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The African War 46 BC

Context

After the death of Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey) in September 48 BC, forces loyal to his cause (the ‘Pompeians’) rallied in north Africa (modern-day Tunisia). They were given support by King Juba of Numidia.

Caesar, arriving back in Rome from the East (whose pacification, starting in Egypt, moving through Syria and into Turkey, are described in The Alexandrine War), quelled a mutiny in Campania. He took steps to relieve debtors. Loyal followers were given rewards i.e. governorships and priesthoods. Some were enrolled in the senate to fill gaps. Repentant Pompeians were forgiven i.e. there was no bloodbath as under the dictators earlier in the century, Sulla or Marius.

At the very end of 47 BC Caesar was elected consul and sailed to Africa to defeat this last holdout of Pompeians. The Pompeian forces were led by Quintus Caecilius Metellus Scipio, along with Titus Labienus, Publius Attius Varus, Lucius Afranius, Marcus Petreius and the brothers Sextus and Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey’s sons). They key port of Utica was held by Caesar’s old foe, Cato the Younger and the Pompeians had a key ally in King Juba I of Numidia.

The African War consists of 98 ‘chapters’ taking up 48 pages of a Penguin paperback.

The African War

Map of the Roman province of Africa showing the towns and cities mentioned in the text

1 to 6: Arrival

Caesar assembles an army from different contingents at Lilybaeum, a port on Sicily. Leaving a Caesarian governor in place, he embarks and sails for Africa. The crossing takes three days and his ships are scattered by winds.

3 to 6: Arrival at Hadrumetum, an important port 50 miles down the Tunisian coast from the ruins of Carthage. Its commandant Caius Considius Longus refuses to negotiate. Caesar sends a prisoner with a message. When Considius asks who it’s from, the messenger replies ‘From the commander-in‑chief, Caesar.’ Then Considius retorted: ‘There is but one commander-in‑chief of the Roman people at the moment, namely Scipio’ and has the messenger executed in front of him.

Caesar rides round the walls and lands his 3,000 or so infantry but rather than lay a siege, knowing other Pompeian forces (Gnaius Piso with 3,000 Moorish troops) are approaching, Caesar makes a fighting withdrawal to Ruspina. Meaning that he had barely left his makeshift camp before Numidian cavalry mount a surprise attack and threaten to overwhelm his rearguard until he sends in Gaulish cavalry, who rout him. But for the entire march his rearguard is subject to lightning attacks.

7 to 19: Operations near Ruspina

Caesar advances to Leptis which he secures but doesn’t let his cavalry ashore. He sends back to Sicily for reinforcements, sends a contingent to find the transport ships which have gone astray, and another detachment of ships to the island of Cercina, which he hears has a large supply of corn.

Next day he returns to Ruspina. He is waiting for the arrival his missing transports. The enemy, led by Meanwhile the enemy, led by Labienus and the two Pacidei, arrive and line up for battle. Caesar deploys his men in a single line with archers in front and cavalry on the wings. Quite quickly Caesar’s force is surrounded and forms into a circle. Labienus rides up and down his front line mocking the Caesarians until one veteran centurion of the Tenth Legion confronts him and throws a spear which transfixes his horse. Caesar turns his legions round and tries to make for the camp but fresh enemy reinforcements arrive. He orders his men to make one last attack and throws his last cohorts into the field, driving the enemy back off the plain, then withdrawing in good order to his own fort

The Penguin edition notes that the historians Dio Cassius and Appian both say this battle was a big defeat, with the Caesarians taking heavy losses and being forced onto a hilltop where they would have been cut to pieces had both Marcus Petreius and Labienus not both been injured.

The account gives Labienus’s reasons for feeling confident, including the rumour that three legions had mutinied back in Rome, listing the mixed forces at his command, then recapping the facts about this battle, namely it was fought on 6 January 46, on the sixth day after Caesar disembarked, on a wide flat plain, from 11 in the morning till sunset.

19 to 36: Waiting at Ruspina

Caesar hears that Scipio is approaching with the main forces (8 legions and 3,000 cavalry (and so builds up the defences at Ruspina, bringing more men from the ships (Gallic and Rhodian rowers and marines, archers of all nations). He sets up smithies to manufacture arrows, javelins and sling shot.

Corn is an issue. The enemy have gathered all there is to collect into strongholds and then laid waste and ravaged the land around.

There’s a kind of interlude or digression in which we are shown Cato (who, it will be remembered, had always been against Caesar and bore some of the responsibility for the civil war by constantly blocking Caesar’s conciliatory offers). Anyway Cato is now in charge of the city of Utica and the text gives us a lengthy speech in which he reminds Pompey’s son, Gnaeus, of his father’s immense military achievements, and encourages him to emulate them. Thus inspired Gnaeus sets off from Utica with 30 ships and a force of 2,000 slaves and freemen to invade the kingdom of Mauretania (to the west of Africa i.e. the coast of modern day Algeria. He is approaching the town of Ascurum when the inhabitants sally forth in force and crush his forces, causing them to flee in panic to their ships, and once embarked they sail all the way to the Balearic Islands.

Meanwhile Scipio leaves Utica and marches via Hadrumetum to join Labienus. The text dwells on Caesar’s shortage of corn and fodder for the horses. Seasoned veterans take to feeding the horses seaweed cleaned in fresh water.

Meanwhile King Juba decides to join the Pompeians and gathers infantry and cavalry to march east and join Scipio. But this leaves his own kingdom undefended, and Bochus, king of West Mauretania, joins with the Roman bankrupt and mercenary Publius Sittius, to attack Juba’s kingdom in the west. They attack Cirta, the richest town in the kingdom. When it refuses to yield, they take it by storm and slaughter the entire population and set about ravaging the land. When Juba hears this he understandably decides he has to defend his own country, and so withdraws his forces from Scipio’s army and returns west, though he leaves 30 elephants.

Some nobles (does this mean Romans of the equites class) come to Caesar, telling him Scipio’s forces are devastating the land and begging him to save them.

Farms were being burned to the ground, fields stripped, herds plundered or butchered, towns and strongholds destroyed and abandoned, and the principal citizens either murdered or held in chains, and their children haled off to slavery on the pretext of being hostages.

Caesar had been planning to winter his troops (it is January) but decides to commence his campaign and sends for reinforcements from Sicily. While Caesar continues fortifying his camp and building causeways to the sea to allow safe disembarkation, a passage is devoted to Scipio’s attempts to train his elephants, difficult beasts.

A digression for the sad story of the Titius brothers who are aboard one of the many troop and transport ships which get scattered en route to Africa, are captured by Pompeian forces, taken before Scipio who has them executed. Why is this tragic little story included?

Cavalry squadrons from both sides skirmish and sometimes talk. Labienus tries to take the town of Leptis which is held by a Caesarian commander. At one point his horse is hit by a javelin from a scorpion and they retreat.

Scipio brings his forces out to face Caesar’s camp every day, with no response, each day becoming more mocking and scornful, till one day he deploys his entire force. Detailed description of how Caesar orders the foragers back inside the camp and deploys a minimum of cavalry but doesn’t offer battle. There’s a page describing Caesar’s motivations and the reason for his confidence which includes the solidity of the camp’s defences and the power of his own reputation. What’s striking about it, though, is its weakness. These are not very effective reasons, and neither is the claim that he didn’t want to win victory over a mere ‘remnants of his enemies’.

This passage lacks the vigour and unstoppable logic of the same kind of thing found in the Gallic Wars i.e. it doesn’t feel at all by Caesar, but very much like an apologist cooking up reasons to defend his actions.

Anyway, Scipio hangs round then withdraws his army into his camp and gives a pep talk. Meanwhile, allegedly, Caesar’s numbers are augmented by a steady stream of Gaelutian deserters. The text claims this is because many of them were done kindness by Marius, to whom they have heard Caesar is kin.

[Caesar’s aunt, Julia, was married to Marius. The editor of the Penguin edition, Jane F. Gardner, speculates that these Gaelutians, or this forebears, had served Marius in the war against Jugurtha, and so had entered into a patron-client relationship with him, which they thought still bound them to his kin, Caesar.]

When they’re Africans, he gives them letters to their kin and sends them back to their territories to recruit.

A little fuss about Acylla. A deputation come from the town and offer Caesar their allegiance and their store of corn so Caesar gratefully sends Gaius Messius to take it, and he arrives just before Considius Longus the Pompeian commander of Hadrumetum.

So this long sequence amounts to Caesar establishing his beachhead and resisting the temptation to battle till he is ready. He sends Gaius Sallustius Crispus to the island of Cercina which he takes without a fight and loads its store of corn aboard ship to be sent to Caesar. And the proconsul Alienus embarks two legions, 800 Gallic cavalry and 1,000 archers and slingers from Sicily and they arrive soon after with Caesar. Two reasons to be cheerful.

Puzzled why Caesar isn’t giving battle or moving about the country, Scipio sends two Gaetulians to pretend to be deserters, find out Caesar’s intentions and report back. In fact once in the presence of Caesar they confess their mission and say they and their countrymen want to desert, and also remember the kindness done them by Caesar’s kinsman Marius. Caesar welcomes them and they are joined by a steady trickle of deserters from Scipio’s legions.

Slow developments: Cato is recruiting more and more forces in Utica; a deputation arrives from Thysdra saying ships with a huge amount of wheat have arrived from Italy; in the west Publius Sittius invades King Juba’s territory and takes a town.

37 to 48: Operations near Uzitta

Instructing the ships to return to Sicily to collect the rest of his army, in the middle of the night of 25 January Caesar strikes camp and moves his army quietly along the coast to an area where a large plain is bounded by a semi-circular ridge.

[I tell you what would be fabulously use in this, the Civil War and the Gallic War – photographs. If the editor/translator had been paid to go out to the locations of these towns or battles and taken photos of the sites. The cumulative effect of all these descriptions is to make you realise how very poor words are at conveying landscape.]

Caesar advances along the ridge taking abandoned forts. The last one is held by Numidians. There is a fight between the cavalry forces. Caesar sent cavalry down into the plain where they massacred some more cavalry, putting Scipio’s forces to flight. A passage reflecting on the bodies of the Gaulish and German dead cavalry and why they had followed Labienus from Gaul.

[One of the subsidiary dramas of the civil war is the way that Labienus went from being Caesar’s right-hand man and most dependable lieutenant in Gaul, to defecting to Pompey at the outbreak of war, and now, commanding the forces directly opposing Caesar in Africa. What were the thoughts of both men about this turn of events?]

Next day Caesar advances his complete army down the ridge, into the foothills and slowly out onto the plain. Scipio advances his army but uses the town of Uzitta as a bulwark for his centre and stops in that position. Caesar realises he can’t fight both an army and storm a town at the same time. After facing each other all day in the African heat, the armies both withdraw and Caesar orders his men to extend their fortifications. Much time spent building camps and fortifications.

The narrative has a habit of cutting away to other developments going on at the same time, and as a result the author deploys the word interim a lot, which Gardner translates as ‘meanwhile’. So:

Meanwhile the Pompeian Considius is still besieging the town of Acylla, held by Gaius Messius. When he hears of Scipio’s cavalry’s defeat (the dead Germans and Gauls) he abandons the siege, burned his corn, spoiled his oil, marched through Juba’s territory to give Scipio some of his forces, then retreated with the rest to hold Hadrumetum.

Caesar is still suffering the problem that troop ships are being blown off course. Several are captured by Pompeian ships. Once contained veteran troops who are brought before Scipio. He very decently offers to spare their lives if they will join him. A centurion of the 14th Legion refuses, says he’s loyal to Caesar, tells Scipio to lay down his arms, and offers to take on Scipio’s strongest cohort with just ten colleagues.

Infuriated, Scipio has the centurion executed on the spot and all the other veterans taken outside the town walls and there tortured to death. Caesar is upset and angry because he had posted lookouts along the coast to spot his ships and they had failed. He has them all dismissed.

Unseasonal weather: rainstorms which flood Caesar’s camp, the men already hard pressed for provisions.

Meanwhile King Juba received a request from Scipio to join him and, leaving a force under Saburra to combat Sittius, marched to join Scipio with 3 legions, 800 cavalry, Numidian riders without bridles, light infantry and 30 elephants. Now there had been much rumour, paranoia and fear among the soldiers about the threat of Juba’s vast forces, but when they lined up with Scipio’s the next morning, the Caesareans were not impressed, all their fears dispelled, and morale restored.

49 to 66: Caesar takes the offensive

Now Scipio has the maximum force available to him battle can’t be far off. Caesar pushes to secure all the forts lining the ridge surrounding the plain, but Labienus beats him to the last in the series. It is reached by going down into a rocky ravine and up the other side and Labienus set an ambush with cavalry hiding behind the heights. But some of Labienus’s men bolted, giving away the plan, so the entire force ends up turning tail and Caesar’s force kills them and occupies the last fort.

Caesar decides to build ‘two containing walls’ across the plain from his main camp to the town of Uzitta. The aim was to protect his flanks as he advanced towards the town and make it easier for the enemy to defect and desert. As usual I found it difficult to envision the position of these walls, and impossible to understand their purpose, and difficult to understand how long walls can be constructed while part of his force stood in front of them skirmishing with barbarian cavalry and light infantry.

That evening, as Caesar is withdrawing his forces to the main camp, the massed forces of Juba, Scipio and Labienus attack and drive Caesar’s cavalry back, but Caesar quickly reverses the direction of march, turns his legions around and they stop and then rout the Pompeians, fighting them back to their camp with much loss of life. Only nightfall prevented Scipio and Labienus falling into his hands, and in the aftermath lots of Pompeian troops defect to Caesar.

Ships carrying the Tenth and Eighth legions arrive. Recalling the disorder and mutiny of some legions in Campania and Sicily, Caesar now assembles the entire army and makes a page-long speech singling out some five officers who have incited mutiny or, in the case of Gaius Avienus, brought over a ship filled entirely with household slaves rather than soldiers – dishonourably discharges them from the army and sends them back to Italy accompanied by just one slave.

Meanwhile the messages Caesar had sent via friendly Gaetulians have borne fruit and the entire people rises up against Juba, who is obliged to withdraw some of his forces from Scipio in order to put down the rebellion.

Caesar’s ‘lines of fortification’ are now complete and he brings up troops and siege engines to attack the defenders of Uzitta. More Gaetulians, specifically about 1,000 cavalry, defect to him.

A digression on Juba’s arrogant behaviour in ordering a Roman officer not to fraternise but worse, ordering Scipio not to wear a red cloak like himself. To think of freeborn Romans taking orders from a barbarian!

Next day Scipio comes out with all his forces yet again. Caesar lines his men up in front of his fortifications and they stand staring at each other. The town is incorporated into Scipio’s line so Caesar is reluctant to attack because, once he’s passed the town, he knows the legions inside it will come out and attack his rear. Impasse.

The text gives a detailed breakdown of the deployment of both forces but, as there is no battle, who really cares. Instead, as Caesar is packing up and withdrawing his army, some of Scipio’s Numidian cavalry attack. Caesar’s Gaetulians respond, counter attack but go too far, across some marshy ground on the battlefield and are quickly surrounded. His cavalry are mauled before making it back to camp as night falls.

Next day dawns and both generals have their soldiers continuing to develop their fortifications.

Caesarian ships arrive and anchor off Leptis. Pompeian Varus attacks them, setting fire to the transports and capturing dome five-bank warships. As soon as he heard this Caesar rode the 6 miles to the harbour, ordering all his ships to meet him there. Alarmed, Varus turned his fleet back towards Hadrumetum; Caesar pursued and captured a quinquereme and trireme. Varus’s fleet makes it into the harbour at Hadrumetum and Caesar can’t follow because of an adverse wind but sets fire to all the transports anchored outside.

In the captured ship are some Roman nobles. Caesar executes on man he had pardoned in Spain, only to have him go join Pompey in Pharsalus, and then come here to serve Varus. Another noble he spared because he honestly claimed to have been taken prisoner and had no time to escape.

Caesar discovered secret underground stores of corn and sent men to fetch them. Learning of this Labienus set an ambush for next time they did it, deploying cavalry and light infantry. Learning of this Caesar lulled him into a false sense of security, then deployed three legions and all his cavalry behind the foraging party. When Labienus attacked the latter, the Caesarian cavalry attacked, when the main body of Labienus’s cavalry came to their help Caesar revealed his three legions and Labienus withdrew.

Next day King Juba had all the Numidians who had fled their posts during the failed ambush crucified.

67 to 78: The Pompeians lose the initiative

Lack of corn prompts Caesar to abandon his camp, burning it, assigning garrisons to the three friendly towns of Leptis, Ruspina and Acylla, setting his ships to blockage Hadrumetum and Thapsus. He marches with the remainder to Aggar, where he establishes a new camp, and goes successfully foraging for food. By ‘foraging’ I take it the text means stealing food from all the inhabitants of the region.

Scipio follows. Caesar captures Zeta, leaves a garrison and is minded to attack Scipio’s forces which are themselves foraging when more legions appear. As he marches back towards Aggar past Scipio’s camp, the latter attacks. Fierce fighting, the Numidian cavalry attacking if he retreats but pulling back if he stands. It takes all night to slowly retreat back to his camp while fighting off the skirmishing Numidians.

The Africans’ tactics of constant skirmishing but retreat as soon as the infantry offer engagement, requires a completely new set of tactics, and so Caesar personally sets about retraining his troops.

How many feet they were to retreat from the enemy; the manner in which they must wheel round upon their adversary; the restricted space in which they must offer him resistance — now doubling forward, now retiring and making feint attacks; and almost the spot from which, and the manner in which they must discharge their missiles — these were the lessons he taught them.

Caesar imports elephants from Italy for his troops and horses to get used to, for the troops to learn the weak spots of and practice throwing untipped javelins at. And has to accustom the legions to this new, sneaky, guileful, tricky opponent.

A deputation from the town of Vaga arrives to ask for Caesar’s protection. Soon after which a refugee arrives to declare that Juba had hastened to the town to stop it being occupied, stormed it, slaughtered the entire population, and abandoned it for his troops to plunder.

On 21 March Caesar holds the traditional purification ceremony of the army. Apparently, this had something to do with marking the start of the campaigning season although, as we’ve seen, Caesar campaigned throughout the winter. Next day he marches to Scipio’s camp and presents his army in battle array, but Scipio doesn’t rise to the bait.

Next day he marches to Sarsura. Labienus attacks the rearguard, capturing many camp followers then attacking the troops themselves, but Caesar had anticipated this and stationed men without baggage in the rear who promptly turned, raised standards, and scared Labienus off.

At Sursura Caesar slaughtered the entire Pompeian garrison. Caesar distributed corn to the army then marched on to Thysdra but finds no water and so retires to Aggar.

The town of Thabena revolts against Juban rule, massacres its garrison and asks for Caesar’s protection, so he sends a detachment to take it. At the same time more troop transports arrive from Italy, some 4,000 infantry, 1,000 slingers, 400 cavalry, so Caesar assembles his force and marches to a plain two miles from Scipio’s camp.

