044 - Caesar Triumphant

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 44, Caesar Triumphant. Last time, we left Caesar in a somewhat precarious position, sorry about that Caesar, on the far side of the Adriatic with only half his army. The rest of Caesar's men had been turned back by the naval blockade led by Bibulus, who died denying the second half of his old enemy's army an easy crossing. Pompey, with his well-supplied and much larger army, now numbering some 45,000, humming along nicely, he made no attempt to attack Caesar right away, even with the latter's army at half strength. He knew that Caesar was in a rotten position, and would soon discover that food for his men and horses would be hard to come by in this hostile country. Let the rebels starve. Worst case scenario, they eventually surrendered, and no more Roman blood is spilled. Worst case scenario, they refuse to give up, and Pompey's well-fed army crushes Caesar's exhausted and starving troops. The smart play was definitely to wait.

The contrasting styles of the two generals could not be more apparent during the coming campaign in Greece. Pompey was careful, methodical, and well-organized. He had no need to take risks, because time and numbers were both on his side. Caesar, on the other hand, was flying by the seat of his pants, making it up as he went, and taking wild risks every step of the way. I think 99 times out of 100, the Pompey model beats the Caesar model, but every so often that one shot pops up. Caesar may have been one of the most brilliant generals of the ancient world, but he was also, by his own admission, one of the luckiest.

This luck was well on display when the two armies finally did meet at Dyrrhachium in May of 48 BC. In the months after his landing, Caesar used every channel he could think of to secure a truce with Pompey, from the highest diplomatic overtures to sending legionaries to the outskirts of Pompey's camp to try and get the foot soldiers on both sides to agree that fighting each other was crazy. Caesar pursued peace not only because he wanted to build the case that he was not the aggressor, but he was also in no position to actually, you know, win a battle. It was this latter fact that kept Pompey and the Senate from taking Caesar's overtures too seriously.

So as the winter slogged on, things were not looking good for Caesar. Not only were his men struggling on a subsistence diet, but he began to suspect that his allies in Italy were intentionally delaying the launch of the reinforcements Bibulus had turned back. Had he been betrayed? Had he foolishly rushed into his own destruction? A man of action, Caesar was unable to hold still, and even attempted to cross back across the wintry Adriatic Sea to fetch his missing troops, but was turned back by a storm. He was left to brood in his tent, racked with doubts about his position and his own abilities.

But just as he was beginning to lose heart, Mark Antony lit a fire under the legions waiting in Brundisium and led them boldly across the Adriatic. Antony may have been crass, vulgar, and an unrepentant hedonist, but he was nothing if not a brilliant soldier and Caesar's most loyal captain. There was no way he was going to hang his general out to dry, even if more than a few people had whispered in his ear that he ought to do just that. When the spring came, the reinforcements linked up with Caesar, bringing his numbers up to a respectable 15,000. Now at full strength and with Antony at his side, Caesar felt confident about taking the fight to Pompey.

By May, the Republic's army was camped just south of Dyrrhachium, a port city which lay directly across the Adriatic from Brundisium in modern Albania. In the dating for the rest of the war, I'm going to use the month the battles actually took place in, rather than the recorded historical dates. In just a few years, Caesar will reset the Roman calendar to reflect the drift caused by centuries of missing leap days, so the Battle of Dyrrhachium, which was recorded to have taken place in July, actually took place in mid-May. Just as Pharsalus really took place in June, not August. The difference in dates may seem trivial, but to understand Pompey's hope that he would be able to starve Caesar into submission, you have to understand that everything took place before the harvest season, not after it, as the misaligned old calendar implied.

So in May of 48 B.C., Pompey was camped in a strong position with the sea and a link to endless supplies at his back, surrounded by steep hills. No direct assault was possible, so Caesar decided to try to recreate some of his success at Alesia and hem Pompey in. He ordered the same men who had built him a bridge across the Rhine in ten days to build him a wall in a giant arc starting at the sea north of Pompey's camp, running up and down the hills to the east, and then wrapping back around and connecting to the Adriatic in the south. He may not be able to prevent Pompey's access to food, but the wall would cut off his access to fresh water and the critical pastureland Pompey's cavalry needed to feed their horses.

