

The anonymous author of the
African War
reports that the centurions attempted to prevent the men from advancing until their commander had given the order, but that they would not be restrained until finally, “Caesar realized that it was impossible to resist his soldiers’ impetuosity. He gave the battle-cry Telicitas’—‘Good Luck’—and galloped forward against the enemy front line.” The slingers and archers on Caesar’s right wing—to seaward—created havoc among the elephants, which, as so often happened if insufficiently-trained elephants were used in battle, turned and became far more danger to their own side than to their enemy. As Scipio’s left wing collapsed his native cavalry took flight, and soon the whole of his army was fleeing round the shore of the lake in the direction of Juba’s camp. Juba and Afranius had escaped as soon as they saw the collapse of Scipio’s army, and their camp was now seized by the soldiers whom Caesar had left behind to guard his own camp when the attack began. The defeated who were left upon the field laid down their arms and surrendered in the usual manner—only to be met with a brutality that had not been seen in any of Caesar’s previous campaigns. The legionaries, in some curious kind of rage that they had never displayed before, proceeded to massacre their opponents. Caesar, who had had no part in starting the battle, seems to have had no influence over his soldiers once it was clearly at an end. Indeed, his legionaries even singled out for death members of their own camp whom they said were traitors, not sparing a number of knights and even senators. “After so resounding a victory they thought that anything was permitted to them.”

That may be so, but the behavior of Caesar’s troops after Thapsus marks a great moment of change in the whole history of Rome. Caesar’s legionaries may well have been, as the author of the
African War
tells us, so poor that “to secure foodstuffs they had been compelled to spend all that they had, only a few having tents made of hides, the others making shelters with their tattered clothes.” It was possibly their sheer desperation and desire for loot that drove them to butcher the Pompeians when they yielded after the battle. But a more significant factor had now emerged, something demonstrated by their murder of political figures and even senior officers on their own side—the legionaries had at last learned who wielded power. They had been used before for many decades, by Caesar and others, as the instruments of policy. By attacking without orders, by killing their surrendered opponents without orders, and finally by storming through their own lines, murdering people whom they considered traitors or opposed to their own interests, they demonstrated that power lay in the sword and the arm of the legionary. Once acquired, such knowledge could never be forgotten. In the centuries to come the legions would often determine the course of the empire, and make or unmake emperors at will.

The most curious circumstance of the battle of Thapsus was Caesar’s apparent reluctance to give the order to advance, when the moment was opportune and his troops were begging for the signal. But was it reluctance or inability? Plutarch reports that “Some people say that he was not in the action, but that he was taken with his usual distemper just as he was setting his army in order. He perceived the approaches of it, and before it had disordered his senses, when he was already beginning to shake under its influence, withdrew into a neighboring fort, where he reposed himself.”

This reference to his “usual” malady confirms something that Suetonius also tells us, that “he twice had epileptic fits while on campaign.” Epilepsy was clearly something with which he was familiar, if this account is correct, for Caesar perceived the “warning” or
aura
, as it is called, which often precedes epileptic fits, and had time to have himself carried out of sight. It would explain his failure to give the order to charge, although it belies the statement that he led on his horse into battle. The epileptic is invariably left prostrate and comatose for a time after an attack. The “divine malady,” as it has been called, has often been found in men of extreme intelligence. The strangeness of its manifestations has led to sufferers in many countries being associated with occupation by a god. It may well have contributed to Caesar’s view of his own divine origin.

The aftermath of Thapsus was the disintegration of the Pompeian forces, the death of many of their leaders and the suicide of Cato in the city of Utica. Cato had not been present at the battle because he was in command of this, the greatest city in Africa after Carthage, where the bulk of the Pompeian senators and the rich property owners who supported their cause had made their capital and base. When the news from Thapsus reached them, nearly all except Cato accepted that everything was lost and made their preparations for coming to terms with Caesar. Cato was willing to fight, but could find no supporters.

Leaving a strong force behind to clear up whatever pockets of Pompeians were left in the area of Thapsus, Caesar hastened across country to reach Utica, hoping to catch up with the fleeing Pompeian leaders and also to capture Cato alive. No doubt he would have pardoned him—it would have been a fine gesture. But the latter, true to his republican principles to the last, had already made his statement on that score: “I am not willing to be indebted to the tyrant for his illegal actions. He is acting contrary to the laws when he pardons men as if he were their master, when he has no sovereignty over them.” The death of Cato foreshadowed that of Caesar. As a republican martyr he had far more influence over those who became the conspirators dead than alive. Of the other leading Pompeians, the Numidian King Juba and Petreius died in a death-pact duel, Scipio was killed in a sea-battle and Afranius was killed on Caesar’s orders. On the other hand, the two sons of Pompey, Gnaeus and Sextus, managed to escape to Spain, as did Caesar’s unremitting enemy and former lieutenant, Labienus. The rich state of Numidia was turned into another province, New Africa, Sallust becoming its governor, while all the towns that had sided with Caesar’s enemies had to pay heavy penalties in money, grain and oil. The African campaign had concluded successfully for him, but it had been ill-conducted throughout by both sides, and Thapsus was a victory for his legionaries rather than for Caesar. It only remained for him now to return to Rome, celebrate his triumph and begin the work of restoration, except—that one cloud on the horizon—there still remained the threat posed by the sons of Pompey who had escaped to Spain.

The defeat at Thapsus, and above all the death of Cato, brought a kind of despair to all those, Cicero for example, who in their heart of hearts had continued to dream of the restoration of the republic. Despite Pharsalus, despite Caesar’s triumphs in the East, they had continued to hope that Africa would see the end of him, and that the victorious fleet of the Pompeians would sail north to Italy to announce the tyrant dead, the republic restored and the continuation of
Optimate
rule in the senate. Caesar sailed from Africa in June, but instead of proceeding directly to Rome called in at Sardinia (“the only one of his properties he has not yet visited” wrote Cicero sarcastically), where he promptly raised the annual tax. He did not arrive in Rome until late July, thus giving his friends time to put the capital into some kind of order and his enemies to compose the smiles upon their faces.