It’s near a town named Tegea. Scipio brings his men out of his camp, deploying them. Time passes. Eventually a cavalry skirmish develops in which both sides send in reinforcements, but Caesar has the best of it, his cavalry pursuing the enemy three miles up into the hills and killing many before returning.

But Caesar can’t get the enemy to fight. He realises two things: that they lack confidence in their own abilities and so are relying on Caesar’s shortage of water to wear him down. And so on 4 April, by night, he left the camp by Aggar and marched 16 miles to Thapsus, which Vergilius was holding with a large garrison.

Scipio follows him and now, according to the narrative, is forced to give battle. Why? ‘To avoid the utter humiliation of losing Vergilius and those most staunch supporters of his cause — the men of Thapsus’.

79 to 86: The battle of Thapsus

Caesar advances to Thapsus and begins to invest the town. Scipio follows and finally encamps 8 miles south. Thapsus is on a promontory with a big salt lake to its south, creating a narrow land corridor. Because Caesar had blocked this Scipio went up and round the western side of the lake.

Map of the battle of Thapsus, 6 April 46 BC

Scipio’s men give signs of agitation behind their fortifications and this incites Caesar’s forces. It’s an oddity of this battle that Caesar does everything in his power and even gets his centurions to try and restrain the men, but then a bugler gives the signal to advance and the cohorts run forward charging, and Caesar gives in to fortune and destiny.

Sling shots terrify the elephants. The Moorish cavalry panics and flees. (Digression to describe the action of one brave legionary who attacks a furious elephant to stop it trampling to death a camp follower.) The garrison of Thapsus emerge from their fortifications and wade through the water to join their comrades but are beaten back by slings and arrows.

The retreating Pompeians arrive at Scipio’s base camp but discover there is no one there to rally them. They run to Juba’s camp to discover it is in enemy hands. The Scipionians drop their arms and beg for mercy but Caesar’s men’s blood is up and they massacre them to a man, despite Caesar’s orders to stop, and even wound eminent nobles and knights on Caesar’s own side.

In the way of these kinds of texts, the casualties are given and seem a) suspiciously round figures and b) ludicrously one sided. Thus, 5,000 of the enemy are killed to Caesar’s 50 dead and a few wounded. He captures 64 elephants. What I want to know is what happened to Scipio, Labienus and Juba who all disappear from the narrative.

(Plutarch, in his life of Caesar, 53, says: ‘Thus in a brief portion of one day he made himself master of three camps [Scipio’s, Juba’s and Afranius’s) and slew fifty thousand of the enemy, without losing as many as fifty of his own men’.)

Next day Caesar lines his whole army up in front of Thapsus and calls on Vergilius to surrender but there is no reply. Next day he gives rewards and praise to the bravest fighters, then leaves a commander to besiege Thapsus and one to besiege Thysdra, while he proceeds to Utica.

87 to 98: Final stages of the campaign

Scipio’s retreating forces arrive at the town of Parada. The people have heard of Caesar’s victory and so refuse the Pompeians entry but the Pompeians storm it, pile up logs in the forum, burn the town’s precious belongings, then tie up townspeople and throw them into the flames.

Cato the Younger was governor of Utica. He didn’t trust either the senate of 300 or so eminent Romans or the townspeople. The latter he forced into a trench in front of the town, the latter he kept under guard. When Scipio’s cavalry arrived they attacked the townspeople in the trench but were beaten off. So instead the cavalry break into the town and plunder and loot it. Cato could only stop them by promising 100 sesterces each, joined by a Roman noble Faustus Sulla, who gave them money, then they rode off west to join King Juba.

Cato assembles the Three Hundred (presumably meaning the town’s senate or leading figures) and persuades them to free their slaves in order to join the defence of the town. Only some comply. Many want to flee, so Cato sets about carefully and methodically putting ships at the disposal of the fleeers. He assigns his children to the care of his questor, then withdraws to his bedroom, where he runs himself through with a sword. When his slaves and friends run in and try to patch him up, Cato pulls at the wound and his guts with his own hands, killing himself. Yuk.

These last acts of his management of the town and suicide are described in detail in Plutarch’s life of Cato. The townspeople opposed him but came to respect his rectitude.

His deputy, Lucius Caesar, opens the town gates and welcomes Caesar’s forces. Caesar marches through the territory picking off towns which now throw themselves open to him, including Usseta and Hadrumetum, finally arriving at Utica as it got dark. Along the way he met and pardoned a suite of Roman nobles who had been holding the town against him.

Next morning Caesar assembled the 300 and upbraided them for opposing him. They were trembling all expecting to die but Caesar forgives them, albeit on the harsh condition that all shall love all their properties, confiscated by the state. If any buy them back, they shall hold their property secure and the fee amount to their fine. He imposed a group fine on the 300 of 200 million sesterces.

King Juba flies west, hiding in farmhouses during the day, till he arrives at the town of Zama. Now he had built a huge pyre here and threatened the people with burning them on it with the result that, no surprisingly, they refuse to let him in. Neither will they hand over his treasure or wife and children so Juba ends up taking refuge with Marcus Petreius in a country villa.

The people of Zama send an envoy to Caesar begging his protection so he sets off. Some of the king’s cavalry officers approach him asking for forgiveness and he forgives them all. This is excellent policy because, as word spreads of his clemency, more and more towns surrender to him and senior officers come over.

Considius, who had been holding Thysdra for the Pompeians, hearing of their defeat at Thapsus, takes treasure and slips out of the town with a small entourage of barbarians. But somewhere along the trail the Gauls cut him down, stole the gold and absconded.

At which point, realising it is all over, Vergilius asks safe conduct for him and his family, then surrenders Thapsus.

King Juba, with no army to command and abandoned by his people, resolves on suicide. There are a number of versions: some say he and Petreius agreed to duel, he easily killed Petreius then stabbed himself; or Petreius killed him then stabbed himself; or they killed each other at the same time; or they both committed suicide.

Meanwhile, in the west, Sittius routed the army of Juba’s general, Saburra, killing the general. Then he heard of the 1,000 cavalry under Faustus Sulla and Afranius, fresh from sacking Utica and being paid off and planning to take ship to Spain, last holdout of the Pompeians. Sittius ambushes them, killing a great number but taking alive Faustus and Afranius. A few days later, in some obscure affray, they were killed. Caesar pardoned their children and let them keep their property.

Scipio, Damasippus, Torquatus and Plaetorius Rustianus were making for Spain aboard warships. After a stormy passage they were carried towards Royal Hippo, where Sittius had his fleet at that time. Outnumbered as they were by the latter, Scipio’s vessels were surrounded and sunk and Scipio and the others all perished. [Other accounts say that, after losing the naval engagement Scipio also committed suicide by stabbing himself with his sword.]

Having entered Juba’s royal town of Zama, Caesar holds an auction of King Juba’s belongings and gives the citizens of Zama rewards for resisting their king. He declared the kingdom a Roman province, appointing Gaius Sallustius proconsul, awarding western Numidia to King Bochus. Sittius founds a colony there. (This Sallustius is the same man who in the late 40s retired from public life and wrote monographs in the Jugurthan War and the Cataline Conspiracy.)

At Utica Caesar sold the property of commanders under Juba and Petreius, imposed fines on the towns which held out against them but took steps to make sure they weren’t plundered. On Leptis he imposes a fine of 3 million pounds of oil a year.

On 13 June Caesar set sail from Utica, arriving at Caralis on Sardinia. Here he punishes the people of Sulci for rebelling against him, then set sail along the coast of Italy and arrived safely back in Rome.

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by Simon on June 17, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Ancient history, War

Tagged Acylla, Afranius, Africa, Aggar, Algeria, Alienus, Ancient history, ancient Rome, Appian, Ascurum, Balearic Islands, battle, battle of Pharsalus, battle of Thapsus, Caesar, Caius Considius Longus, Campania, Caralis, Carthage, Cataline conspiracy, Cato the Younger, Cercina, Cirta, civil war, Damasippus, Dio Cassius, Egypt, elephants, Gaius Avienus, Gaius Messius, Gaius Sallustius, Gaius Sallustius Crispus, Gnaeus Pompeius, Gnaius Piso, Hadrumetum, history, Jane F. Gardner, Jugurthan War, Julius Caesar, King Bochus, King Juba, King Juba I, Labienus, Leptis, Lilybaeum, Lucius Afranius, Marcus Petreius, Marius, Moorish cavalry, Numidia, Pacidei, Parada, Plaetorius Rustianus, Plutarch, Pompeians, Pompey, Publius Attius Varus, Publius Sittius, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Scipio, Roman history, Rome, Ruspina, Saburra, Sallust, Sardinia, Scipio, Sextus Pompeius, Sicily, siege, Sulci, Sulla, Syria, Tegea, Tenth legion, Thapsus, The African War, the Alexandrine War, the Civil War, the Gallic War, Three Hundred, Thysdra, Titus Labienus, Torquatus, Tunisia, Turkey, Utica, Uzitta, Vaga, Varus, Vergiliuis, war, West Mauretania, Zama, Zeta

Posted by Simon on June 17, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/06/17/the-african-war/

The Alexandrian War by Aulus Hirtius

Julius Caesar’s 130-page account of his civil war with Pompey up until the latter’s defeat at the battle of Pharsalus is always published alongside three shorter accounts – of the Alexandrian War, the African War and the Spanish War – even though there is nowadays scholarly consensus that Caesar didn’t write any of these. No one knows for sure who did. Maybe his lieutenant Aulus Hirtius, who is recorded as writing the eighth and final commentary in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, wrote the Alexandrian War, but probably not the African and Spanish texts which are stylistically below Caesar’s standard and also incomplete.

The Alexandrian War

1 to 4: Military preparations

Julius Caesar had arrived with a fleet and army in Alexandria, in pursuit of Pompey. After disgustingly being presented with the head of Pompey, Caesar set about interfering in the civil war between King Ptolemy and his sister Cleopatra, and found himself under attack for his pains. He and his forces are penned into a specific quarter of the city and besieged by the Egyptian army led by Achillas.

Description of Alexandria, built of stone with little wood or flammable material. Caesar’s policy is to isolate his sector of the town and secure supplies of water and food. The Egyptians are highly educated and have copied Roman siege engines and manoeuvres.

The motivation of the Egyptians, namely resentment at the way the Romans keep coming here, first Gabinius (sent by Pompey to reinstate Ptolemy XII Auletes) then Pompey, albeit briefly; now Caesar. The population, from the richest to the slaves who they freed to fight, believe they are fighting for Egypt’s independence and to prevent her becoming a Roman province (as she of course did, after the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC).

Cleopatra was Ptolemy XII Auletes’s eldest daughter. His younger daughter, Arsinoe, slips out of the sector of the city which Caesar controls, going to join the Egyptian general, Achillas. However, the campaign doesn’t progress, the pair fall out and Arsinoe has Achillas assassinated, handing control of the army over to her favourite, Ganymedes.

5 to 9: the water supply poisoned

Ganymedes conceives the idea of tainting the Romans’ water supply, by clever engineering turning the water supplied to the buildings the Romans had occupied either salt or brackish. This panics the Roman troops who want to leave, but Caesar delivers one of his Great Speeches (as per the Gallic Wars) reassuring them and then taking the practical step of ordering them to dig wells. Soon enough they come across fresh water. It’s noticeable that the speech is markedly less clear and concise than Caesar’s speeches in The Civil War. One among many indications that this account was not written by Caesar.

The 37th legion arrives by ship with corn, men and weapons, but misses the harbour and a strong wind prevents them from entering Alexandria harbour for weeks.

10 to 25: Naval engagements

Caesar is taken out to his ships and then takes them to Chersonesus. Troops going ashore to fetch water are attacked and captured by Egyptians. Caesar wants to avoid battle and moors outside the city. But a Rhodian ship anchored further away than the others tempts the Egyptians to attack and this turns into a full scale battle, in which Caesar captures one enemy trireme and sinks one, with combatants on many of the others killed. If night hadn’t fallen he would have captured the entire Egyptian fleet.

Initially the Egyptians lose heart but Ganymede rouses them to fight back and rebuild the fleet Caesar had burned. They recall guard ships from the mouth of the Nile, find old ones tucked away in the dockyards, strip roofs to provide the oars for ships. In a short space of time they prepare 27 ships.

Caesar has 25 ships. He sails out of the Great Harbour to face the Egyptian fleet. There’s a battle and the 9 ships from Rhodes again distinguish themselves under their gallant leader Euphranor. He makes a little speech to Caesar promising not to let him down. The narrator explains that it is all or nothing for the Romans; if they are defeated their campaign is over; whereas the Egyptians can take setback after setback. Therefore Caesar rouses the troops and they incite each other, with the result that the Romans and allies win the battle, capturing a quinquereme and bireme and sinking 3 other ships to no Roman loss.

To fully control the port Caesar realises he needs to capture the island the Pharos is on and the causeway which leads to it. He lands troops on the island, ten cohorts of infantry and cavalry. There’s a problem finding a landing place, with Egyptian ships harassing them but once ashore they fight and turn the defending forces, and those in the defended positions panic and run, some throwing themselves into the sea and swimming the half mile back to town.

Caesar allows his men to loot the area, then demolish the buildings then set a garrison to defend the island and lighthouse. But when he tries to take the arch on the long causeway back towards the city, the Egyptians counter-attack and it turns into a rout. The fleeing Romans overload their own boats many of which sink. Caesar is forced to abandon his main boat when it becomes swamped, leaps overboard and swims further out to waiting ships, and from here directs the retreat onto smaller boats. Having secured this arch the Alexandrians fortified it with defence works and siege engines (22).

Frankly, I found it very difficult to follow what was meant to be happening in this description. I get that there was a causeway but I didn’t understand whether it had a kind of lock at the city end through which ships could pass, which the Romans were trying to seize. And I didn’t quite understand how the Alexandrians were able to take the Romans by surprise or get round them if it was a narrow causeway. In this as so many other descriptions in the Gallic and Civil Wars, even though the authors are eye witnesses, I find descriptions of physical layouts and battles often incomprehensible.

Caesar rouses his men who make daily skirmishes and sallies against the enemy fortifications. I have no idea what this looked like because I got no good visual sense of the defences in question.

A deputation of Egyptians asks Caesar to release their king who might become a conduit to negotiate a ceasefire. They’re fed up of being ruled by a girl. When he sends for the king the young lad bursts into tears and begs not to be sent away. And yet as soon as he joins his people on the outside he renews the war with new ferocity, leading the narrator to reflect on the nature of Egyptians: ‘they were a deceitful race, always pretending something different from their real intentions.’

The Egyptians learn that overland forces are coming from Syria and so try to block off the food supplies which are reaching the Romans by ship, stationing ships near Canopus. So Caesar exits the Grand Harbour and engages in a major battle off Canopus. Upsettingly, almost the only leader to die is the hero of the Rhodians, Euphranor, who destroys one ship but goes too far in his pursuit of another, is surrounded and sunk. C’est la guerre or, as the author puts it:

Fortune, however, very often reserves for a harsher fate those upon whom she has showered her most prolific blessings.

26 to 33: The last stages

Caesar had sent his loyal friend King Mithridates of Pergamum to Syria and Cilicia for reinforcements and food. Now Mithridates arrives, having marched back from Syria. He comes to the border garrison town of Pelusium, storms and takes it in a day. Then marches on towards the Nile Delta. Fights another engagement with the Egyptian army sent to stop him, initially having the best of it.

The King of Egypt sets out to confront him by sailing a fleet down the Nile. Caesar sails his fleet along the coast. The king camps on a bluff overlooking a tributary of the Nile. When Caesar approaches he sends some cavalry and light infantry to block his way. But Caesar’s German mercenaries cross the tributary and massacre this advance guard.

When he reaches the king’s camp he realises how well fortified it is. The king has built a fort next to a village and a defensive wall joining fort and camp and encompassing the village. Caesar attacks the fort and a weak spot where the walls of the camp touch the river, leaving a slight gap. Caesar notices they have left the highest part of the camp undefended and orders his men to storm it there. They succeed and from this high point attack downwards into the lower parts throwing the Egyptians into a complete panic. They throw themselves over the ramparts which then collapse crushing many. Many try to swim out to their ships in the river but drown and it is thought the king himself makes it to a ship which is then swamped by panicking sailors and sinks and he drowns. End of Ptolemy (31).

Then Caesar returns to Alexandria with his men triumphant and the remaining Egyptian army surrenders, coming towards him dressed as supplicants and offering him their sacred objects in submission and he makes his way through the former ‘enemy lines’ to the part of town his men held and received their congratulations.

Having secured Alexandria and Egypt, Caesar returns to his original aim which was to enforce the will of the recently dead king, Ptolemy XII Auletes. The older son being dead he instals the younger one on the throne to share it with Cleopatra. He leaves legions to enforce this settlement and maintain the new rulers in power (just as Pompey had left Gabinius after he had installed Ptolemy XII Auletes back on the throne) and departs for Syria.

Here’s a summary by modern historian, Robert C. L. Holmes with illustrations, which makes the battle of the causeway a little clearer.

34 to 41: Events in Asia

The narrative now switches to describe what has been going on during the civil war in other key Roman provinces. In Asia (i.e. modern-day Turkey) the king of Armenia appeals to the Roman governor, Domitius Calvinus, because Lesser Armenia and Cappadocia have been overrun by Pharnaces, king of Pontus. [It will be remembered from Plutarch and other sources that Pharnaces was the son of the great Mithridates who was such a thorn in the side of Rome from 88 to 63, when he committed suicide after this son of his, Pharnaces, overthrew him.]

Domitius sends messages to Pharnaces telling him to withdraw and assembles a force from various legions, including ones raised from native soldiers, then sets out for Armenia. He approaches the town of Nicopolis where Pharnaces has made camp. The two sides jockey for position, Pharnaces builds a long defensive trench in front of the town. Domitius has received envoys from Caesar, who is in a parlous condition back in Alexandria and demands reinforcements. But he knows he can’t turn his back on Pharnaces, who will attack him.

So there’s a full-blown battle and the Romans lose. The 36th legion acquit themselves well but the centre and the right flank (the Pontic legions and the entire army of King Deiotarius who had asked the Romans for help in the first place) fold and are annihilated. Domitius survives and withdraws the surviving forces back through Cappadocia to west Asia i.e. back towards the coast.

Pharnaces advances into Pontus, his ancestral kingdom, where he behaves like a tyrant, taking towns, brutally punishing their populations. The narrator singles out his fondness for identifying beautiful young men and having them castrated.