Pompey responded by building his own parallel wall and trench system to keep Caesar's forces out in case they tried an open assault. Caesar notes in his commentaries on the civil wars that the two generals were essentially inventing entirely new ways to wage war as they went along. The ensuing weeks of siege and skirmishes fought in the no-man's land between the two walls has often been compared to the modern trench warfare of World War I rather than a classical era infantry battle. Men would launch themselves over their respective walls and attack, only to be repulsed by the superior defenses they assaulted. They would then return to the safety of their own walls and the whole bloody drama would be played out in reverse.

The stalemate was broken when a few Gallic officers defected to Pompey and brought with them information about the weak points in Caesar's wall. Pompey may have run his side of the war as conservatively as possible, but he could not ignore this opportunity. He pointed his men at the spots identified by the defectors and attacked immediately. Caesar tried to plug the hole, but failed miserably. He lost some thousand troops in the fighting and was forced to abandon his wall and retreat.

But what initiative Pompey had shown by attacking was immediately negated by his hesitancy to pursue Caesar's fleeing army. The old general let Caesar's reputation for cleverness trip him up and he convinced himself that Caesar was trying to lure him into a trap by running away. But there was no trap, just a pack of disorganized troops running away after getting their pants beat off. Collecting himself far inland, Caesar was amazed that he had managed to escape the day in one piece. He commented to one of his officers, today the victory had been the enemy's had there been anyone among them to gain it.

Caesar regrouped his army and marched inland, trying to put some distance between himself and Pompey. He had been badly shaken by the defeat at Dyrrhachium, but the fight had by no means gone out of him or his men. Some in the senatorial camp urged Pompey to now make straight away for Italy and retake Rome. But Pompey wisely understood that this was not a battle of territory, this was a battle of will. The objective was not to control Rome, it was to defeat Caesar. Anything less would be a false summit on the way up the mountain.

By June, Caesar had been chased across northern Greece and was encamped near the town of Pharsalus in Thessaly, just on the other side of the mountains from the famous pass at Thermopylae. He now had about 20,000 troops all told, stronger than he had been, but numerically no match for the 45,000 Pompey had encamped five miles to the northwest. At Pharsalus, Pompey held the high ground and all the advantages of being in friendly country and so was content to starve Caesar into submission. But he was surrounded by the Senate in exile, who pressed Pompey to attack and end the war once and for all. Every day, Caesar would march his army out onto the plain to offer battle, desperate for a conclusive fight, but Pompey would always decline.

After a few days of light skirmishes, though, he finally gave in to pressure from the Senate and marched out in full force. He may have had misgivings about whether it was a good idea, but if it was a battle the Senate and Caesar wanted, a battle is what they would get. The Senate was overjoyed as they looked past the battle to a post-Caesar world. They argued in their tents about who would become Pontifex Maximus, who would be consul in the next year, how Caesar's estates would be divided, everything, it seemed, but the battle itself.

Caesar was not so distracted. The two armies were lined up with a river on Caesar's left and Pompey's right, making any attempt to flank the other on that front a non-starter. So both commanders looked to Caesar's right as the center of the action. Pompey massed all of his cavalry on that flank and intended to smash through Caesar's weaker horsemen and then surround the small army. But Caesar immediately understood what Pompey's deployment meant and peeled off a cohort of men from each of his three lines and angled them as a fourth line as backup for his cavalry. He deployed this fourth line under cover of dust and the marching of his light skirmishers so Pompey would not realize the additional wall of infantry existed.

