Colleen McCullough - 5. Caesar

Dawn brought a thick fog and windless, enervating air. In Caesar's camp all was stirring; the mules were being loaded up, the wagon teams harnessed, everyone getting into marching mode. "He won't fight!" Caesar had barked when he came to wake Mark Antony a good hour before first light. "The river's running a banker after this storm, the ground's soggy, the troops are wet, da de da de da... Same old Pompeius, same old list of excuses. We're moving for Scotussa, Antonius, before Pompeius can get up off his arse to stop our slipping by him. Ye Gods, what a slug he is! Will nothing tempt him to fight?" From which exasperated diatribe the sleepy Antony deduced that the old boy was touchy again. In that grey, lustrous pall it was impossible to see as far as the lower ground between his own camp and Pompey's; the pulling of stakes continued unabated. Until an Aeduan scout came galloping up to where Caesar stood watching the beautiful order of nine legions and a thousand horse troopers preparing to move out silently, efficiently. "General, General!" the man gasped, sliding off his horse. "General, Gnaeus Pompeius is outside his camp and lined up for for battle! It really looks as if he means to fight!" "Cacat!" That exclamation having escaped his lips, no more followed. Caesar started barking orders in a fluent stream. "Calenus, have the noncombatants get every last animal to the back of the camp! At the double! Sabinus, start the men tearing the front ramparts to pieces and filling in the ditch I want every man out quicker than the capite censi can fill the bleachers at the circus! Antonius, get the cavalry saddled up for war, not a ride. You you you you form up the legions as we discussed. We'll fight exactly as planned." When the fog lifted, Caesar's army waited on the plain as if no march had ever been on the agenda for that morning. Pompey had drawn his lines up facing east which meant he had the rising sun facing him on a front a mile and a half long between the line of hills and the river, a huge host of cavalry on his left wing, a much smaller contingent on his right. Caesar, though he had the smaller army, strung his infantry front out a little longer, so that the Tenth, on his right, faced Pompey's archer-slinger detachment and part of Labienus's horse. From right to left he put the Tenth, Seventh, Thirteenth, Eleventh, Twelfth, Sixth, Eighth and Ninth. The Fourteenth, which he had thinned down from ten to eight cohorts when re-forming his legions at Aeginium, he positioned concealed behind his thousand German horse on the right wing. They were curiously armed; instead of their customary pila the men each carried a long, barbed siege spear. His left, against the river, would have to fend for itself without cavalry to stiffen it. Publius Sulla, a knacky soldier, had command of Caesar's right; his center went to Calvinus; his left was in the charge of Mark Antony. He had nothing in reserve. Positioned on a rise behind those eight cohorts of the Fourteenth armed with siege spears, Caesar sat Toes in his usual fashion, side on, one leg hooked round the two front pommels. Risky for any other horseman, not so for Caesar, who could twist in the tiniest fraction of time fully into the saddle and be off at a gallop. He liked his troops to see, should they cast a glance behind, that the General was absolutely relaxed, totally confident. Oh, Pompeius, you fool! You fool! You've let Labienus general this battle. You've staked your all on three silly, flimsy things that your horse has the weight to outflank my right and come round behind me to roll me up that your infantry has the weight to knock my boys back and that you'll tire my boys out by making them run all the way to you. Caesar's eyes went to where Pompey sat on his big white Public Horse behind his archer-slingers, neatly opposite Caesar. I am sorry for you, Pompeius. You can't win this one, and it's the big one. Every detail had been worked out three days before, gone over each day since. When Labienus's cavalry charged, Pompey's infantry did not, though Caesar's infantry did. But they paused halfway to get their breath back, then punched into Pompey's line like a great hammer. The thousand Germans on Caesar's right fell back before Labienus's charge without truly engaging; rather than waste time pursuing them, Labienus wheeled right the moment he got to the back third of the Tenth. And ran straight into a wall of siege spears the eight cohorts of the Fourteenth who had practised the technique for three days jabbed into the faces of Galatians and Cappadocians. Exactly, thought Labienus, mind whirling, like an old Greek phalanx. His cavalry broke, which was the signal for the Germans to fall upon his flank like wolves, and the signal for the Tenth to wheel sideways and slaughter the archer-slinger contingent before wading fearlessly into Labienus's disarrayed cavalry, horses screaming and going down, riders screaming and going down, panic everywhere. Elsewhere the pattern was the same; Pharsalus was more a rout than a battle. It lasted a scant hour. Pompey's foreign auxiliaries held in reserve fled the moment they saw the horse begin to falter. Most of the legions stayed to fight, including the Syrian, the First and the Third, but the eighteen cohorts against the river on Pompey's right scattered everywhere, leaving Antony complete victor along the Enipeus.