42 to 47: Events in Illyricum

Where was Illyricum? Illyricum was the Roman province which encompassed the east coast of the Adriatic and up into the mountains, sometimes referred to in translations as the Balkans, the territory which, under the emperors, came to be called Dalmatia. The Roman governors of the province consistently supported Caesar, but the natives sided with Pompey. The heavy fighting at Dyrrhachium in 48 was just south of the border of the province. Unlike Greece, Asia or Egypt it is described as a very poor province, with ‘very meagre prospects.

Illyricum in the Roman Empire

Caesar had been proconsul of Illyricum all through the Gallic war and at the end of each fighting season in Gaul had crossed back over the Alps to come and administer this province, so he knew it well.

At the outbreak of the civil war with Pompey Caesar had left it to be run by his quaestor Quintus Cornificius, who had acted wisely and discreetly, slowly taking fortresses built by rebellious natives and pacifying the province. Cornificius captured Marcus Octavius‘s fleet fleeing after the battle of Pharsalus.

Caesar now orders Aulus Gabinius to take newly levied legions and unite with Cornificius, but he arrives in the depths of winter and sustains many reverses, coming off worst when he attempts to storm fortresses in bad weather without food supplies. Gabinius is defeated while withdrawing on Salona, losing 2,000 troops, 38 centurions and four tribunes. He dies soon afterwards of illness.

Caesar had left Publius Vatinius in charge of Brundisium. When Vatinius learns that the Pompeian fleet of Marcus Octavius is raiding up and down the Illyrian coast, he repairs and knocks together a scratch fleet of ships and sails out to engage Octavius. He forces Octavius to abandon his siege of Epidaurus.

Vatinius engages Octavius’s fleet off the island of Tauris. Octavius has the bigger ships and more of them but Vatinius’s men are more fierce for battle. Thus, when the ships ram each other and become entangled it is Vatinius’s forces who storm the enemy ships and fight fiercely, sinking many of Octavius’s ships. Octavius abandons his own ship, swims to a small boat which is swamped by survivors and also sinks then, despite his wounds, to an escort vessel and, as night falls, escapes.

Vatinius rests his men and repairs his ships before sailing on to the island if Issa where he a) takes submission of the townspeople b) learns that Octavius has sailed to Africa, where most of the other Pompeian forces are now regrouping. And so Vatinius returns to Brundisium with his fleet and army intact, having rid Illyricum of its sea-borne attackers and secured it for Cornificius and Caesar.

48 to 64: Events in Further Spain

[Spain was divided into two Roman provinces, Hispania Ulterio and Hispania Citerior, which can be translated into slightly old-fashioned English as Further Spain and Hither Spain.]

This section is more enjoyable than any other part of the book for the simple reason that it is clear and comprehensible. The author gives a lucid, comprehensive and rational explanation of why the governor of Hither Spain, Quintus Cassius Longinus, was deeply hated by both the provincials and his own troops, for his systematic extortion of the former and his cynical bribery of the latter.

When Caesar orders him to bring an army across to Africa, to march through Mauretania to the border of Numidia, like a character in a Plautus play, Cassius is overjoyed because this means more opportunity for bribery, extortion, corruption and loot. He travels to Lusitania to raise more taxes, men and build ships.

He assembles his troops at a camp near Corduba and promises the ones coming with him 100 drachmas each, then returns to Corduba. That same afternoon he was entering the judgement hall when he is set upon by half a dozen Roman conspirators who stab him and his guards.

It’s interesting that they use the same technique as with Caesar i.e. one person buttonholes the victim with a document, a petition, distracting them and manoeuvring them into the optimum kill position, and then the others attack. Also interesting how difficult they found it to kill someone. It took about thirty stabs to kill Caesar, and even though there are half a dozen assassins here, they fail to kill Cassius.

Cassius is rescued by his bodyguard and carried home, most of the assassins flee to safe houses, but L. Laterensis goes to address the native troops and second legion, telling them that their hated leader is dead and they are both overjoyed.

So it comes as a dreadful disappointment to everyone to learn that Cassius has survived and is not that badly hurt. The legions promptly march to Corduba to show their loyalty to their commander, as they know what is good for them.

Cassius has the main assailants interrogated, and they reveal the names of plenty of other conspirators including some of the most senior figures in the province. Cassius has the junior ones executed or tortured but negotiates a ransom from the richer ones. His greed was legendary.

When Cassius hears that Caesar has triumphed over Pompey, he orders a levy of all the richest men in the province, told those he owed money to that he wasn’t going to pay it, extorted more loans, held a levy of knights i.e. leading businessmen to conscript them to the army unless they bought their way out. Then dispatched the legions he was planning to tranship to the embarkation point.

En route he learns that the native legion and the second legion have mutinied chosen Titus Thorius, a native of Italica, as their leader. He sent the quaestor Marcus Marcellus to secure Corduba but then heard that Marcellus had gone over to the mutineers along with some cohorts of the legion kept in Corduba to maintain it.

Thorius marches his veteran legion towards Corduba. They did so in the name of Pompey because they didn’t want the reputation of being simple mutineers. The people of Corduba beg them not to loot and pillage the city. The army realise they don’t need to proclaim their allegiance to Pompey and revert back to loyalty to Caesar (!), acclaim Marcellus their leader and camp near Corduba.

Cassius approaches with his loyal legions. He sends for help to king Bogud in Mauretania and Marcus Lepidus, the pro‑consul of Hither Spain. He lays waste the territory of Corduba. The two armies camp opposite each other by the river Baetis. Marcellus’s troops beg him to engage but he withdraws at which point Cassius sends his superior cavalry to harass the rearguard.

When Marcellus blocks access to the river for his troops, Cassius struck camp and marched to Ulia, a town he believed to be loyal. Marcellus besieges Ulia and Cassius’s camp but before the encirclement is complete Cassius sends out his cavalry to be free to forage.

King Bogud arrives with a legion loyal to Cassius and harasses Marcellus’s fortifications, though without a decisive blow either way.

Lepidus arrives with 35 legionary cohort and enforces a truce. In fact Marcellus immediately defers to his authority and goes over to him. Cassius is more suspicious and only agrees to submit if Marcellus’s fortifications are dismantled. To everyone’s surprise King Bogud attacks part of Marcellus’s defences and only an angry Lepidus’s intervention stops there being a massacre.

Lepidus and Marcellus are now unified and then Trebonius arrives to govern the province as pro-consul. Cassius posts his troops to their winter quarters and hastened to Malaga where he embarked on ship. His enemies say he wanted to avoid the humiliation of having to submit to Lepidus and Marcellus, and also avoid travelling through a province he had thoroughly pillaged and looted.

His ship foundered in bad weather at the mouth of the river Ebro and he was drowned.

65 to 78: Operations in the East leading up to the battle of Zela, August 47 BC

Having marched up from Egypt to Syria, Caesar learned of political unrest in Rome (as usual) but knew he had to secure the East before he returned. By this he meant leaving all the provinces:

organised in such a way that they would be immune from internal disagreements
had accepted a legal constitution
had no fear of aggression from without, either through peace treaties with neighbouring enemies or by having beaten and intimidated them

Syria, Cilicia and Asia would be easy but Bithynia and Pontus were still being tyrannised by Pharnaces.

So Caesar posts Sextus Caesar, his friend and kinsman, to command the legions and govern Syria, and sets off for Cilicia where he calls a conference at Tarsus and secures the peace and security of the province from its tribes and kings.

Then forced marches through Cappadocia to Comana. Here Caesar adjudicates a dispute between Ariobarzanes III (king of Cappadocia from 51 to 42 BC) and his younger brother, Ariarathes, granting the latter the kingdom of Lesser Armenia.

Deiotarius, originally tetrarch of western Galatia, had been rewarded by Pompey for his help against Mithridates with land in eastern Pontus and the title of king. Now he came to Caesar very shrewdly dressed in the clothes of a suppliant and begged forgiveness for siding with Pompey, saying he didn’t have much choice. Caesar is quite hard on him, saying he should have known who would triumph. But forgives him on condition he joins his native legion for the campaign ahead.

Caesar marches to Pontus and assembles his forces which are not large (four legions) but battle hardened. Pharnaces sends embassies of peace truckling favour by pointing out that he had refused to send auxiliaries to Pompey, unlike Deiotarius. The text quotes Caesar’s reply to Pharnaces in which he says they can’t undo the past outrages (the murders and emasculations) but Pharnaces must now:

withdraw from Pontus
release the household slaves of the tax‑gatherers
make all other such restitution as lies in his power to the allies and Roman citizens

Realising Caesar is pressed for time, Pharnaces delays. So Caesar marches to the town of Zela. Pharnaces occupies an old camp of his father on a nearby hill, Caesar camps 5 miles away. The text once again gives a confusing description of how Caesar moved his forces to take advantage of the terrain, especially as the notes point out that nothing in the description correlates to any of the natural features around Zela. Were these descriptions just made up?

Caesar moves up his army to the south side of a valley whose north side Pharnaces occupied and gets them to start building fortifications. If there’s one thing you learn from all these texts it’s that the Roman army spent far more time building camps and fortifications and entrenchments and siege works than actually fighting.

With mad confidence Pharnaces orders his army to descend the steep ravine and begin ascending the other side towards Caesar’s camp. The initial assault throws the Romans into confusion but they form up and start to repel the enemy who, once they are forced backwards down a slope, fall over their own reinforcements, drop their weapons and flee to the other side of the valley where they are now defenceless.

It is a complete victory and Pharnaces flees with a handful of men. Caesar is overjoyed at having such a quick victory in what he feared would be a long drawn out campaign. He made a present to his troops of all the royal plunder. He instructed the Sixth legion to leave for Italy to receive its rewards and honours, sent home the auxiliary troops of Deiotarus, and left two legions in Pontus with Caelius Vinicianus. Then he himself set out on the following day with his cavalry in light order.

78: good administration

The key to success was not just thinking strategically and winning battles. It was about the widespread and consistent good administration of the existing provinces and newly captured territories.

Thus Caesar marches east through Galatia and Bithynia into Asia, holding investigations and giving his rulings on disputes in all those provinces, and assigning due prerogatives to tetrarchs, kings and states. The Mithridates who had brought him such vital help in Egypt he made king of Bosphorus, which had formerly been under control of Pharnaces, and thus creating a buffer state ruled by a friendly king between the Roman provinces of Asia and ‘barbarian and unfriendly kings’ i.e. Pharnaces and the Parthians beyond.

Video

This video clarifies a lot of details which are obscure in the text, particularly about the fighting in Alexandria.

It clarifies that Caesar took refuge in the palace complex and demolished the surrounding walls and buildings in order to create a fortified base which he could hold against repeated attacks, despite sustained fighting in the streets around it. The video explanation is clearer than anything in the text.

Similarly, I found the naval battle which starts in section 10 hard to follow in the text:

In order to take some personal decision as to what he thought ought to be done, Caesar boarded a ship and ordered his whole fleet to follow him. He did not embark any of our troops, since, as he was going somewhat too far afield, he was loath to leave our entrenchments unmanned.

He ordered the entire fleet to follow him In order to take some personal decision as to what he thought ought to be done? Doesn’t make much sense. Taking the fleet off somewhere rather feels as if he has made a decision. At places like this, you strongly feel the narrator was not privy to Caesar’s plans. In The Civil War Caesar generally explains his thinking and strategy in such a lucid way they can easily be converted into bullet points. Not in this text. One more piece of evidence that it was written by someone close to Caesar’s operations, a trusted lieutenant, but not the man himself.

Were the Romans good governors?

The central topic of the Civil War was defeating Pompey. In this text, however, it’s much more about trying to establish good, secure and lasting administrations, starting in Egypt, but ultimately stretching all around the Mediterranean. It’s a simple question but I wonder whether it can be answered: were the Romans good governors and administrators? A little more precisely: did the provinces the Romans governed benefit from their rule?

The arguments against are very evident in these texts being:

the process of being conquered involved mass slaughter, towns obliterated and country ravaged (as vividly depicted in the Gallic Wars)
even when you’d been ‘pacified’ and accepted Roman province status, chances were that one of their civil wars would break out and you’d find your cities and land devastated all over again
even in complete peacetime you might find yourself lumbered with a criminal like Quintus Cassius Longinus as a governor, with absolutely no court of appeal from his extortions

So the downsides are obvious. But what of the benefits? Someone somewhere must have done a definitive study of the simple question.

Roman reviews

Roman writers

The way things are by Lucretius

Nero: the Man Behind the Myth @ the British Museum (2021)

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by Simon on June 15, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, War

Tagged Achillas, Adriatic, African War, Alexandria, Alexandrian War, Ancient history, ancient Rome, ancient world, Ariarathes, Ariobarzanes III, Arsinoe, Asia, assassination, Aulus Gabinius, Aulus Hirtius, Battle of Zela, Bithynia, Brundisium, Caelius Vinicianus, Caesar, Cappadocia, castration, Chersonesus, Cilicia, civil war, Cleopatra, Comana, Corduba, Dalmatia, Deiotarius, Domitius Calvinus, Dyrrhachium, Egypt, Epidaurus, Euphranor, Gabinius, Galatia, Gallic Wars, Ganymedes, Gaul, Hispania Ulterio Hispania Citerior, Illyricum, Italica, Julius Caesar, king Bogud, King Mithridates, king of Bosphorus, king of Pontus, King Ptolemy, Lesser Armenia, Lucius Laterensis, Malaga, Marcus Lepidus, Marcus Marcellus, Marcus Octavius, Mauretania, Nicopolis, Nile Delta, Pelusium, Pergamum, Pharnaces, Pharos, Plutarch, Pompey, Pontus, Ptolemy XII Auletes, Publius Vatinius, Quintus Cassius Longinus, Quintus Cornificius, river Baetis, river Ebro, River Nile, Robert C. L. Holmes, Roman Empire, Roman rule, Salona, Sextus Caesar, Slavery, Spain, Spanish War, Syria, Tarsus, Tauris, The Alexandrian War, the Balkans, Titus Thorius, trireme, Ulia, Vatinius, war, western Galatia

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The Civil War by Julius Caesar – 2

Julius Caesar’s own account of the civil war he fought against Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey) and his successors from 49 to 45 BC is divided into three parts. I have previously summarised parts one and two. This is a summary of the third and final part.

Part 3: The great confrontation (112 sections)

1 to 6: Caesar in Italy – Pompey’s preparations

Caesar returns to Italy where he temporarily takes the title dictator in order to carry out the legal functions of the absent consuls and senate. He oversees elections in which he is elected consul for the next year, 48 BC. Caesar adjudicates legal cases, solves bankruptcy cases, officiates at the Latin religious festivals, then relinquishes the dictatorship and hurries to Brundisium.

Here he is presented with an ongoing shortage of ships. Pompey has had a whole year in which to gather forces in Greece and Asia, which Caesar proceeds to itemise. Thus Pompey holds all the ports along the Adriatic coast and Caesar lists the squadrons and their officers, with Marcus Bibulus in overall command. (This Bibulus had been aedile then consul in the same years as Caesar and had a number of bitter grievances against him.)

7 to 19: Negotiations in Epirus

Caesar manages to ferry some legions over to Palaeste but many of the ships returning to transport more are intercepted by Bibulus and burned, with their crews and captains aboard. The Pompeian Marcus Octavius besieges Salonae and the townspeople resort to desperate measures to break the siege.

Caesar sends a peace envoy to Pompey. Obviously it is carefully crafted for inclusion in this narrative and cannily states that the best time to negotiate is while both sides are equally balanced. Caesar offers to disband his armies in 3 days if Pompey will do the same and both submit to the adjudication of the Senate and people of Rome.

In the meantime Caesar marches to Oricum where the townspeople disobey the Pompeian commander Lucius Torquatus and open the gates to him. He marches on to Apollonia where the people, again, refuse to disobey a) a consul who b) has been accepted by the entire Italian people, so that he commander, Lucius Staberius, is forced to flee. Same happens at Byllis, Amantia and all the towns of Epirus who send envoys promising to obey Caesar.

Pompey is marching his army at top speed to Dyrrachium but is panicking, with troops deserting. Near the town Pompey orders a camp built and makes his senior officers, centurions and men renew their oath of allegiance. Beaten to Dyrrachium, Caesar builds a huge camp nearby and decides to spend the winter under tents.

Caesar’s next cohort of troops to be transported from Brundisium is setting out when the commander receives message that the entire coast is patrolled by Pompey’s navy and turns back. One ship continues, is intercepted, and everyone on board is put to death. That said, Pompey’s navy can’t put into any of the ports which are now controlled by Caesar and so run short of food and drinking water.

A Pompeyan officer named Libo asks to see Caesar and offers a truce. But when he refuses to send envoys on to Pompey Caesar realises he’s playing for time. Bibulus, commander of the Pompeian fleet, contracts illness aboard ship and dies. Caesar hears after the war that when his closest advisers began to discuss peace with Pompey the latter shut them up by asking rhetorically what he could want from a life or reputation granted by Caesar i.e. to live at Caesar’s will? I.e. Pompey would never have listened to Caesar’s peace proposals.

The two armies are camped not far from each other either side of the river Apsus, and the common soldiers arranged a ceasefire. This was escalated into a formal meeting between officers, with the soldiery on both sides wanting peace. But Caesar emphasises it was the Pompeian officers who refused compromise. Caesar’s legate or second-in-command for his entire command in Gaul, Titus Atius Labienus, has gone over Pompey’s side and makes a haughty speech demanding Caesar’s head. After that, no negotiations are possible.

20 to 22: Trouble in Italy

A digression describing the short career of Marcus Caelius Rufus who makes several ill-conceived political initiatives in Rome, before being banned from political life and expelled from the city. Nonetheless he invited back the rabble rouser Titus Annius Milo from exile in Massilia and together they try to foment a kind of slave rebellion in central Italy. But when Milo offered money to a garrison Caesar had put in place in the town of Cosa, they killed him on the spot. End of revolt and digression.

23 to 30: Antony runs the gauntlet

The Pompeian Libo takes a fleet of 50 ships and blockades Brundisium, capturing some military and grain transport ships. Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) sets a trap and captures one of Libo’s ships. Also, after a while, they run short of water, since the entire coast is manned by Caesarians, so Libo abandons the blockade. It is now January 48 BC, one year after Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

Caesar implores reinforcements and eventually Mark Antony and Fufius Calenus sail a fleet of troops across the Adriatic, pass Dyrrachium, where they start to be pursued by Pompeian forces, but by good fortune, make port at Nymphaeum. The Pompeian ships out at sea were hit by a gale and many driven ashore and wrecked. Caesar makes one of many comments about the sheer luck involved in warfare.

Both Pompey and Caesar learn where Antony has landed (with 3 legions of veterans, one of recruits and 800 cavalry) at the same time, strike their camps and go to join/attack him. Pompey gets there first but, as Caesar approaches from behind, realises he risks being caught between two armies and so retreats to Asperagium.

31 to 38: The lieutenants in Macedon

Description of the wretched behaviour of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio as governor of Syria, extorting and mulcting the province, before being summoned by Pompey to Macedonia.