The battle began when Caesar ordered his first line in a frontal assault on Pompey's infantry, but Pompey had ordered his own troops to stand fast. Standard tactics of the day dictated that both sides should run headlong at each other and meet somewhere in the middle, but Pompey's plan was to force Caesar's veteran fighters to run the whole way, giving his own less experienced troops a slight advantage. But that veteran experience did not just mean they were better fighters. It also meant that they were more disciplined. When Caesar saw Pompey's troops staying put, he signaled his centurions to halt the charge, just short of spear range to catch their breath. It is no small thing to halt the charge of an entire army when you have just whipped them into a murderous frenzy. But Caesar had trained his men well. When he said stop, they stopped. Only when they were sufficiently rested from their sprint did Caesar give the order to close the final distance. Just like that, his men turned back on the murderous frenzy and threw themselves against Pompey's line.

The Battle of Pharsalus had begun. With the two infantries engaged, Pompey ordered his cavalry to break through according to the plan. They had no problem driving off Caesar's smaller cavalry. But when they cleared out the enemy horse, they suddenly found themselves confronted with an unexpected line of Caesar's heavy infantry. This time, it was Caesar's turn to defy convention. Usually, when confronted by charging cavalry, infantrymen would hurl their spears and then try to hack at the legs of the riders with their short swords. But Caesar ordered his men to hold onto their spears and use those to attack the heads of the riders. Simply surprised by this new tactic, Pompey's cavalry was completely thrown off and pulled up short, trying to avoid being stabbed in the face by spears.

In just a few minutes, Caesar's fourth line had scattered the charging cavalry, and as soon as they had, the battle was as good as over. The fourth line charged forward and was able to sweep around behind Pompey's infantry. Besieged now on two fronts, Pompey's less experienced troops panicked, and the decisive battle of the Civil War turned quickly from titanic struggle for the future of Rome to complete and utter rout. Pompey himself seems to have snapped mentally when he saw his cavalry shattered and fled the battlefield, leaving his army to fend for itself. Seeing Pompey run ended any notion that the day might somehow be salvaged, and it soon became every man for himself. Senators who had just that morning been splitting up the inevitable spoils of victory now scattered in every direction.

Caesar himself did not linger over his victory in the field, and immediately charged for Pompey's camp, hoping he could catch his defeated rival and finalize an official peace. But despite his speed, he could not get there in time. Pompey had gathered up his family, who had been with him since his flight from Rome, and abandoned the camp. He loaded up as much gold as he could, but was forced to leave behind most of his possessions when word came that Caesar was headed straight for him. He went so far as to throw off his general's cloak and disguise himself as a common camp follower to avoid capture. Pompey Magnus, who had fought his whole career for honor and glory, was reduced by defeat to a pathetic shadow of his former self, abandoning his troops and running for his life.

But maybe that's too harsh. It was not for nothing that Pompey fled for Egypt, and not for nothing that he made sure he took with him as much gold as he could. The Senate had an ally in King Juba of Numidia, and Pompey's plan was likely to gather another army in North Africa, where allies of Caesar had just been defeated in that sub-theater of the greater civil war. But it was not to be. Court ministers in Alexandria, the capital of Egypt, learned that Pompey was headed their way and resolved to curry favor with Caesar by assassinating his enemy. When Pompey arrived at the Egyptian coast, he was greeted by a small skiff that was to take him to shore. But as soon as he was on board and separated from his bodyguards, the Egyptian welcoming party attacked. They stabbed Pompey repeatedly, murdering him there on the shores of Egypt, the second triumphor to meet a violent end after a life spent chasing greatness.

When Caesar heard the news, he was enraged. The conspiring ministers in Alexandria could not have been more wrong about what Caesar wanted, and their clever plan totally backfired. Rather than making a friend in Caesar, they had just cemented him as a furious enemy. See, Caesar's whole posture had always been one of the magnanimous victor, the generous statesman who was forever pardoning his enemies. After the battle of Pharsalus, a whole contingent of senators decided that running in order to keep up the fight was pointless, and supplicated themselves before Caesar, expecting the worst but hoping for the best. Caesar pardoned them all, and declared it his greatest desire to simply heal the divisions within the state and reunite Rome as one body.