Pompey left the field at an orderly trot the moment he realized he was done for. Rot Labienus and his scornful dismissal of Caesar's soldiers as raw recruits from across the Padus! Those were veteran legions out there and they fought as one unit, so competently and with such businesslike, rational flair! I was right, my legates were wrong. Just what is Labienus up to? No one will ever defeat Caesar on a battlefield. The man is on top of everything. Better strategy, better tactics. I'm done for. Is that what Labienus has been aiming for all along, high command? He rode back to his camp, entered his general's tent and sat with his head between his hands for a long time. Not weeping; the time for tears was past. And so Marcus Favonius, Lentulus Spinther and Lentulus Crus found him, sitting with his head between his hands. "Pompeius, you must get up," said Favonius, going across to put a hand on his silver-sheathed back. Pompey said no word, made no movement. "Pompeius, you must get up!" cried Lentulus Spinther. "It's finished, we're broken." "Caesar will be inside our camp, you must escape!" gasped Lentulus Crus, trembling. His hands fell; Pompey lifted his head. "Escape where?" he asked apathetically. "I don't know! Anywhere, anywhere at all! Please, Pompeius, come with us now!" begged Lentulus Crus. Pompey's eyes cleared enough to see that all three men were clad in the dress of Greek merchants tunic, chlamys cape, broad-brimmed hat, ankle boots. "Like that? In disguise?" he asked. "It's better," said Favonius, who bore another and similar outfit. "Come, Pompeius, stand up, do! I'll help you out of your armor and into these. So Pompey stood and allowed himself to be transformed from a Roman commander-in-chief to a Greek businessman. When it was attended to, he looked about the confines of his tent dazedly, then seemed to come to himself. He chuckled, followed his shepherds out. They left the camp through the gate nearest to the Larissa road on horseback and cantered off before Caesar reached the camp. Larissa was only thirty miles away, a short enough journey not to need a change of horse, but all four horses were blown before they rode in through the Scotussa gate. Even so, the news of Caesar's victory at Pharsalus had preceded them; Larissa, emphatically attached to Pompey's cause, was thronged with confused townsfolk who wandered this way and that, audibly wondering what would be their fate when Caesar came. "He'll not harm you," said Pompey, dismounting in the agora and removing his hat. "Go about your normal business. Caesar is a merciful man; he'll not harm you." Of course he was recognized, but not, thanks be to all the Gods, reviled for losing. What was it I once said to Sulla? asked Pompey of himself, surrounded by weeping partisans offering help. What was it I said to Sulla on that road outside Beneventum? When he was so drunk? More people worship the rising than the setting sun.... Yes, that was it. Caesar's sun is rising. Mine has set. A half-strength squadron of thirty Galatian horse troopers rallied around, offering to escort Pompey and his companions wherever they would like to go provided, that is, that it was eastward along the road back to Galatia and a little peace. They were all Gauls, a part of those thousand men Caesar had sent to Deiotarus as a gift, a way of making sure the men didn't die, but couldn't live to rebel either. Mostly Treveri who had learned a little broken Greek since being relocated so far from home. Freshly mounted, Pompey, Favonius and the two Lentuli rode out of Larissa's Thessalonica Gate, hidden between the troopers. When they reached the Peneus River inside the Tempe Pass, they encountered a seagoing barge whose captain, ferrying a load of homegrown vegetables to the market in Dium, offered to take the four fugitives as far as Dium. With thanks to the Gallic horsemen, Pompey and his three friends boarded the barge. "More sensible," said Lentulus Spinther, recovering faster than the other three. "Caesar will be looking for us on the road to Thessalonica, but not on a barge full of vegetables." In Dium, a few miles up the coast from the mouth of the Peneus River, the four had another stroke of luck. There tied up at a wharf, having just emptied its cargo of millet and chickpea from Italian Gaul, was a neat little Roman merchantman with a genuinely Roman captain named Marcus Peticius. "No need to tell me who you are," said Peticius, shaking Pompey warmly by the hand. "Where would you like to go?" For once Lentulus Crus had done the right thing; before he left the camp, he filched every silver denarius and sestertius he could find, perhaps as atonement for forgetting to empty Rome's money and bullion out of the Treasury. "Name your price, Marcus Peticius," he said magnificently. "Pompeius, where to?" "Amphipolis," said Pompey, plucking a name out of his memory. "Good choice!" said Peticius cheerfully. "I'll pick up a nice load of mountain ash there hard to get in Aquileia."