Meanwhile, having linked up with Antony, Caesar sends envoys to nearby parts of Greece to test their loyalty. A rather complicated description of the reception of three separate envoys Caesar sends to different parts of Greece, leading up to a confrontation between Scipio – who force marches his army into central Greece – and the Caesarian Gnaeus Domitius Domitian, with 2 legions and 500 cavalry.

39 to 58: Stalemate at Dyrrachium

Caesar leaves the port of Oricum in the charge of Manius Acilius and marches inland. Pompey’s son Gnaeus storms Oricum with a sophisticated attack, then goes on to Lissus where he burns the thirty transport ships left by Antony. A very effective young admiral, aged only 26 or so.

Caesar marches to Asparagium to confront Pompey, sets camp and next morning brings out his army in battle array to settle the issue. But Pompey doesn’t rise to the bait. Caesar adopts a different strategy and force marches his legions back to Dyrrachium. Pompey builds a camp on a defensible height.

It now becomes clear the war is going to last a long time. Pompey refuses a direct fight and his strong fleet controls the entire coast, preventing Caesar getting supplies or reinforcements from Italy. Caesar decides to surround Pompey’s camp and blockade it. Pompey counters by building a long wall, dotted with forts designed to encompass as much territory as possible. This leads to constant sniping and skirmishing between the sides along these extended lines, which Pompey always wins.

It’s an unusual position. Normally an army besieges another when the other is a) defeated or tired and b) numerically smaller. Here Caesar has fewer forces than Pompey’s which a) had not fought at all b) were numerically superior and c) were better provisioned. Caesar, however, dries up Pompey’s water supplies, leading to great hardship.

Around section 50 there is a gap in the manuscript and when it resumes we are in the middle of a set of firefights in which Pompey appears to have tried to break out of his fortifications, being only with difficulty forced back. One particular Caesarian fort stood alone against a Pompeian legion for four hours and, when it was finally relieved, Caesar generously rewarded and promoted its leading fighters.

Every day Caesar lines up his army offering to fight but Pompey refuses. Caesar sends envoys out to towns further and further afield in Greece to win their loyalty. Caesar sends Aulus Clodius, a mutual friend, to parlay with Scipio, who is now in central Thessaly and in a powerful position, both as Pompey’s father-in-law and as commander of an army in his own right. But after initial talks, on the following days Aulus is excluded from conferences and nothing comes of it.

Caesar’s tactic of surrounding and starving out Pompey begins to work. Horses are going short of provisions, men are going hungry.

59 to 74: Setbacks for Caesar

Pompey takes advantage of the insider knowledge of two Gaulish chieftains who Caesar had promoted, brought with him and trusted, but who had become corrupt, extorting and embezzling money. When Caesar berated them for this they fled Caesar’s camp with money and Gaulish men and went over to Pompey. They now provided Pompey all the information he needed to break through a weak point in Caesar’s fortifications down by the sea, massacring Caesarean cohorts, until Antony arrived and stabilised the situation.

In a second battle, there is a confusing description of an attack on a lesser camp Pompey had partly abandoned which leads at first to success by Caesar, then, when Pompey arrives with reinforcements, to the panic-stricken rout of Caesarean forces trapped between various defensive walls. When the rout is complete, Pompey parades his prisoners and Labienus has them all executed in sight of their comrades. One’s tentative sympathy for Labienus for standing up to Caesar’s illegal behaviour shrivels and disappears.

In a rare moment of reflection, Caesar comments that Pompey’s forces made a very big mistake in attributing this victory to themselves when the cause of the catastrophe had mostly been the panic of Caesar’s own side, who crushed and trapped each other in their panic to escape the constricting fortifications.

The Pompeians boasted they had won a great victory when it had not been a battle at all, had not been fought in an open space, when most of Caesar’s forces had been prevented from coming to the rescue by the tight space. Above all they showed a failure to grasp the fundamental contingency of battle where big events can hinge on tiny accidents.

They did not recollect the common chances of warfare, how often trifling causes, originating in a false suspicion, a sudden alarm, or a religious scruple, have entailed great disasters, whenever a mistake has been made in an army through the incapacity of a general or the fault of a tribune; but just as if their victory were due to their valour and no change of fortune could occur, by reports and dispatches they proceeded to celebrate throughout the world the victory of that day (Book III.72)

In other words, pride before a fall. Hubris.

75 to 81: Caesar moves to Thessaly

After this setback, Caesar assembles his army and makes a big speech to restore morale (we have read scenes like this in the Gallic Wars). Then Caesar that night abandons the whole siege strategy and sets them off in stages marching south inland towards Apollonia. For the next few days Caesar adopts the same tactic, sending the baggage off ahead at midnight, then setting the unencumbered troops off a few hours later.

Caesar summarises the strategies going through both his and Pompey’s minds. He is interested in drawing Pompey away from the coast and his supply lines, but risks getting caught between him and Scipio’s army, so is keen to reach Apollonia as soon as possible to link up with the legions he had assigned to Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus.

Unhappily for Caesar, Domitius had meanwhile struck the camp he’d built near to Scipio’s and gone foraging for food i.e. making it harder for Caesar to hook up with him and combine against Scipio. But, as it happened, he encountered the treacherous Gauls mentioned above. They parleyed in peace and the Gauls boasted about their Famous Victory and that Caesar had turned tail and run. Thus alerted to what Caesar was doing, Domitius sent out scouts, contacted and then linked up with Caesar’s army.

Caesar marches on to Gomphi, the first town in Thessaly whose ruler, Androsthenes, hearing exaggerated rumours of Caesar’s defeat, had defected to Pompey, withdrawing his population into the town and sending messages to Pompey asking for quick help.

Bad idea. Caesar invests the town as soon as he arrives and by the end of the afternoon has stormed its walls and given the town over to his troops to plunder and make an example of. He then hurried on to Metropolis, which had also defected and the townspeople barricaded themselves inside. Caesar presented some survivors from Gomphi who, when they told their story, the Metropolitans opened their gates and threw themselves on Caesar’s mercy, He was very careful to preserve them from harm and so the message was spread around the region that Caesar was merciful and it was alright to submit to him.

Caesar marches on into open countryside where crops are ripening. Since food is a constant worry for an army on the move, he decides to make this the base of operations.

82 to 84: Pompey follows

Pompey arrives nearby, makes camp, addresses his troops, makes Scipio joint leader. Caesar mockingly describes how everyone in Pompey’s camp was now over-confident of victory and how all Pompey’s political hangers-on were already squabbling about who will get which magistracy or priesthood once they returned victorious to Rome, the kind of petty politicking which Cicero describes the letters he wrote from Pompey’s camp (Atticus. XI.6).

It is impossible not to enjoy Caesar’s gloating. He may be a genocidal military dictator but he was shrewd, effective and extremely experienced. Throughout his account he emphasises the role even tiny tremors of fortune can make to outcomes. And so we realise the profound foolhardiness of Pompey’s hangers-on and their bickering and arguing about who shall have which office and who shall confiscate which dead Caesarean’s property back in Rome. They think war is as guaranteed as a bought election, as bribery and suborning in politics, not realising how contingent it can be.

But he who remains most focused and mindful is able to take advantage of those little reversals of fortune. So while Pompey’s entourage politicked, Caesar brought out his forces every day and practised and trained on the plain between the two camps.

85 to 101: The battle of Pharsalus

Caesar does this for several days in a row but Pompey refuses to bring his army out to face him. Eventually Caesar abandons hope of tempting Pompey to an open battle, and was striking camp and had begun actually marching off in search of fresh cropland, when he noticed that Pompey’s army had that morning come out a little further from their ramparts than was customary. He has finally agreed to fight.

Caesar gives a (presumably fictional) account of Pompey’s speech to his advisers, saying they will wrap the battle up by using overwhelming cavalry on Caesar’s exposed right flank. Then Labienus is made to give an over-confident speech, introducing an oath that he will not re-enter the camp unless as victor and making all the other leaders swear it. Reminds me of the ofermōde of Earl Byrhtnoth at the Battle of Maldon a thousand years later. In other words, this is a very literary motif.

Caesar describes his deployment of his forces, then his final speech to his men, reminding them of his repeated attempts to negotiate peace. (Hmm, is this what you would say to an army to fire them up before a battle? Or is it placed here for purely political effect?)

Expecting Pompey to rely on his cavalry and knowing his own is weak, Caesar made the vital decision to post an unusual fourth line of infantry borrowed from each legion behind his own cavalry. And so when Pompey’s cavalry attacked, it at first stunned and moved backwards Caesar’s men. But at the height of the engagement Caesar ordered this fourth line to come out from behind his cavalry and attack Pompey’s cavalry from the side. This confused and panicked Pompey’s cavalry and they took heavy casualties then fled the battlefield to the nearest hill.

This was the decisive moment of the battle. Seeing his cavalry repulsed, Pompey left the battlefield and went to his tent in his camp. This fourth line then massacred Pompey’s slingers and archers who had been left exposed by the flight of the cavalry, then attacked the main block of his infantry from the side and behind. That was enough to break Pompey’s lines and create a rout.

The Caesarians pursued them right up to the walls of their camp, scaled them, opened the gates and rampaged. They discovered the tables of the generals laid with fine wine and food expecting a victory feast.

Meanwhile Pompey removed his general’s insignia, mounted a horse and fled out the back gate. He rode to Larissa, picking up a few senior officers on the way and reached the coast with an entourage of 30, where he went aboard a civilian grain ship, plunged in despair.

A significant number of Pompey’s army escaped to nearby hills. Caesar told his men not to plunder the camp but come with him. He built a wall fencing the Pompeian survivors from the river i.e. water, then waited. In the morning they all came down and surrendered, pleading for their lives. Caesar granted them all clemency, and ordered his men to treat them well, sending the legions with him back to the camp to rest.

Caesar claims that of Pompey’s army about 15,000 fell but 24,000 surrendered. He captured 180 military standards and nine eagles. He describes it as the Battle of Thessaly (the name of the region) though later history came to call it the Battle of Pharsalus (the nearest town).

Caesar cuts away to news of the victory arriving at a) Brundisium, where another Pompeian fleet was blockading the Caesarians and b) at Sicily, where Caesar’s fleet was suffering from an attack of fireships led by Gaius Cassius.

102 to 105: The death of Pompey

Pompey flees by ship through the Greek islands, to Mytilene, to Cilicia, and on to Cyprus. Everywhere he and the lieutenants who followed him went they found the towns and citadels closed against him.

Pompey raises money from tax collectors in Cilicia and sails to Pelusium in the Nile Delta. (Caesar includes none of the details which Plutarch included in his Life of Pompey a hundred years later, not mentioning Pompey’s intention of collecting his wife Cornelia and youngest son Sextus from Mytilene, or the council of advisers he convened to discuss where to go next and which reluctantly settled on Egypt.)

Caesar gives a very schematic account of the conversation among the advisers to young King Ptolemy XIII when they hear of Pompey’s arrival on the coast of Egypt. Caesar bluntly describes Pompey going in a small boat to the Egyptian shore where he was murdered by Achillas and Lucius Septimius. It’s interesting to compare and contrast Caesar’s blunt unornamented account with the more artful and unbearably moving account of Plutarch.

Caesar arrives in ‘Asia’ i.e. the west coast of Turkey, and devotes a half a page to describing the various omens and prophecies of his victory which he discovers had been observed out in the superstitious East.

106 to 112: Caesar at Alexandria

Caesar takes half his troops by ship to Alexandria. He lands and takes it upon himself to adjudicate in the civil war between young Ptolemy and his sister Cleopatra. This had a legitimate basis. Old king Ptolemy Auletes had been deposed by his people and only restored by the money and army raised and sent by Pompey/Rome. Before his death Auletes had written a will dividing the kingdom between his eldest son and daughter and asking the people of Rome to see that it was carried out. Caesar had a copy of this will which had been found at Pompey’s camp.

But while he was debating all this with young Ptolemy Caesar learned that an Egyptians army was approaching Alexandria, led by the same Achillas who murdered Pompey. Caesar is mocking of its make-up of ex-slaves, criminals and Romans gone to seed.

But it leads to serious fighting, as the Egyptian army seizes most of the city, trapping Caesar and his much smaller forces in a particular quarter. The main threat comes in the harbour where the Egyptians attempted to seize the 50 warships which they had sent to help Pompey and which had now returned to base. With these the Egyptians could cut off Caesar’s escape or prevent him being supplied. Caesar manages to lead an attack on these ships and burns them all.

Then he secures the Pharos, the island which controls Alexandria’s harbour and fortifies the part of the city he holds. Ptolemy’s younger daughter, Arsinoe, goes over to the attackers but soon sows dissent and splits its leadership. Meanwhile, the king’s tutor and regent Pothinus continued sending messages of encouragement to Achillas until he discovered by Caesar and executed.

And so ends in mid-struggle Caesar’s account of the Civil War, explaining why the narrative continues without a break into the separate text known as The Alexandrian War.

Thoughts

Obviously the book has an epic feel, overflowing with compelling details about one of the most turbulent and tragic events in classical history. It’s breath-taking in itself to be reading the eye witness accounts of the central protagonist in one of the great events in Western history, as if we could read Napoleon or Hitler’s diaries.

But the real eye-opener is Caesar’s stamina. He came straight from carrying out eight years of relentless warfare in Gaul into a further five years of intense civil war in theatres all around the Mediterranean. Caesar’s ability to manage all this, to get up every morning with full commitment, a ferocious grasp of detail, making the right calls about tactics and strategy, about political manoeuvring, assessing a never-ending stream of opponents and allies, is quite breath-taking. Superhuman stamina and ability. No wonder many contemporaries came to think of him as a god.

The war instinct

There is a certain keenness of spirit and impetuosity implanted by nature in all men which is kindled by the ardour of battle. This feeling it is the duty of commanders not to repress but to foster, nor was it without good reason that the custom was instituted of old that signals should sound in every direction and the whole body of men raise a shout, by which means they thought that the enemy were terrified and their own men stimulated. (III.92)

Video

There are many videos of the Battle of Pharsalus. I found this one clear and thorough.

Roman reviews

Roman writers

The way things are by Lucretius

Nero: the Man Behind the Myth @ the British Museum (2021)

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by Simon on June 13, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Politics, War

Tagged Achillas, Alexandria, Amantia, ancient Egypt, Ancient history, ancient Rome, ancient world, Androsthenes, Apollonia, Arsinoe, Asparagium, Asperagium, Aulus Clodius, battle of Dyrrachium, Battle of Maldon, battle of Pharsalus, Battle of Thessaly, Brundisium. Marcus Bibulus, Byllis, Caesar, Cilicia, civil war, Cleopatra, Cyprus, Dyrrachium, Earl Byrhtnoth, Epirus, Fufius Calenus, Gaius Cassius, Gaius Pompeius, Gallic Wars, Gnaeus Domitius Domitian, Gomphi, Julius Caesar, Libo, Lucius Septimius, Lucius Staberius, Lucius Torquatus, Macedon, Manius Acilius, Marcus Caelius Rufus, Marcus Octavius, Massilia, Mytilene, Nile Delta, Nymphaeum, ofermōde, Oricum, Palaeste, Pelusium, Plutarch, Pompey, Pothinus, Ptolemy, Ptolemy Auletes, Ptolemy XIII, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio, river Apsus, River Rubicon, Roman history, Rome, Salonae, Syria, The Alexandrian War, Thessaly, Titus Annius Milo, Titus Atius Labienus

Posted by Simon on June 13, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/06/13/the-civil-war-julius-caesar-2/

The Civil War by Julius Caesar – 1

Fortune, which has great influence in affairs generally and especially in war, produces by a slight disturbance of balance important changes in human affairs.
(The Civil War Book 3 chapter 68)

I picked up this 1967 Penguin paperback of Julius Caesar’s Civil Wars, translated by Jane Gardner, in the sensible A format size (18 cm by 11 cm) with reassuringly browned paper, in a second hand bookshop for just £2. Though nearly 60 years old it has fewer scuff marks and scratches than a book I recently bought ‘new’ from Amazon, ‘destroyer of books’, whose cover was smeared, scuffed and scratched.

This Penguin volume actually contains four ‘books’:

The Civil War, the longest text at 112 short ‘chapters’ or sections (often no more than paragraphs), making up 130 Penguin pages
The Alexandrian War (78 sections, 42 pages)
The African War (98 sections, 49 pages)
The Spanish War (42 sections, 22 pages)

Only the first of these is nowadays thought to have been written by Caesar. The second is generally attributed to one of Caesar’s lieutenants, Aulus Hirtius, who had written the eighth and final book in The Gallic Wars, the final two by someone who was an eye witness but of lower military rank and a lot lower literary ability than Caesar.

However, the four texts are always included together because, whatever their shortcomings, they are clearly conceived as a set, taking the reader through the entire civil war, from Caesar’s crossing the river Rubicon a little south of Ravenna in January 49 BC, through to the final mopping up of Pompeian forces in 45.

Having read numerous accounts of the civil war, I think the single most important fact (which often doesn’t come over) is that within a few weeks of Caesar entering Italy with his army of Gaul, his opponent, Gnaeus Pompeius, fled Rome and fled Italy. We know from Cicero’s letters on the subject that even at the time, his allies and supporters thought this was a mistake and so it proved to be, handing mainland Italy and the capital over to Caesar almost without a fight (this narrative describes a handful of sieges and confrontations before almost all the towns and cities and army units in Italy simply went over to Caesar’s side).

Pompey’s flight a) handed Rome and Italy over to Caesar and b) meant that the civil war would be fought on foreign soil, eventually in all the provinces Rome ruled, meaning (from west to east) Spain, north Africa, the Province (the south of France featuring the major port of Marseilles), Greece, Egypt and Asia Minor.

Despite Caesar defeating Pompey’s main army at the battle of Pharsalus in central Greece in August 48 and Pompey’s flight to Egypt where he was murdered a month later, in September 48 – nonetheless, forces loyal to Pompey and led by his sons fought on in Spain, Africa and Asia. This explains why the civil war(s) continued for another 3 years and why the main text, The Civil War, which ends with the death of Pompey, needed to be continued with the three subsequent shorter texts, and why each of them focuses on a particular arena of the later stages of the war.

Gardner’s introduction

Jane Gardner gets straight to the point with a solid factual introduction to the fraught background to the outbreak of civil war between Caesar and Pompey in 49 BC. I was struck by the way she goes back 80 years to start her historical background with two key events:

The attempt by Tiberius Gracchus to implement major land reform, which led to his assassination by conservative elements of the Senate in 133 BC
How Gaius Marius got himself appointed consul for five years in a row (104 to 100 BC) to deal with the threat from barbarian tribes who threatened to invade Italy from the north.

1. The killing of Gracchus was the first time the forces competing in the Roman state spilled over into political violence.