Among those who begged forgiveness was Marcus Brutus, son of Caesar's old mistress Servilia, whom Caesar had long regarded affectionately as a stepson. He welcomed Brutus back to his side, and told him to forget the past, that together they would build a new future for Rome. And this was exactly how he intended to handle his old friend Pompey the Great, just as soon as he caught him. So you can imagine Caesar's reaction when he landed in Alexandria in the autumn of 48 BC, hot on Pompey's heels, and instead of receiving information about which direction his rival had gone, he was instead presented with Pompey's head.

The assassination denied Caesar his planned public relations coup de grace of pardoning Pompey and asking that he serve beside him, as together they repaired Rome and made the empire even greater than it had been before the Civil War. When he saw the head, he wept bitter tears, and to everyone's shock, ordered that it be buried with full honors. The ashes of Pompey's body were handed over to his grieving widow, who was allowed to return to Rome and perform the funeral rites, becoming of a great hero.

When Caesar was done mourning his old partner and one-time son-in-law, he turned to the ministers who had engineered the assassination. They were in big trouble. Alexandria had been founded in 334 BC by Alexander the Great, and since that time, it had grown to become one of the most important cities of the ancient world, nearly as wealthy and populous as Rome itself. When Alexander died, his domains had been divided up by his former captains, with Egypt going to the general Ptolemy, and since then, the Ptolemaic dynasty had ruled the Nile from the growing cosmopolitan capital of Alexandria. The Greek-speaking Ptolemies made no effort to integrate with the locals and rarely left the safety of their palaces.

But with the death of Ptolemy XII in 51 BC, the ruling dynasty was fractured. The dead king had decreed that his son and daughter ought to be co-rulers in the Egyptian tradition, but the same court ministers who would later assassinate Pompey had decided that the ten-year-old Ptolemy XIII would be far easier to control than his eighteen-year-old sister Cleopatra, and so worked diligently to marginalize her power. But Cleopatra was savvy, and, seeing that she was the target of palace intrigue, did something totally radical. She turned to the local Egyptians for support. She became the first of the Ptolemies to learn Egyptian and often took part in the local religious festivals in her role as queen. By ingratiating herself with the locals, the queen became even more dangerous to the ministers controlling her brother, and so, by the time Caesar arrived in Egypt, a full-blown civil war was underway, with Cleopatra exiled from the capital, leading an army of local Egyptians.

But at that time in Egypt, support from the locals did not count for nearly as much as support from the Greeks in Alexandria, so her position was dicey at best. And this is why it had been such a huge mistake by the conspiring ministers to kill Pompey. It caused Caesar, in his disgust, to turn away from the young king they controlled and look for other allies in Egypt to support. Cleopatra fit the bill perfectly.

So rather than return to Rome and begin consolidating his power there, Caesar announced his intention to stay in Alexandria and settle the civil war. But placing an ally on the throne was not Caesar's only reason for staying in Egypt. His endless campaigning was expensive, and he needed money. With the rise of Rome, the Ptolemies maintained the independence of Egypt by issuing massive bribes to influential Romans, which in time included Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar. Caesar reminded young Ptolemy XIII that the last round of payments promised by his father had in no way been forgotten just because the old king had died. Ptolemy's ministers did everything they could to try to convince Caesar to leave, promising payments as soon as he was back in Rome, but Caesar would have none of it. He was more than content to wait for payment, and in the meantime, he could help them solve their little civil war. I'll bet they were thrilled.

He called for Cleopatra to return to the royal palace to help sort out the conflict. But knowing that if she were to simply appear at the gates, it was likely that her brother's allies would have her killed before she could make it to the relative safety of Caesar's company. So she famously hid in what amounted to a laundry bag and had a loyal slave smuggle her into the palace. Caesar was immediately taken by the cunning young queen after she slipped through danger in such dramatic fashion. Declaring only to be executing the will of the dead Ptolemy XII, Caesar re-elevated Cleopatra to co-ruler, and not long after, the 21-year-old queen, for reasons of either politics or affection, became Caesar's mistress.