2. Marius’s career showed that the system of annually changing magistrates and proconsuls was becoming too limited for Rome’s farflung military needs. (Julius Caesar’s aunt married Marius. His father and brother supported Marius. He grew up in the shadow of Marius’s populares party and narrowly avoided execution when the dictator Sulla, representing the optimates, took power in 82.)

Gardner gives a good brief overview of the events which led to the formation of the Triumvirate which Caesar set up between himself, Pompey and Crassus (60 BC); how he used this to secure his posting as proconsul to Cisalpine Gaul (swiftly expanded to include Transalpine Gaul); how friction in the triumvirate led to its renewal at a big conference at Luca in 56; and how it was undone by two hammerblows:

The death in 54 of Caesar’s daughter, Julia, who he had married to Pompey and acted as a family tie between them.
The death of Crassus during his ill-fated campaign in Parthia 53.

In Gardner’s hands, the centre of the story is Pompey’s inability to make his mind up. The same self-knowledge teetering on reticence which led him to peacefully disband his army on returning from the East in 62 plays out less positively in his inability to really make his mind up how to behave in the growing political crisis of the late 50s.

In Gardner’s account it is Pompey’s lack of decisiveness which creates the crisis of uncertainty and vacillation which Caesar eventually cuts through by crossing the Rubicon and creating a state of civil war. If Pompey had grasped the nettle and agreed with Caesar’s suggestion that they both lay down their commands at the same time and meet to discuss their issues, peace could have been preserved. But Pompey left it to others – senators such as Marcus Marcellus and Lucius Lentulus – to make proposals and counter-proposals which Caesar found unacceptable, until it was too late.

Eventually Caesar felt his position was so threatened that he decided to make a lightning strike from Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy), where he legitimately held command, into Italy proper, where he very much didn’t. The river Rubicon separated these two territories. So crossing the Rubicon with one of his legions was illegal and universally interpreted as an attack on the government and constitution of Rome.

How it was written

During the eight years of his command in Gaul Caesar had got into the habit of writing commentarii or reports on each campaigning season, summarising his military campaigns, in brisk no-nonsense factual accounts. He had these sent to Rome to, in effect, justify his (often dubious) actions. These were probably dictated to secretaries while he was on the move, amid the numerous other correspondence and paperwork he dealt with. There are eight of them, one for each year of his command, and taken together they make up the document known as The Gallic Wars.

Having established the habit and method for doing this, it seems likely Caesar simply continued it to document the new conflict, which continued more or less without a break from his Gallic campaigns.

The Civil War

Caesar’s paranoia: ‘What is the aim of all these preparations but my destruction?’

At the start of his narrative Caesar deals briefly with the politics, with his offers and attempts at negotiations with the Senate, but it quickly falls into another litany of towns besieged and Pompeian forces which come over to his side, very similar in feel to the Gallic Wars.

Admittedly there isn’t the total destruction, massacres, selling into slavery and hostage-giving which characterised the Gallic Wars. But it is a general’s view of things i.e. a long list of territories and cities and towns which need to be taken and then secured by posting loyal officers in them.

A note on the army

A cohort contained 480 men. A legion contained ten cohorts. When you add in officers, engineers and cavalry (120 men plus horses) a legion numbered about 5,000 men.

The text of The Civil War is divided into three ‘books’, volumes or parts, each of which is further sub-divided into short numbered sections, conventionally referred to as ‘chapters’.

Part 1: The struggle begins (87 chapters)

(N.B. These dramatic titles don’t exist in the original text. They are inventions of the editor of the Penguin edition.)

1 to 6: Intransigence at Rome

Haste and confusion characterised every transaction. (5)

Quick summary of the hasty and confused debates in the Senate at the end of 50 BC, with the anti-Caesar faction calling for JC to be sent an ultimatum to lay down his command before negotiations could begin about his future. Caesar wanted to be allowed to stand for the consulship in his physical absence. He wanted to be elected consul because it would give him immunity from all prosecution for a year. Most of the Senate refused this idea because it was unprecedented and unconstitutional. Caesar read this refusal as a deliberate ploy so that when he laid down his command in Gaul and returned to Rome as a private citizen, he would be vulnerable to prosecution by his many enemies for his many dubious actions in Gaul. Senators like Cato had made it crystal clear he would launch a legal action against Caesar the second he set foot in Italy. Hence Caesar’s demand that he be given a consulship / legal immunity. But the legitimists, traditionalists and his actual enemies all rejected this. Impasse.

Caesar also learned that the end of 50 and start of 49 was seeing widespread conscription of soldiers across Italy. Pompey’s mouthpiece in the Senate, Scipio, tells them Pompey is ready to defend the state. When the Senate meets outside the city (because Pompey as a proconsul [of Spain] is not allowed within the city limits) Pompey tells them he has command of 10 legions and is ready to defend the state. The Penguin notes tell us this presumably means the 2 legions he had withdrawn from Caesar ostensibly to be sent to the East but which hadn’t left Italy yet; seven legions loyal to Pompey in Spain; and one under Domitius. (The fact that so many of Pompey’s legions were in Spain explains why Spain would turn out to be a main crucible of the war).

Caesar goes to some lengths to single out the treatment of the tribunes of the plebs, Mark Antony and Gaius Scribonius Curio. When they continued to lobby the Senate in Caesar’s favour, the most vehement senators threatened them with violence, and they were roughly manhandled out of the building, convincing both to disguise themselves and flee north to join Caesar. In constitutional terms they had been deprived of their right of veto and Caesar tries to give his agenda a gloss of respectability by saying one of his war aims is the restoration of the tribunes’ rights.

Caesar describes his demands as moderate and just, and implies that all his enemies had vested interests of one kind or another, not least securing positions of power from which they could extract bribes. He says all the year’s appointments to governorships, proconsulships and so on were hurried and unconstitutional.

7 to 15: Caesar reacts

Caesar assembles his men and pleads his cause. The Senate has:

seduced Pompey and led him astray, although they have always been friends and he has helped Pompey win positions
removed the right of veto from the tribunes, something never done before
declared a state of emergency when there is no emergency
insulted his reputation and achievements as the pacifier of Gaul

So the troops all clamour to right these wrongs and protect his reputation. Caesar moves his legions south to Ariminum just within his province (of Cisalpine Gaul). Here he receives envoys from Pompey who remind him they have been friends and tell him to put his own grievances aside for the good of the state. Caesar adds to his list of grievances:

having his command in Gaul ended 6 months early
the voted will of the people that he stand for the consulship in absentia being overturned
his proposal for a general demobilisation being ignored

(9) Caesar makes counter-proposals:

Pompey should go to his allotted province i.e. Spain
they shall both demobilise their armies
there shall be a general demobilisation throughout Italy
free elections to all magistracies
a face to face meeting with Pompey at which everything can be settled

When these demands are presented to Pompey and the consuls at Capua, Pompey replies that Caesar must return to Gaul, disband his army and only then will Pompey go to Spain. But until he does so, the Senate will continue with a general levy of troops throughout Italy (10).

Caesar rejects these demands as unfair, not least because no date would be set for Pompey’s departure, so he would be left in Italy with his two legions indefinitely. And Pompey’s refusal to meet and talk indicates lack of goodwill. So Caesar places cohorts in the towns surrounding Arretium and the narrative becomes a description of towns seized for his side (Pisarum, Faunum, Ancona).

Iguvium comes over to him. He sets off to take Auximum which is held by Attius Varus and the narrative settles down into a long list of small Italian towns and little known Roman officers who hold them. Caesar is at pains to emphasise that when he took towns he thanked the populations and, more often than not, let the officers who’d opposed him go free, as in the case of Lucius Pupius.

(14) The ease with which towns go over to Caesar causes panic at Rome where the two consuls raid the treasury then travel south to join Pompey at Capua, where he is stationed with his two legions. Arguably, the authorities’ abandonment of Rome meant the war was lost from the start.

Caesar continues marching south towards Asculum which was being held by Lentulus Spinther who, hearing of his approach, flees; Lucilius Hirrus similarly abandons Camerinum. But Lentulus rallies the remaining forces of both and takes them to Corfinium, which was being held by Domitius Ahenobarbus.

16 to 23: The siege of Corfinium

Caesar moves with characteristic speed and comes across Domitius’s forces dismantling a bridge over the river before they’ve finished the job, fights them off, and forces them into the town. Domitius is an effective opponent. He reinforces the town defences, sends a message to Pompey telling him to bring legions to surround Caesar, and addresses his men.

Sulmo, a town 7 miles away, is being held by the senator Quintus Lucretius and Attius but Caesar sends Mark Antony there and the townsfolk gladly open their gates and the troops go over to Caesar, who incorporates them into his own forces and lets Attius go free.

Caesar spends days building siege works. Domitius receives a reply from Pompey who refuses to come to his help, saying it would jeopardise his cause and no-one asked him to go to Corfinium. So Domitius deceitfully tells his troops Pompey is on his way, while making a plan with his closest advisors to secretly flee the town.

Word leaks out and the soldiers decide to abandon such a two-faced leader, arrest Domitius and send messages to Caesar saying they’re prepared to surrender. Caesar is wary of sending his troops into the town that night lest they loot it, so he sends the envoys back and maintains the siege. At dawn Lentulus asks for a private interview, is let out of the town and taken to Caesar who takes the opportunity (in the narrative) to reiterate his demands. He:

does not intend to harm anyone
wants to protect himself from the slanders of his enemies
to restore the expelled tribunes to their rightful position
to reclaim for himself and the Roman people independence from the power of ‘a small clique’

Are these the demands of ‘a revolutionary proconsul who placed his own dignitas above his country’? Discuss.

In the morning Caesar orders all the senators and magistrates hiding in Corfinium to be brought to him. He protects them from the jeers and insults of the soldiers, berates them for giving no thanks for the benefits he’s brought them and then, quite simply, lets them go. He has all the soldiers in the town swear allegiance to him. The magistrates of the town bring him 6 million sesterces but Caesar simply gives it back to Domitius to prove he is not interested in financial gain.

24 to 29: Pompey leaves Italy

Pompey had already abandoned Rome. Now he moves quickly to Canusium and then onto Brundisium, then, as now, the port for ships to Greece.

Caesar follows him, picking up Pompeian forces who abandon their leaders on the way. Caesar discovers the two consuls and most of Pompey’s army have taken ship for Dyrrachium, leaving Pompey inside Brundisium with 20 cohorts.

Caesar immediately starts building a great breakwater to block the port, but continues to send envoys to Pompey requesting a face-to-face meeting. Characteristically, Pompey doesn’t grasp the nettle but hides behind the constitutional nicety that, in the absence of the 2 consuls (who have fled) he is not authorised to negotiate.

In Caesar’s version, it is Pompey’s inability to take responsibility and engage in the kind of face-to-face discussions they had during the triumvirate which condemns Rome to civil war.

Caesar’s patience wears out, he realises he’s never going to get a sensible reply, and finally decides to conduct an all-out war (26).

The ships which had ferried Pompey’s first contingent to Greece now return and Pompey makes plans to embark the second and final cohort of troops. He fills the town with booby traps and a light guard on the city walls while the rest of the troops embark. At the last minute the guards are called and run down to the port, as the ships are setting off. Caesar’s men scale the walls, are helped by the townspeople to evade the traps, and some make it onto the water and capture two of Pompey’s ships which had gone aground on a breakwater.

Strategically, the best thing for Caesar would have been to pursue Pompey as quickly as possible but for the simple fact that Pompey had commandeered all the ships and waiting for new ones to be sent from Sicily or Gaul would lose the advantage. Meanwhile, most of Pompey’s legions were in Spain where a lot of the country’s nobles owed Pompey big debts of gratitude (for making them Roman citizens).

30 to 33: Caesar’s Senate

Accordingly Caesar sends lieutenants to Sardinia and Sicily which the Pompeian governors promptly flee.

Caesar’s noted enemy, Cato the Younger, governor of Sicily, makes a public speech about how Pompey had deceived him and the Senate into believing they were ready for war when they weren’t at all, and then flees to Africa, where the Pompeian Attius Varrus has taken control.

Having made his deployments Caesar goes to Rome and makes a long repetition of his complains directly to the remaining senators (32). He asks them to join him in governing Rome, otherwise he’ll do it by himself. But no-one volunteers to go as emissary to Pompey as they are afraid, and one of the tribunes has been suborned to filibuster events as long as possible, and so Caesar gives it up as a bad job and heads off for Gaul.

34 to 36: Resistance at Massilia

In the Province Caesar learns that Domitius has seized Massilia. Caesar makes a speech to the elders of Massilia who promise neutrality but meanwhile Domitius takes control, requisitioning ships from neighbouring ports. Caesar orders ships to be built in nearby ports then leaves Gaius Trebonius in charge of the siege of Massilia and marches on towards Spain.

37 to 55: The first Spanish campaign – Ilerda

The complex deployment and redeployment of Pompey’s lieutenants to the different provinces of Spain, which leads up to the siege of Ilerda, held by the Pompeian Lucius Afranius.

This is the first full-blown military encounter of the war and is described in Caesar’s usual technical detail, with siegeworks, attack and counter-attack. The river running past the town, the Sicoris, plays a key role, especially when there’s heavy rainfall and it and another river flood and wash away the bridges, leaving the Roman forces trapped between them, cut off from supplies of corn which, in any case, were short at this time of year. When a train of senators, magistrates, cohorts and cavalry arrive to join Caesar, they are prevented by the flooded rivers and attacked by Afranius’s forces.

All this is talked up by Afranius’s supporters and word spreads to Rome that the war is virtually over, which encouraged more to go over to Pompey’s side. But Caesar has boats made in a lightweight style he had seen in Britain, ferries enough of his troops over the flooded river to set up a base and then build a bridge from both sides. His cavalry attack a party out foraging Pompeians then fight off an enemy cavalry attack.

56 to 58: The naval fight at Massilia

The Pompeians under Domitius had built 17 warships while Caesar’s force under Decimus Brutus had hurriedly built far less at an island near Massilia. Domitius attacks. Caesar describes the composition and strengths of the opposing forces. Despite bad odds Caesar’s forces prevail.

59 to 80: Spain – a war of attrition

The situation swiftly changes:

the bridge has allowed Caesar’s force full mobility
five important local tribes switch allegiance to Caesar
and promise to deliver corn, thus solving the crisis in provisions
optimistic rumours that Pompey was marching through north Africa to cross into Spain to reinforce his garrisons prove to be untrue (60)

Afranius and his colleague Petreius worry that they’re going to be cut off and so decide to abandon Ilerda and move deeper into Celtiberia, where the reputation of Pompey will guarantee support. They build a bridge across the Ebro 20 miles away just as the river hemming Caesar in becomes fordable. (To be honest, it is pretty difficult making sense of these complicated and often obscure descriptions of flooded rivers, bridges and fords.)

Caesar’s forces protest that they are hanging around while the enemy gets away, so Caesar selects the weakest to stay behind and guard the camp and the strongest to ford the river, which they just about manage to do. He forms them up and they pursue the fleeing Pompeians. They come up to them within a few miles of mountains, where both sides make camp.

Next day Caesar takes his men by a roundabout route to get to the bridge across the Ebro first. Afranius’s forces at first jeer them for fleeing the battlefield until they slowly realise they are going to be cut off. There follows complex manoeuvring to seize the high ground and the first of the mountain passes. Caesar’s forces massacre some of the Pompeian cavalry. Caesar’s men are all for finishing them off but Caesar thinks he can win without bloodshed and gives himself a speech saying he wants to avoid the deaths of citizens if at all possible. His army mutters and disagrees.

Next day some of the Pompeians are harassed when going to fetch water, so the leaders decide to build a protective rampart from their camp down to the water and go to supervise it. In their absence there is a mutiny with soldiers of all ranks, up to and including Afranius’s own son, fraternising with Caesar’s forces, calling out to friends, asking if they will be well treated if they surrender.

When Afranius hears all this he is ready to fall in with the capitulation. Petreius, on the other hand, stays resolute and with a small cavalry bodyguard descends on the fraternising soldiers, killing as many of Caesar’s as he can. He then tours the army, begging them not to abandon Pompey their leader; has the entire army, by centuries, repledge its oath of allegiance to him; and calls for anyone harbouring Caesarian soldiers to hand them over, before having them publicly executed in front of his soldiers. By terrorising his troops, Afranius restores discipline.

In his own camp Caesar shows his famous clemency, ordering soldiers from the opposing camp to be not punished but protected. And many chose to stay on with his side and Caesar was careful to show them honour. The Pompeians are running out of food and finding it hard to access water so they decide to march back to Ilerda. Caesar harasses their rearguard all the way.

81 to 87: The Pompeians capitulate

Caesar forces the Pompeians to make camp a distance from water, sets up his own camp and starts making siegeworks. On the second day the Pompeians come out to offer battle but a) Caesar doesn’t want unnecessary bloodshed and b) he doesn’t think there’s sufficient space (2 miles) between the camps to enforce a decisive victory. In the event, despite being impressively drawn up, neither side offers battle and at sunset they both withdraw to their camps.

Caesar sends his cavalry ahead to secure the ford over the river Sicoris thus cutting off the Pompeians from their intended route. At which point, starving and thirsty, the Pompeian leaders sue for peace, at a public meeting held in sight of both armies. Caesar makes a long speech in which he recapitulates the wrongs he has endured and the broader historical picture in which he claims that an army has been maintained in Spain (which is at peace and hardly needs it) purely to attack him. He lists other innovations whose sole purpose has been to threaten and attack him at the will of a ‘clique’ in Rome.

In a magnanimous display of clemency Caesar announces his only condition for peace is the disbanding of this Spanish army and everyone can go free. The location of demobilisation is set as the river Var. The Pompeian army cheer, as they had expected punishment of some sort, and clamour to be demobilised sooner rather than later. Caesar promises to supply them corn till they reach the Var and compensate all soldiers for any property lost to his men.

A third of the army was disbanded in the next 2 days, the rest marched under escort to the Var and was disbanded there. Caesar is at pains to convey his consistent humanity and clemency.

Part 2: Securing the West (44 chapters)

1 to 16: The siege of Massilia

Caesar’s lieutenant Gaius Trebonius continues the siege of Massilia. Pompey sends Lucius Nasidius with a fleet of ships to help out. These join forces with Lucius Domitius and Caesar describes a big sea battle which the Caesarean fleet of Decimus Brutus wins.

Caesar gives a very detailed description of the siege works his men build against the wall of Massilia which eventually weaken it. Envoys from the city come out and plead for mercy from Trebonius and beg to wait the return of Caesar. The result is a ceasefire during which both sides slacken off. Until some of the besieged garrison, that is, make a sortie with firebrands and successfully burn down one of the besieging towers. This makes the besiegers return to construction with a vengeance and less inclined to forgiveness.

17 to 21: Spain – surrender of Varro

In Further Spain Pompeian governor Marcus Varro hesitates which side to support until he hears misleading news of Pompeian victories at Ilerda and Massilia, whereupon he comes down fiercely on the Pompeian side, persecuting towns and individuals said to sympathise with Caesar.