The powers behind Ptolemy XIII, however, were not going to take this lying down, and concluded that they were going to have to expel the Romans by force. Caesar had brought with him to Alexandria only a single understaffed legion of some 4,000 infantry and around 800 cavalry. Reinforcements were on the way, but they were weeks out. So if the ministers were planning to drive Caesar away, they knew they needed to do it before the rest of his army arrived. So they whipped the local Alexandrians into a frenzy, declaring that Caesar was planning to make Egypt a province, depriving them all of the liberty and wealth to which they had grown accustomed. Nearly the whole city rose up in revolt and besieged the royal palace which was held by Caesar and his men.

What followed was weeks of bitter street fighting, as Caesar was forced to try and conquer and hold the neighborhoods around the palace, house by house, block by block. Nothing in their long careers prepared the Romans for the rigors of urban warfare. The cavalry was useless, and traditional troop deployments were unworkable. Their only advantage was that they were tougher and more disciplined soldiers than their opponents, and were able to withstand barrages from the locals as they moved to eradicate pockets of resistance. Eventually the Romans leveled whole blocks to create a no-man's land the Alexandrians would be suicidal to try and cross.

The ticking clock was at the forefront of the Alexandrians' mind. While Caesar needed only to hold out until reinforcements arrived, the Alexandrians needed to win before the reinforcements arrived. But no matter how hard they tried, they couldn't break the Roman resistance. Caesar was able to maintain access to supplies by winning a naval battle on the harbor, but suffered casualties he could not afford in an ultimately successful but brutal assault on Pharos Island, home to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the great lighthouse of Alexandria.

Finally though, in January of 47 BC, word came that the Roman reinforcements had completed their overland march and were now on the outskirts of Egypt. Caesar slipped his besieged men out of the palace under cover of night, and along with a contingent of Cleopatra's Egyptian army, joined with the newly arrived legions to form an army of some 20,000. This combined force assaulted the base of young Ptolemy's army, which numbered around 20,000 itself. Used to fighting severely outnumbered, basing an army merely equal in size was a rare treat for Caesar's legions. The battle of the Nile was easily won by the Romans. Ptolemy XIII drowned when the ship he was escaping on capsized, and Cleopatra was placed back on the throne.

Caesar though, never had any real intention of annexing Egypt. The wealth of Alexandria, combined with its now thoroughly anti-Roman citizenry, would prove a fertile center of rebellion no matter how loyal a governor Caesar installed. Better to leave it as a client kingdom, with Cleopatra in charge. The queen understood that she owed her position to Caesar, and Caesar alone, so he knew she might be the one person on earth he could trust not to rebel the first chance she got. But official province or not, Egypt was now firmly under Roman control. The Hellenistic dynasty of the Ptolemies that had ruled since Alexander the Great was, for all intents and purposes, broken. Rome's full encirclement of the Mediterranean was nearly complete.

Because I left Caesar in such desperate straits at the end of the last episode, suffering through the winter with half an army deep in hostile territory, this week I think he deserves to be left in a slightly better place. So we'll leave him there in Egypt where, despite the fact that the remaining senatorial forces were regrouping in Numidia, the fact that Mark Antony's ruthlessly debauched management of Rome was turning the city into a hellhole, the fact that his appointed governor of Spain was so corrupt and brutal that the natives so recently won to Caesar's banner were in revolt, and the fact that nearly every territory Rome had ever pacified was planning to declare its independence at the first opportunity, Caesar took a month off in early 47 BC to enjoy a leisurely cruise up the Nile with Cleopatra.

Next week, Caesar will go back to the exhausting business of consolidating power over the Roman Empire, but for now, let's leave him be. I think he's earned a vacation.