Caesar for his part wants to return to Italy but knows he must finish the job in Spain or it will remain a Pompeian stronghold in his rear. In the event the plans of the Pompeian governor Marcus Terentius Varro are overthrown as town after town of Hither Spain declares for Caesar till eventually Varro surrenders to Caesar without a fight all his forces and money.

Caesar holds councils at Corduba and elsewhere, rewarding towns and communities. He puts Quintus Cassius in charge of the province and travels back to Massilia.

22: Massilia capitulates

Two defeats at sea, the undermining of their walls, starvation and an outbreak of pestilence convince the inhabitants of Massilia (called Massiliotes) to surrender. Their governor Lucius Domitius escapes by ship. Caesar accepts Massilia’s submission, leaves two legions to guard it and hastens back to Rome.

23 to 36: Africa – Curio’s campaign

Caesarean Gaius Scribonius Curio’s campaign in Tunisia against the Pompeian Publius Attius Varus. Curio is over-confident of success, only taking 2 of the 4 legions Caesar gave him to Africa. Here he camps opposite Varus’s camp outside Utica and has an initial success when his cavalry routs some of Pompey’s.

Now a lot of Curio’s men came from the Pompeian forces which surrendered at the siege of Corfinium. Varus has one of his men ride up and down opposite Curio’s lines, reminding them of their original oath to Pompey. This gives rise to rumours and dissension within Curio’s army and his advisers are split between forcing an attack on Utica or withdrawing to their original camp, Castra Cornelia, along the coast.

Caesar depicts Curio giving a speech to his advisers saying he’ll take neither course of action, and then addressing his troops at length, saying it was their example of abandoning Pompey which helped turn over Italy to Caesar, how Caesar has won 2 provinces in Spain, plus Massilia, pointing out that they didn’t desert their general Lucius Domitius, it was Lucius Domitius who deserted them. And lastly asking whether he has been a good and fair general to them.

This rouses them so much that on the following day they brave a difficult ravine between the two armies to take Varus’s forces by storm and force him right back, to abandon his camp and take refuge in the town.

37 to 44: Curio’s last stand

Then Curio hears that king Juba of the Numidians is approaching and withdraws his legions from the advanced camp back to Camp Castra, and sends to Sicily for food. The camp would be very well positioned to stand a long siege, but when Curio hears the king himself has been distracted by a tribal war and is only sending his lieutenant, Saburra, with a smaller force he willingly believes it. At nightfall Curio sends all his cavalry to ambush Saburra at the river Bagradas, which they successfully do.

Curio receives the triumphant cavalry back with their prisoners and loot as proof of victory and leads his infantry out in the middle of the night with the plan to force march to attack Saburra while the latter is still in confusion. What he doesn’t know is that King Juba very much is marching his way and that, when he hears of Saburra’s setback, he sends him 2,000 of his best cavalry and continues his infantry march to join him.

With the result that Curio’s force confronts Saburra’s forces in full battle order. Curio is victorious wherever he attacks but a) his on cavalry is slow and tired and b) his men are outnumbered. Reinforcements from the king continually arrive until Curio is surrounded. He sees a nearby hill and orders his men to gather there to make a stand, but enemy cavalry possess it first, at which point Curio’s men give up. His officers encourage him to flee the field but he says he couldn’t face Caesar after losing the army he gave him and so fights on till he’s killed.

Back at Camp Cornelia the rest of Curio’s forces panic and, when the quaestor Marcus Rufus tries to organise an orderly departure by ship, the men panic and swamp the boats, sinking many and discouraging the other ships from coming into harbour. Only a handful of officers and centurions make it aboard and so back to Sicily alive. The rest surrender to Varus.

Next day when King Juba arrives and sees cohorts of survivors in front of Utica he declares them his spoils of war and has them all executed. Varus is too weak and scared to prevent him.

End of Part 2. Part 3 is summarised in the next blog post.

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by Simon on June 10, 2022 • Permalink

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Tagged ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, Ancient history, ancient Rome, Ancona, Ariminum, Arretium, Asculum, Attius Varrus, Attius Varus, Aulus Hirtius, Auximum, battle of Pharsalus, Brundisium, Caesar, Camerinum, Canusium, Capua, Castra Cornelia, Cato, Cato the Younger, Celtiberia, Cicero, Cicero's letters, Cisalpine Gaul, civil war, commentarii, Corduba, Crassus, Decimus Brutus, Domitius Ahenobarbus, Faunum, Fortune, Further Spain, Gaius Marius, Gaius Scribonius Curio, Gaius Trebonius, Gallic Wars, Gaul, Gnaeus Pompeius, Gracchus, history, Hither Spain, Iguvium, Ilerda, Italy, Jane F. Gardner, Jane Gardner, Julia, Julius Caesar, King Juba, Lentulus Spinther, Lucilius Hirrus, Lucius Afranius, Lucius Domitius Gaius Scribonius Curio, Lucius Lentulus, Lucius Nasidius, Lucius Pupius, Marcus Antonius, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Marcus Marcellus, Marcus Porcius Cato, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Varro, Mark Antony, Marseilles, Massilia, naval warfare, Numidia, Numidians, optimates, Parthia, Parthian Empire, Penguin, Petreius, Pisarum, Pompey, populares, Publius Attius Varus, Quintus Cassius, Quintus Lucretius, Ravenna, river Bagradas, river Ebro, River Rubicon, river Sicoris, river Var, Rome, Saburra, Senate, Sicily, siege, Spain, Sulla, Sulmo, the Civil War, the Province, Tiberius Gracchus, Transalpine Gaul, triumvirate, Tunisia, Utica, war, warfare

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The Gallic War by Julius Caesar – 3

It is nearly always invisible dangers which are most terrifying. (VII.84)

This second half of the Gallic Wars is much more exciting than the first. In the previous four books the Romans steamrollered over everyone they encountered in a rather monotonous way. Here they experience the catastrophic loss of an entire legion and then the fierce siege of Quintus Cicero’s camp, i.e. for the first time you feel the contingency and risk involved in the entire project. And both events are carefully crafted to feature dramatic episodes of a kind not found in the first four.

Book 5: The second rebellion

The book title was supplied by the editors of the Penguin edition and refers to the revolt of the Belgic tribes.

1 to 8: Illyricum and Gaulish rebels

At the end of each campaigning season in Gaul, Caesar spends the winter in Cisalpine Gaul attending to administration. He also visits the third province he’s in charge of, Illyricum. Here he stamped on the Pirustrae tribe who had allegedly been raiding over the border into Roman territory. Representatives of the tribe met him to tell him it wasn’t them, and delivered hostages as he demanded.

By this point we’re getting used to certain things.

This is a world made up of scores and scores of tribes who co-exist uneasily, continually liable to be invaded or go invading themselves.
Raiding other tribes’ territories seems to be a common occurrence so presumably is a standard way of making a living, acquiring land or loot.
Caesar has a standard methodology. Where possible, meet and threaten representatives of the erring tribe. If they persist in troubling the peace, attack and defeat them. Either way, you insist on them sending hostages to be kept as security against good behaviour.

This handful of options are repeated endlessly. In the spring Caesar returns to Gaul where he has to sort out the Treveri, a tribe living close to the Rhine whose leaders have failed to come to the annual conference of Gallic tribes. Turns out two rivals are vying for leadership, Caesar supports Cingetorix.

He rides on to Portus Itius, from where the invasion is to be launched. Tellingly, he takes leaders of most of the Gaulish tribes with him. The most dangerous of these is Dumnorix, ambitious leader of the Aedui. When Caesar insists he accompany him to Britain, Dumnorix begins spreading rumours to the other chiefs that they’ll all be killed in Britain. The sailing is delayed 4 weeks by a contrary wind, towards the end of which Dumnorix left the damp with some Aeduin cavalry. Caesar immediately delayed the sailing and sent troops to recapture Dumnorix, buy force if necessary. Dumnorix did indeed put up a fight, drew his sword and told his followers to protect him. So the Roman cavalry killed him. End of disruptive influence.

9 to 25: Second expedition to Britain

Caesar had ordered his troops over the winter to build a massive fleet eventually consisting of 600 troopships and 28 warships. He sets sail with five legions (about 25,000 soldiers) and 2,000 cavalry. Including private ships they hired, the Romans appeared over the horizon with 800 ships, an enormous force. No wonder the defending Britons decided to retire to higher ground.

They disembarked without event, set up a camp, then Caesar marched the majority 12 miles or so inland till they came to a Briton camp. The Seventh Legion stormed it and forced the Britons to flee but Caesar brought them back to work on the camp.

They set out again to confront the Britons but were informed of a large storms and when he returned Caesar saw it had damaged lots of boats. he drew them further up on the beach, ordered repairs made, sent orders to Titus Labienus back in Gaul to start building more.

He gives an overview of the British which is a bit random. He includes the plausible notion that the coastal areas have been settled by incomers from the continent with trivia such as, the natives think it wrong to eat of hare, fowl, and goose although it’s alright to keep for pastime or pleasure. He also makes the wildly inaccurate claim that the climate is more temperate than in Gaul, the cold seasons more moderate. I don’t think so.

He gives a wildly inaccurate description of the geography of Britain, making it out to be a huge triangular island off the west coast of France extending down to opposite Spain. It’s a great mystery how the Romans managed to conquer anywhere without decent maps.

He mentions that the British paint themselves with woad so have blue bodies. But then goes on to say they share wives between groups of ten or 12 men. This is the kind of wildly improbable legend that disfigures to much of the ostensibly ‘factual’ writing of the ancient world.

Back to the present, he describes a lightning British attack on the camp which takes them by surprise and causes casualties. The British fight well, making use of chariots and loose formations which replace each other ad lib.

Next day he sends legions foraging but once again the Britons attack in numbers. It’s hard fought but this time the legions turn them and chase. The Britons scatter and never again attack in such a unified way.

The Britons had united under the leadership of one chieftain, Cassivellaunus. He withdraws his forces north of the Thames which the Romans traverse and continue fighting, with Cassivellaunus hiding his chariots in the woods, till opportunities present for raids.

Envoys arrive from the Trinovantes. Their young leader Mandubracius had already crossed the Channel to seek Caesar’s protection after his father was killed by Cassivellaunus. Caesar demands from Mandubracius hostages and corn, but when these are brought, lets him go.

When other tribes see how fairly Mandubracius was treated, they send envoys seeking Caesar’s protection, being the Cenimagni, the Segontiaci, the Ancalites, the Bibroci and the Cassi. He learns that Cassivellaunus has retreated to famous stronghold built in a good defensive position. Caesar lays siege to it and storms it from its weakest side. Meanwhile Cassivellaunus had sent orders to four allied tribes to attack the Roman camp in Kent, but the Romans repel the attack, kill many attackers and capture a tribal leader.

Summer is nearly over and Caesar decides to return to Gaul. So while he was in the ascendent and the Britons demoralised, he demanded hostages and set an annual tribute for Cassivellaunus to pay Rome. And not to attack the British tribes which had allied with Rome. Then he marches the legions to the coast and into the ships and so back to Gaul.

Given the size of the invasion fleet (800 ships!) which indicated that it was a serious attempt to permanently conquer at least the southern part of Briton, you can’t help concluding the invasion – both the invasions – were a failure.

26 to 37: Revolt of Belgic tribes and massacre of the 7th Legion

Caesar distributes his legions and generals with various tribes. The Eburonians rebel and attack a Roman camp. Ambiorix tells the Romans that a Gaul-wide agreement has been made to launch a concerted attack on all the Roman forces and moreover a group of German mercenaries has crossed the Rhine. So he warns them to leave their camp and promises them safe passage through his territory.

The Romans are surprised but it makes sense that the Eburonians wouldn’t rebel on their own. So, what to do? Caesar gives a dramatic set piece debate among the two commanders, Lucius Aurunculeius Cotta who says stay put, and Quintus Titurius Sabinus who trusts Ambiorix and recommends that they leave (28 to 29).

Sabinus wins the argument and the legionaries are told to pack their most important belongings and set off. Catastrophe ensues. The Gauls wait till the legion has entered a deep narrow defile then bottles them up at either end and starts to massacre them. At one point Ambiorix asks the two Roman generals to a meeting. Cotta refuses to go but Sabinus leaves the fight to climb a hill and approach Ambiorix. He and his centurions are ordered to lay down their weapons, which they do. But as they approach Ambiorix they are surrounded and then killed. The Gauls raise a shout and fall on the remaining Romans with renewed fury. Cotta and most of the force are killed. The remnant make it back to the camp where, that night, seeing they are surrounded, they all commit suicide. A handful of survivors make it to Titus Atius Labienus’s camp to tell the story.

It is thought that some 6,000 legionaries died in this colossal blunder. The massacre happened at Atuatuca in modern Belgium.

38 to 58: Siege of Quintus Cicero

Emboldened, Ambiorix rallies allied Gaulish tribes, and led a ‘huge mass’ of the Eburones, the Nervii, the Aduatuci and their allies and dependents against the camp of Quintus Tullius Cicero. This was somewhere on the river Sambre and about 80 miles from the camp Caesar had made at Amiens. The Gauls made a surprise attack as the legionaries (as so often) were out gathering firewood etc, but they fought a fighting retreat back to the camp. This the Gauls surrounded and invested. They had with them defectors and Roman prisoners who showed them how to build the kind of siege towers and earthworks the Romans used, so these were built and turned against their inventors.

The Gauls called a parley and offered Cicero the same deal they’d offered Sabinus i.e. to lay down their arms and walk away in peace. But Cicero is not as foolish as Sabinus and makes a defiant reply, telling the Gauls that if they lay down their arms he will send to Caesar who will judge them for their rebellion. And so the siege continues. On the seventh day a fierce gale blows up and the Gauls shoot flaming arrows into the camp which burn down a lot of the huts.

Cicero sends a series of messengers to try and get through to Caesar, but all of them are caught and some of them tortured in view of the camp. Eventually a native Gaul makes it through the blockade and to Caesar’s camp, to whom the news of Cicero’s siege comes as a shock. He immediately sends a message to Marcus Licinius Crassus at his camp 24 miles away telling him to march to meet him. Same to Gaius Fabius and Labienus. Labienus writes back that the entire force of the Treveri were upon him and so, on balance, it was too risky for him to leave his camp. Caesar approves this decision and sets off with just two legions to raise the siege on Cicero’s camp.

By a series of forced marches Caesar quickly reaches Cicero’s camp and sends word through a native messenger that he is near. The Gauls lift the siege and turn their forces to face Caesar, some 60,000 warriors (49). Caesar has 7,000 men (49). With the enemy only 3 or so miles away Caesar orders the building of a camp, only smaller than usual, and instructs the soldiers to run around and given an air of panic and fear. This lures the Gauls out into the open and then up to this camp which they start besieging. But they had barely begun engaging when Caesar ordered his infantry to flood out by side gates and the cavalry to sally out and attack the flanks. Taken by surprise the Gauls fled and the Romans were able to cut them down.

Then he marches to relieve Cicero. He is astonished to see the size and number of siege engines the Gauls had built and then to discover that almost all the defenders had been wounded and fought bravely. He publicly congratulates Cicero and all his men, carefully speaking to individual centurions and tribunes to thank them. He addresses the disaster of the massacred legion and assures them it was down to Sabinus’s error, unlike the resolute leadership of their own Cicero.

Caesar’s victory goes some way to rallying the Romans and, more importantly, their Gaulish allies. But nonetheless the tribes are in a ferment, all sending each other messages discussing alliances and attacks. Caesar realises he must winter in Gaul to keep an eye on the situation. Caesar calls meetings with the heads of various tribes, partly by threats, partly by promises, keeps them peaceful. The Aedui and the Remi remain the staunchest allies.

But the Senones try to murder their king, Cavarinus, who had been friendly to the Romans. Indutiomarus leader of the Treveri is particularly rebellious. He sends messages to the German tribes across the Rhine enticing them to war with the Romans, but none sign up, replying that they’ve learned their lesson.

In Gaul Indutiomarus is more successful in recruiting a large force from miscellaneous tribes, attracting to his standard exiles and criminals, training them, procuring horses and so on. Once he feels strong enough he calls an armed convention of the Gaulish tribes at which he a) outlaws Cingetorix, his son-in‑law and rival for leadership of the Treveri; and b) declares his intention to rally the Senones, the Carnutes and several other tribes, to march through the lands of the Remi and laying them waste, before going on to attack the camp of Labienus.

Indutiomarus with his massed forces approaches and invests Labienus’ camp. The latter feigns timidity and reluctance, all the while awaiting his opportunity. He recruits cavalry from nearby friendly tribes and keeps them all hidden in the camp, while Indutiomarus and his men ride up to the walls, yell and jeer and throw spears and abuse the Romans. At the end of a day like this, the Gauls are turning to ride away, with a false sense of security, when suddenly from two gates Labienus launched forth all his cavalry. Anticipating the enemy would scatter in confusion, Labienus carefully instructed his men to resist attacking anyone else but all of them to find and kill Indutiomarus. He put a big price on his head and sure enough some of his soldiers intercepted Indutiomarus at the ford of a river, killed him, cut off his head and brought it back to Labienus.

When they learned this, all his allies among the Eburones and Nervii flee, talk of rebellion is dowsed down and that winter found Gaul quiet.

Book 6: (53 BC)

1 to 8: Further revolt in Gaul

Caesar tasks three generals with raising new recruits and asks Pompey to send him the legion he recently raised in north Italy. He hears news of northern tribes conspiring to rebel and so makes a lightning attack on the Nervii, capturing cattle, prisoners and ravaging the countryside. When he convokes the annual conference of Gaulish leaders, the Senones, Carnuti and Senones refuse to attend, indicating their hostility. Caesar marches quickly on the Senones forcing their leader, Accio, to back down and hand over hostages.

Then he marches into the country of the Menapii in the far north, burning farms and villages and taking cattle and prisoners till their leaders were forced to sue for peace and hand over hostages in the usual way.

Meanwhile the Treveri, led by relatives of Indutiomarus, had gathered a large force of infantry and cavalry to attack Labienus. Labienus feigned fear and then pretended to leave the camp, luring the Treveri across the river onto flat ground this side. Once they were over he inspired his soldiers to turn and fight them, trapped by the river. Much killing. The Treveri submitted and the Germans they’d invited to come join them decided to stay on the other side of the Rhine.

9 to 10: Caesar crosses the Rhine, retreat of the Suebi

Another Rhine crossing:

to punish the Germans who had sent the Treveri reinforcements
to prevent Ambiorix finding asylum there

The Ubii swear it wasn’t them and he spares them. Investigation suggests it was the Suebi. The Suebi gather their men at a stronghold and await. Caesar’s men quickly build another bridge and he crosses it.

11 to 20: Description of the Gauls

Digression on the nature of Gaulish society. How the advent of the Romans reordered things to bring the Aedui and Remi into prominence. The Gauls fought every year among themselves. The Druids practised human sacrifice, sometimes in wickerwork giants which they set on fire (16).

When the father of a house, who is of distinguished birth, has died, his relatives assemble, and if there be anything suspicious about his death they make inquisition of his wives as they would of slaves, and if discovery is made they put them to death with fire and all manner of excruciating tortures.

Their funerals, considering the civilisation of Gaul, are magnificent and expensive. They cast into the fire everything, even living creatures, which they believe to have been dear to the departed during life, and but a short time before the present age, only a generation since, slaves and dependents known to have been beloved by their lords used to be burnt with them at the conclusion of the funeral formalities. (VI.19)

21 to 28: Description of the Germans

More primitive. Fewer gods, they only worship things they can see like sun, moon and fire. Sex in young men is frowned upon for stunting their growth. Land is redistributed each year to stop them becoming to land-bound and also to enforce a sort of equality. Obsession with war. When a chief proclaims a war anyone who resiles is shunned. They lay waste the land around each tribe.

The Gauls used to be more warlike than the Germans and at points crossed the Rhine and conquered. But being closer to Roman territory they’ve got used to trading and fine products unlike the Germans who remain more isolated and warlike.

He gives one of those characteristically ludicrous descriptions of the natural world, imputing to the great forest of Hyrcania a massive extent (true enough) and a number of fantastical animals.

The Penguin editor suggests that this long digression about Gauls and Germans was placed her to distract from the fact that Caesar’s second incursion across the Rhine, like the first one, achieved little tangible result. When the Germans retreat into the forest, Caesar doesn’t have the provisions to follow them and so, er, retreats back over the bridge, destroying the German end and placing a watchtower and guards on the Gaulish side.

29 to 44: Caesar returns to Gaul

Right up in the north, against the Rhine, is the territory of the Eburones led by Ambiorix. Caesar marches against them, sending ahead Gaius Volcacius Tullus with the cavalry. These go very fast and surprise Ambiorix off his guard with only a few men. However these hold off the Romans while Ambiorix saddles up and flees into the forest. He sends out messages telling every man for himself and many flee and hide.

The Segni and Condrusi come to Caesar and plead that not all Germans in Gaul are conspiring. They aren’t and give hostages and make peace.

Caesar makes his base at Atuatuca, then divides his forces in three and takes his force to ravage the land of the Eburones. Germans across the Rhine hear that there’s a free-for-all and cross the river 30 miles downstream of Caesar’s base, to join in. But prisoners tell them the Romans base is at Atuatuca, full of loot and poorly defended.

Cicero had been left in Atuatuca and initially kept the men penned up in case of attack. But after a week the frustrated men need to get out and the troops need corn so Cicero lets a detachment go collect some, and another detachment take out the animals for exercise. Inevitably it’s at this moment that the Germans appear, mounting a fierce attack, causing chaos. While a fierce fight goes on at the gates of the camp, the detachments sent to fetch food – raw recruits and servants – fell into a panic. Experienced centurions helped them form and wedge shape and make it back to the camp, but another detachment initially took to a nearby hill, then changed its mind and came back down into the flatlands where it was destroyed.

Failing to break in the Germans break off the engagement and ride back to the Rhine. Hysteria grips the Roman camp and rumours spread that Caesar and the other legions have been wiped out, until Caesar himself returns and restores order.

The Penguin edition notes that Cicero clearly deserved a bollocking but Caesar treats him very gently, listing all the extenuating circumstances he can think of. This is because his brother, the orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, back in Rome, is still a political force who Caesar needs to keep onside.

This is reminiscent of the panic at Vesontio back in I.39. Caesar supervises widespread burning and ravaging of the country, with the deliberate intention of starving the inhabitants. An enquiry into the rebellion of the Senones and Carnutes concludes that it was instigated by Accio, who is executed in the traditional Roman manner i.e. scourged and hanged.

Penguin point out that by holding courts, judging and executing leaders like this Caesar was behaving like the governor of an accredited Roman province which Gaul very much was not. It was arrogant (and illegal) behaviour like this which raised so much opposition back in Rome.

Book 7: The rebellion of Vercingetorix (52 BC)

By far the longest book.

1 to 7: General conspiracy of the Gauls — Vercingetorix chosen as leader

The murder of Publius Clodius in January 52 BC led to increased political turbulence in Rome. The Gauls, hearing of this, took advantage to conspire to overthrow the invader and regain their liberty. The Carnutes lead the rebellion and sack the town of Cenabum, killing the knight Gaius Fufius Cita, in charge of managing trade.

This inspires the leader of the Arverni, far away in the south of free Gaul, abutting on the Roman Province, one Vercingetorix. Background to Vercingetorix, namely his father was at one point premier chieftain of all Gaul but was executed for seeking to be king. When Vercingetorix proclaims his ambition to kick out the Romans, his uncle and other chiefs expel him from their capital, Gergovia, but Vercingetorix takes to the road recruiting followers and building up a following. Eventually he returns to Gergovia, takes over his tribe and sends out messages for a major, allied rebellion. He enforces ferocious discipline on his recruits:

compelling waverers by severity of punishment. Indeed for the commission of a greater offence he put to death with fire and all manner of tortures; for a lesser case he sent a man home with his ears cut off or one eye gouged out, to point the moral to the rest and terrify others by the severity of the penalty.

In Italy Caesar hears of numerous tribes forming alliances constellated around Vercingetorix’s leadership. Vercingetorix moves his forces into the territory of the Bituriges.

8 to 14: Caesar moves suddenly against the Arverni

But Caesar surprises Vercingetorix by clearing the snow from a pass through the Cevennes and approaching him from an unexpected direction. He leaves Brutus in charge of his camp and makes a forced march to Vienne. He picks up two legions and marches in through the territory of the Aedui into that of the Lingones, where two legions were wintering. Hearing all this Vercingetorix returns to the country of the Bituriges, and from there heads to assault Gorgobina, a stronghold of the Boii.

This is the longest book of the 8 and is all like this, two leaders criss-crossing ancient Gaul, doing deals with, or being double crossed by, numerous tribes, sending out legions or detachments or squads of cavalry under lieutenants. The names of tribes and locations Caesar passes through, allies with or fights gets very confusing. In brief: Caesar takes three Gaulish towns, Vellaunodunum, Cenabum and Noviodunum.

15 to 31: Siege, defence, and capture of Avaricum

Vercingetorix had suffered 3 defeats in a row so holds a conference of his allies and persuades them to adopt a scorched earth strategy, withdrawing before the Romans and destroying all towns, villages, fields and crops in their paths, with a view to starving them. But the Bituriges went down on their knees and begged him not to burn Avaricum, their fairest town.

So Vercingetorix relents, but Caesar besieges it, for 25 days building an elaborate rampart wall and two huge siege towers. When the population of the town tries to sneak out one night, Caesar takes it, puts it to flame and massacres the 40,000 inhabitants.

Caesar adjudicates leadership contest between rival leaders of the Aedui. But the one he chooses betrays him, a week later telling his people that the Romans have massacred their army, so they have no choice but to go join Vercingetorix and fight for freedom.

34 to 53: Siege of Gergovia

The chief oppidum (fortified town) of the Arverni.— abandoned, after severe repulse. Impulsiveness of the troops who do not hear the recall, continue up the hill to storm the stronghold but are repulsed when the enemy muster with overwhelming numbers. — 46 centurions 700 men

This was the one and only military defeat Caesar suffered at the hands of the Gauls in 8 years. Caesar gives speech reprimanding men and insisting on discipline and then withdraws from Gergovia, marching back along then crossing the river Allier.

54 to 57: Caesar moves against the Aedui.

58 to 62: Labienus, successful against the Parisii, joins him.

63 to 74: General revolt of the Gauls under Vercingetorix.

They attack Caesar, but are defeated, not least because of Caesar’s German cavalry, and retire to Alesia, a town of the Mandubii. Caesar leaves two legions to guard his baggage and swiftly pursues Vercingetorix, killing 3,000 of his rearguard. Three Aeduin traitors are brought to Caesar.

68 to 89: The siege of Alesia

The Gauls retreat inside this stronghold. Caesar orders his troops to construct massive siege-works eleven miles in length, featuring 11 camps and 23 forts. After a confused fight between the opposing cavalries, Vercingetorix adopts the following strategy: he orders his cavalry to leave in the dead of night from a gate which isn’t yet covered by the Roman siegeworks, and to ride to their respective tribes and to raise all men of military age and bring them back, all in the name of a Final Battle which will achieve National Liberation. Meanwhile, all grain is confiscated and Vercingetorix adopts a daily ration for his 80,000 men, which should last a month or so of siege, until the reinforcements from the tribes arrive.

Details of Caesar’s astonishingly complex and thorough siegeworks which face both in and out.

Schematic side view of the Roman siege works at Alesia, 52 BC

The Gauls hold a national convention at which the tribes allot armed forces to send to Alesia, with various factions resiling and bickering. Eventually an astonishing force of 260,000 sets off, but by this stage Alesia’s food supplies have run out.

Caesar describes a meeting of the leaders inside Alesia and gives a speech – presumably entirely fictional – to Critognatus, a noble Avernian who, after a long prologue, recommends cannibalism (77)! It is also notable as belonging to that genre of speeches which Roman authors attributed to their enemies, in which the enemy eloquently describes the crushing servitude and slavery imposed by the Romans.

The weak and old and wives and children are expelled from Alesia and trek over to the Romans to beg them for food. But the Romans barely have enough to feed themselves and refuse the refugees food or permission to pass. So they are caught in no man’s land to starve.

The Gaulish hoard arrives, much to the joy of the besieged who throng the barricades to watch the battle. Caesar places all his infantry around the 11 mile siegeworks then sends his cavalry against the Gaulish cavalry. The Romans suffer casualties before an attack by German cavalry breaks the Gauls and chases them back to their main camp.

A day later a co-ordinated attack from the relieving force triggers a sortie by the besieged and the Romans find themselves hard pressed. But they are defeated by the Romans firing from their strong defences, and fall into the complex web of trenches, booby traps filled with spiked poles and so on. They are forced to withdraw while the besieged are still trying to fill in the first trench of the inner siegeworks, so the latter retreat back into the town, too.

The Gauls then mount an attack on the one Roman camp which isn’t integrated into their defensive circuit, while the besieged again sally forth. (The complexity of the siegeworks and the peril and anxiety of the repeated attacks remind me of the atmosphere at another famous French siege, Dien Bien Phu in French Indo-China, March to May 1954.)

Caesar sends Labienus with reinforcements to the hilltop camp, sends Brutus with reinforcements to the strongest point of the sallying army, then leads reinforcements in person. The forces attacking the hilltop hesitate, then Labienus sallies forth with the cohorts he had picked up. Caught between these cohorts and Caesar’s cavalry, the Gauls panic, break ranks and are slaughtered.

Sedulius, commander and chief of the Lemovices, was killed; Vercassivellaunus the Arvernian was captured alive in the rout; seventy-four war‑standards were brought in to Caesar; of the vast host few returned safe to camp.

Vercingetorix conceded defeat to the tribal leaders inside Alesia. Kill him or surrender him alive, as they wish. The leaders go under flag of truce to Caesar, who sits in front of his fortifications. Vercingetorix is handed over, all the chiefs lay down their arms. Caesar puts the Aeduin and Arvernian prisoners to one side to use as bargaining chips with their tribes, then distributes all the captures Gauls to his army as loot, one Gaul to one Roman.

(I think what this means is each Roman soldier then gets his prisoner to contact his family and demands a ransom for their safe return. So equivalent to cash.)

Caesar then receives the submission of all the tribes, and carefully allots legions and commanders in the territories of the main tribes for the winter. When news of this comprehensive victory reaches Rome, a public thanksgiving of twenty days was granted.

Book 8

This final book was not written by Caesar but by his lieutenant Aulus Hirtius. He was a legate of Caesar’s army of Gaul from 58, and crossed the Rubicon with him in January 49. He fought for Caesar during the civil war, and was appointed governor of Transalpine Gaul in 45. In other words a senior figure.

Preface

Hirtius addresses his friend Lucius Cornelius Balbus, another friend of Caesar’s, serving under him as chief engineer (praefectus fabrum) in Gaul. Balbus was said to have attended the very select dinner Caesar hosted, along with Sallust, Hirtius, Oppius and Sulpicus Rufus on the evening of the day when he crossed the Rubicon.

He explains to Balbus that he is continuing the Commentaries because they don’t link up with Caesar’s own account of the Civil; War. He says he has finished the third of the latter books, set in Alexandria, and has now set to filling the blank between book 7 and the outbreak of civil war by supplying a book 8. But it has been hard work to match Caesar’s clear elegant style and also the speed and alacrity with which he wrote.

1 to 48: (51 BC) End of the revolt in Gaul

Winter of 52 to 51 Caesar hears that the Gauls are plotting again. Alesia proves they cannot defeat the Romans when the latter’s forces are united, but might be able to pick off the legions scattered around the country in different tribal regions.

At the end of December Caesar set out on a lightning march and caught the Bituriges in the fields (it’s not actually likely they would be tilling their fields in the depths of winter, is it? Is this a stock literary convention of this genre?) Anyway, Caesar captures thousands but then lets them go and, when they see him being similarly merciful to nearby allied tribes, the Bitiruges decide to submit and give hostages.

Carnutes dispersed, Bellovaci defeated. Dumnacus besieges Lemonum, but without success. The Armoric states subdued. Drappes captured. Uxellodunum besieged and taken by Caesar. Exemplary punishment, the captured have their right hands chopped off. Labienus’ successful operations against the Treveri. Commius subdued.

49 to 55: (50 BC) Caesar and the Senate

Caesar’s triumphal reception by cities and colonies. He returns to the army in Gaul. A description of his opponents in the Senate. Caesar returns to Italy.

Thoughts

Political consequences

1. Caesar’s Gallic Wars were fought to a) clear his debts b) bring him glory and political power.

2. But in doing so he went far beyond his brief as proconsul – dealing with the leaders of free Gaul as if he was governor of a conquered province, invading Britain (twice) and crossing the Rhine, far exceeding his authority. This prompted growing criticism in Rome throughout his eight-year command. And it was this which created the mounting political crisis about whether he would ever be prepared to lay down his command and return to Rome as a normal citizen – the ultimate result being that he was too scared to do so and, instead, crossed the Rubicon into Italy with his army thus triggering five years or ruinous civil war

The war itself

1. Interesting to learn how universal the exchange of hostages was – the standard procedure to ensure peace, not only with the Romans but among the Gaulish tribes themselves.

2. The relentless Roman victories of the first four books get a bit boring. Book 5 is far more dramatic and exciting, when the massacre of Sabinus’ legion and the siege of Quintus Cicero for the first time introduce a real sense of risk and uncertainty and pave the way for the epic account of the struggle against Vercingetorix in book 7.

3. The invasion of England cost a huge amount of time and money and resources and, in the end, seems completely futile. He took away hostages from southern tribes but, presumably that lapsed when Caesar returned to Rome a few years later. Nowhere was settled, no bases or camps, no trading. Seems like an expensive folly.

Anti-imperialism

One of the interesting things about the text is the way it contains its own anti-argument. Caesar’s entire account takes it for granted that rule by Rome is best for the Gauls. And yet fairly regularly he puts into the mouths of Gaulish leaders as direct speech, or attributes to them in indirect description, the wish to be free men in their own land, living under their own laws.

It’s not an unreasonable wish. And every time you read it, you think, ‘Just what right did Caesar think he had to ravage, burn, pillage, and endlessly fight all these peoples?’ Maybe he thought he was bringing ‘peace’ to a territory plagued by endless internecine violence but it’s hard to see how the endless campaigning and fighting and burning and selling into slavery which the Romans brought was an improvement. It consistently feels worse.

Slavery

Interesting when one of the chiefs, Ambiorix, complains that hostages given by his family were being treated ‘like slaves’ and put in chains (V.27). And, of Gaul in general:

Throughout Gaul there are two classes of persons of definite account and dignity. As for the common folk, they are treated almost as slaves, venturing naught of themselves, never taken into counsel. The more part of them, oppressed as they are either by debt, or by the heavy weight of tribute, or by the wrongdoing of the more powerful men, commit themselves in slavery to the nobles, who have, in fact, the same rights over them as masters over slaves. (VI.13)

At numerous other towns the inhabitants were captured and sold into slavery. But then so were some the captured Romans. Caesar says Britain is famous for half a dozen exports to the continent, among which are slaves.

In other words, slavery was current throughout Gaul, Britain and the land of the Germans, so well beyond ancient Greece or Rome. Was there any part of the known world where slavery wasn’t practised two thousand years ago? Was slavery universal?

Eternal war

The Gauls fought among themselves every year. The Britons fought among themselves until Caesar’s incursion temporarily united them. The Germans lived for war. The Italians went on aggressive campaigns every year and spent half their time fighting each other. In Africa Jugurtha, in Asia Mithridates and the Parthians, in Egypt civil war. War everywhere, every year, all the time, forever.

The stupidity of war

Men fighting, I get. It’s what we do, what we’ve always done. But some incidents highlight the sheer brainless stupidity of war and the terrible, futile, stupid cost to civilian victims, women and children. The height of lunacy is reached in book 7 when Vercingetorix persuades the Averni, to burn down their own towns and destroy their own crops all in the name of freedom and victory. Reminiscent of General Westmoreland’s famous quote during the Vietnam War, that the Americans had to destroy the village in order to ‘save’ it. Or Vladimir Putin’s determination to ‘save’ eastern Ukraine by utterly devastating it.

War crimes

In descriptions of other Roman campaigns I’ve wondered whether what the Romans did amounted to war crimes. Yes, is the short answer. Massacring the populations of entire towns, including women and children, is a war crime.

Caesar’s sustained eight year campaign of destroying towns, massacring their inhabitants or sending them off into slavery, have caused many moderns to compare his actions as a genocide. If a genocide is defined as the systematic attempt to wipe out a particular ethnic group, then no, he just wanted every tribe in Gaul to submit, not to exterminate them.

On the other hand, when tribes or towns did hold out, it appears, from his often very casual references, that he did consciously raze towns to the ground and either massacre or enslave entire populations, most notably at the town of Avaricum, and then at Uxellodunum (VIII.44). Or:

Caesar thought that the next best way of obtaining the satisfaction that his honour demanded was to strip the country of inhabitants, cattle and buildings so thoroughly that any of the Eburones who had the good fortune to escape would loathe Ambiorix for bringing such calamities upon them and never allow him to return. Detachments of legionary or auxiliary troops went all over the country killing or capturing large numbers of the natives, burning the homesteads, and carrying off plunder, until it was completely devastated. (VIII.25)

There’s a revealing moment early in book 8 when Hirtius mentions that the population of the Carnutes are still living in makeshift tents and shacks, as all the towns in their territory have been razed to the ground (VIII.5).

At moments like this you see a vast landscape where all the towns, villages, fields and crops have been destroyed, leaving the survivors to scrape a living in pathetic shelters beside burned-out fields, and you realise this is what the Romans meant when they said they brought ‘peace’.

The scarlet cloak

Caesar always wore the scarlet cloak (paludamentum) of a commander-in‑chief (VII.88).

Video

A useful video summary.

Roman reviews

Roman writers

The way things are by Lucretius

Nero: the Man Behind the Myth @ the British Museum (2021)

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The Gallic War by Julius Caesar – 2

Propaganda

The fundamental thing to grasp about Caesar’s Gallic Wars is that they were not at all what we think of as ‘history’. The Latin word he uses was commentarii which, apparently, means something like ‘report’. Each of the 7 ‘books’ whuch make up the Gallic Wars covers one of the years when he campaigned in Gaul and each one is like an end-of-term, or in this case, end-of-campaign-season report, back to his masters, the Senate and the people of Rome.

Thus they are written for a particular audience and are designed to achieve a certain effect. This is to justify Caesar’s behaviour. Legally, he had been tasked with simply administering 3 existing provinces: Illyricum (the east coast of the Adriatic) Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy) and Transalpine Gaul (the area based round France’s Mediterranean coast, also known as ‘the Province’).

But he wanted glory and and so had his sights set on conquering further north into Gaul. But he couldn’t do this legally or on his own initiative. He had to wait till he had pretexts. This is why the seven commentarii are at such pains to emphasise that it was always the bad guys, the naughty Gaulish or Germanic tribes (the Helvetii, the Suebi, the Belgae) who moved first and to make it clear that Caesar was simply responding to aggression in order to maintain the peace and preserve the security of the Province.

But this interventionism was controversial and provided Caesar’s enemies back in Rome with plenty of ammunition to prosecute him for exceeding his authority. The Gallic Wars are a detailed attempt to head off those accusations and present his case, his justifications, to the widest possible audience.

They are the self-justifying propaganda of a conquering general seeking to influence his compatriots, and need to be read with this very much in mind.

Description of Gaul

First some basic facts: at 58 BC when Caesar was appointed governor, on the Italian side of the Alps, stretching from the mountains to the river Rubicon was the province the Romans called Cisalpine or Hither Gaul. On the other side of the Alps they controlled what they called Transalpine or Further Gaul, often simply referred to as The or Our Province. This covered the entire Mediterranean coast of France and extended inland a bit, up the river Rhone, and east up as far as Lake Geneva.

Beyond this lay what you could call ‘Free Gaul’ which Caesar famously describes as being divided into three parts, inhabited by 1) the Aquitani in the southwest 2) the Gauls of the biggest central part, who in their own language were called Celtae, and 3) the Belgae, in the north, extending from Paris to the Channel in the north and the Rhine in the east. (In the map below the Province is named Narbonensis, another alternative name for the Roman-controlled south of France).

Map with the approximate location of pre-Roman Belgic Gaul shortly before the Roman conquest, according to an interpretation of Caesar (source: Wikipedia)

Caesar deploys the familiar trope that Rome’s influence was n some way effeminising. He notes that the Belgae were:

the bravest, because they are furthest from the civilisation and refinement of the Province, and merchants least frequently resort to them, and import those things which tend to effeminate the mind; and they are the nearest to the Germans, who dwell beyond the Rhine, with whom they are continually waging war.

Caesar gives the names of lots of tribes and generalises about which are Gauls or Celts or German in origin, but pretty much all his terms and labels are contested by modern scholars because a) other ancient historians give different accounts of origins and languages and b) the modern evidence of linguistic studies and archaeology often contradict all of them. I.e. it is a complex and contested field of knowledge which is easy to get lost and perplexed in.

The Roman army

All the editions of the Gallic Wars contain an appendix on the Roman army. Since the reforms of Caius Marius around 100 BC, the army was divided into legions. Each legion contained 6,000 men, divided into 10 cohorts of 600 men, each divided into 3 maniples of 200 men, each made up of 2 centuries of 100 men, commanded by a centurion. Each legion had from 300 to 600 cavalry attached, but these were often foreign recruits and no general relied on them for their main battle plan. Caesar never does.

Tears

There’s a surprising amount of sentimental weeping. Men weeping. Rough, tough warriors and leaders weeping. Women weeping and wailing for their menfolk.

1. 20 With many tears Diviciacus embraced Caesar, and began to beseech him not to pass too severe a judgment upon his brother.

1.20 While he was making this petition at greater length, and with tears, Caesar took him by the hand and consoled him…

1.31 The petition was granted, and they all threw themselves in tears at Caesar’s feet…

Book 1 The expulsion of the intruders (58 BC)

[Note: the following chapter titles are not in the original. They appear to have been added by the translator of the Penguin edition, S.A. Handford. The numbers in round brackets refer to the chapters or sections which each book is divided into and which are numbered in the original.]

Chapter 1: Description of Gaul, its geography and inhabitants

As above.

Chapters 2 to 29: Campaign against the Helvetii

This was Caesar’s first campaign against a Gaulish tribe and, in a sense, the template for his entire subsequent involvement in Gaul.

Caesar claims the leader of the Helvetii, a tribe which lived on the Swiss plateau north of Lake Geneva, were being incited by one of their leaders, Orgetorix, to invade and conquer the rest of Gaul. Orgetorix conspired with leading men in two other tribes to overthrow their rulers, declare themselves kings, and carve up Gaul between them. Orgetorix was summoned to a trial by the seniors of his own people but avoided punishment by turning up with some 10,000 retainers and slaves. He got off, but at some later time perished, possibly by his own hand.

But he had inspired the other leaders with his plan and they burned their houses and crops and set off on a mass migration into Gaul.

Caesar repels the Helvetii going through the Province, forcing them to retreat back into their own territory, take the northern route up through the mountains and into the country of the Aedui. The Romans engaged them at the Battle of the Arar which led to negotiations with Liscus, Dumnorix and Diviciacus.

Second battle, near Bibrax. Retreat and surrender of the Helvetii.

30 to 54: Campaign against Ariovistus and the Suebi

Ariovistus was a leader of the Suebi and allied Germanic peoples. Ariovistus had led his people across the Rhine, fought and defeated the Aedui, seized a third of the Aeduan territory, settling 120,000 Germans there.

Caesar attends a general assembly of the Gauls where Diviciacus, head of the Aeduan government and spokesmen of the Gauls, complains to about Ariovistus’ conquests and the hundreds of Gaulish hostages he has taken. Unless Caesar does something the Aedui will be forced to migrate. Then, true to form, they all start crying.

When Diviciacus had delivered this speech all who were present began with loud weeping to seek assistance from Caesar.

So Caesar sees it as a) his duty to protect a Roman ally, the Aedui, but b) is well aware that confronting Ariovistus will also bring him glory and consolidate his hold over the army.

Caesar makes overtures to Ariovistus which are rebuffed. He marches to and takes the town of Vesontio but here some of the army is overcome by panic. The Gauls tell them the Germans are tall super-soldiers:

men of a mighty frame and an incredible valour and skill at arms; for they themselves [the Gauls] at meetings with the Germans had often been unable even to endure their look and the keenness of their eyes. So great was the panic, and so suddenly did it seize upon all the army that it affected in serious fashion the intelligence and the courage of all ranks… (1.39)

Caesar quells this potential mutiny with a long address concluding that he will march on the enemy with just the loyal Tenth Legion if necessary, with the result that his troops are roused and restored.

Caesar invites Ariovistus to a conference. He makes clear demands: that Ariovistus bring no more of his people across the Rhine, that he and his allies restore the hostages they had taken from the Aedui, and they undertake not to make war against them.

At the meeting with Ariovistus Caesar puts his proposals and Ariovistus haughtily rejects them. Ariovistus is given a powerful speech saying he never attacked the Aedui, Roman friendship is a sham and he’d make a lot of friends back in Rome if he were to kill Caesar on the spot. By this stage some of the Suebians are throwing stones and trying to provoke Caesar’s entourage so the latter withdrew. Next day Caesar sent Gaius Valerius Procillus for further parlay but, as they later discovered, he was immediately arrested and put in chains.

Ariovistus’ army moves off and Caesar tails him till both make camp barely 600 yards from each other. Ariovistus has a much larger force and Caesar realises he is surrounded. The Germans are reluctant to do more than skirmish and Caesar learns this is because their holy women are saying they shouldn’t engage in full battle before the next full moon. He gets some legions to build an advance camp then, next day, leads his legions against Ariovistus’s camp. This turned into the Battle of the Vosges, 58 BC.

The Germans advance towards them with such speed that the Romans don’t have time to use their pilums (spears) but are forced to plunge into hand to hand fighting. The Roman centre is being pushed back when Publius Licinius Crassus grasped what was happening and brings the infantry reserve into action in support of the Roman left. This developed into a general attack on the flank which broke the Germans who turned and ran for the river Rhine 15 miles away.

Many, including Ariovistus himself, managed to cross the river in boats or by swimming. The rest were cut down by Roman cavalry, including both of Ariovistus’s wives and one of his daughters. The ambassador Caesar had sent a few days earlier, Gaius Valerius Procillus, was rescued unharmed to Caesar’s great personal delight but described how his captors had cast lots three times, in his presence, to decided whether he should be burned to death now or later.

So the Suebi had retreated back over the Rhine and were broken as a military threat for the time being. Caesar claims that most of Ariovistus’ one-hundred and twenty thousand men were killed. Caesar winters his army in the land of the Sequani and returns to Hither Gaul to hold assizes. End of first campaigning season.

Book 2 Conquest of the Belgic tribes (57 BC)

Chapters 1 to 33: The Belgae

Caesar hears rumours that the Belgae are hatching a plot against the Roman people. He takes the two legions of Cisalpine Gaul and heads north. Delegates of the Remi, the Belgic people closest to Gaul, come to Caesar, declare their loyalty, but explain the rest of the Belgae’s plans. The Belgae were an originally Germanic people who crossed the Rhine and settled. When the Cimbri and Teutoni were migrating south the Belgae fought them off and gained a reputation for fierceness.

The Remi delegates give a summary of the different Belgic tribes, their numbers and leaders. Soon after this the Belgic horde besieges a Remi town called Bibrax. Caesar sends Numidian and Cretan archers and Balearic slingers to help relieve the siege and the Belgae abandon it.

The two camps line up opposite each other. The Belgae go to try and cross the river Aisne and storm a Roman outpost, but get bogged down and the Romans massacre them. The majority of the Belgae decide to retreat and return to their separate tribal homelands but their withdrawal turns into a rout and the Romans massacre the rearguard.

Caesar besieges Noviodunum, main town of the Suessiones. Overawed by the Romans’ siege engines, they surrender and hand over hostages, including sons of their king, Galba.

Caesar then marches on Bratuspantium, the main town of the Bellovaci, whose inhabitants quickly come out to surrender. The Aedui intercede on the Bellovaci’s behalf, saying they had been duped into rebellion and asking Caesar to show his customary clemency. Caesar does so, accepting 600 hostages and all their weapons. Then he marches on to the territory of the Ambiani who also immediately surrender.

The Nervii, however, under their leader Bogduonatus, resolved to fight and recruited allies including the Atrebates and Viromandui. Caesar marches into their territory and learns their plans. He starts making a camp on a plain by the river Sambre (modern scholars identify this with the river Selle). With great speed the Nervii attacked the Romans making camp and almost overwhelmed them, leaving them no time to properly arm. The battle was on a knife edge.

Caesar grabbed a shield, made his way to the front line and quickly organised his forces while the commander of the Tenth Legion attacked the Nervian camp. Then the two legions who ‘d been guarding the Roman baggage train arrived and helped to turn the tide of the battle. The Nervii are almost completely wiped out, reduced from a fighting force of 60,000 to 500 (28).

The Nervii’s allies, the Aduatuci, had been en route to join them. If they’d arrived in time they probably would have secured a Roman defeat. But hearing of the Nervii defeat they turned round and marched back to their own territory, concentrating their population in one town which they fortified. Caesar besieges it. When they see the siege towers being moved towards the town the Aduatuci decide the Romans must be aided by divine powers to build and move such juggernauts and so beg for clemency and agree to hand over all their weapons.

However, they had treacherously kept a third of their weapons and that night sallied forth and attacked the Roman camp. The Romans rallied and killed about 4,000 Aduatuci after which they retreated back into the town. Next morning the Romans broke down the town gates and took the town, selling the entire population of 53,000 into slavery.

34: Suppression of the ocean states

Caesar had sent Publius Crassus against the tribes which lived alongside the great Ocean i.e. the Atlantic, being the Veneti, Venelli, Osismi, Curiosolitae, Esubii, Aulerci and Redones, and Crassus now reported that they had all been brought into subjection to the power of Rome.

35: Fifteen days’ thanksgiving in Rome for Caesar’s achievements

The end of the campaign season. Caesar’s victories being peace to all Gaul and are known to tribes beyond the Rhine who sue for peace, sending hostages and promising to obey. As he does at the end of each campaign season, Caesar puts his troops into winter quarters and returns to see to his other provinces, namely Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum.

Book 3 The first rebellion (57 BC)

1 to 6: Servius Galba

This is at the tail end of 57, after the campaign season had ended. Caesar deputes Servius Galba to secure a pass over the Alps. Galba signs peace treaties with neighbouring tribes and with just two cohorts set about building a camp at a high settlement named Octodorus. The Seduni and Veragri treacherously attack. They take the Romans by surprise and there is fierce fighting until a brave centurion Caesar picks out by name suggests a sally and the Romans run out the sides of their fort and attack the enemy flanks, routing them. Maybe a third of the enemy were killed, 10,000. Worried about supplies, Galba decided to strike camp and marched his forces down into the safe territory of the Allobroges.

7 to 16: Campaign against the Veneti 56 BC

Suddenly revolt breaks out among the Veneti. They lived in Brittany, had a good fleet and imposed taxes on anyone using their waters. Roman legates had been dispatched to liaise with the Veneti and surrounding tribes and these were all now taken hostage.

Caesar divides his forces, sending them to different parts of Gaul to ensure peace with conquered tribes, then takes the main force west against the rebels. Advantages for the Veneti: their towns are right on the coast, often separated from the land at high tide; they are excellent seafarers and can navigate better than the Romans. Caesar gives a description of Veneti ships, their advantages over Roman ships.

Nonetheless the Roman fleet defeats the Veneti fleet of about 200 ships by the use of grappling hooks on poles to break the enemy rigging and leave their ships defenceless.

This engagement finished the campaign against the Veneti and the whole sea‑coast…they surrendered themselves and all they had to Caesar. He decided that their punishment must be the more severe in order that the privilege of deputies might be more carefully preserved by the natives for the future. He therefore put the whole of their senate to the sword, and sold the rest of the men as slaves. (3.16)

17 to 19: Operations of Titurius Sabinus against the Venelli

The Venelli rebelled against Rome, led by Viridovix who had lured the Aulerci, Eburovices and the Lexovii to put their ‘senates’ to death and join him. The Venelli surround the camp of Quintus Titurius Sabinus and try to tempt him out for a fight but he stalls. Then he briefs a Gaul to pretend to be a deserter and go to the camp of the Venelli and tell them Caesar is in trouble in the West and so Sabinus will try to sneak out of the camp that night to go help him.

Based on this false intelligence the Venelli march en masse up to Sabinus’s camp but he surprises them by sortying from the sides and setting his cavalry on them before they’re ready. Tired after their forced march and confused by the Roman tactics, the Venelli are massacred.

20 to 27: Operations of Publius Crassus in Aquitania

Publius Crassus leads a legion into Aquitania to take on the Sontiates. He engages in open battle then besieges their town which, when it looks like it will fall, the Aquitani surrender. A brotherhood of elite fighters led by Adiatunnus attempt a sortie but are fought back and surrender.

Crassus then tackles the Vocates and the Tarusates. He takes a town within days of besieging it and this so alarms the natives they send for help over the Pyrenees and veterans of Quintus Sertorius’s campaigns come to help. (See my summary of Plutarch’s Life of Sertorius.)

Alarmed at the rise in enemy numbers and that they would soon control the roads and corn supply, Crassus came out of the town next day to fight. The enemy refuse to engage so Crassus marches up to their camp and starts investing it, building ramps up the walls, throwing weapons. Then the cavalry report that the rear gate is inadequately secured and the Romans storm it. The enemy fought free into open country where the Roman cavalry followed and slaughtered them.

As a result of this victory over the strongest force the Aquitani could muster, Crassus received the surrender of the Tarbelli, Bigerriones, Ptianii, Vocates, Tarusates, Elusates, Gates, Ausci, Garumni, Sibuzates and Cocosates.

28 to 29: Operations of Caesar against the Morini and Menapii

The Morini and Menapii were the only unconquered peoples left in all Gaul. Caesar decided to mop them up before winter. But they adopted tactics unusual for the Gauls and retreated into their marshlands. Caesar ordered the construction of a camp nearby but, not for the first time, the natives rushed out and attacked while the Romans were building it.

The Romans fought them off and during the next days Caesar ordered them to fell all the trees and create a mighty rampart. The enemy retreated into the forest but it began to rain continuously and Caesar’s own army needed shelter, so he ordered them to burn the enemy’s fields and villages and buildings and then led them to winter quarters.

Book 4 Invasions of Germany and Britain (55 BC)

1 to 4: Description of the Suebi, Ubii, Usipetes and Tencteri

This was the year of the consulship of Pompey and Crassus as arranged at the conference of the Triumvirate at Luca.

The Usipetes and Tencteri cross the Rhine into Gaul with many men. They explain they have been pushed out of their own land by the Suebi, the most powerful of the German tribes. The Suebi wear the barest of clothes, bathe in cold rivers, have no agriculture but live by hunting, have tremendous freedom, scorn riding horses with saddles, ban merchants who bring wine and other womanish products.

5 to 15: Operations of Caesar against the Usipetes and Tencteri

Caesar hastens to the area and discovers the Usipetes and Tencteri have pushed aside the local Gauls, destabilising the area. Negotiations with their leaders, who bullishly say they don’t want to attack but will defend themselves if necessary. A few days later they send another deputation talking peace but, as they withdraw, 600 or so of the German cavalry attack the Romans. This surprise attack sees a number of Roman casualties and demoralisation before the main force of the infantry appears and the Germans withdraw.

This treacherous attack gives Caesar the moral advantage and when another deputation comes a few days later he promptly detains them (13) and marches double fast the 8 miles to the German camp which he immediately storms. The warriors are taken by surprise, mixed up with the women and children and all begin to flee back towards the Rhine. Here they are caught in the junction of the Rhine and Moselle and large numbers are killed. The remainder put themselves under Caesar’s protection. In other words, a crushing victory.

[The detaining of the envoys was clearly against the rules of war and Caesar’s enemies fiercely criticised it. A note in the Penguin edition tells us that Cato the Younger called for Caesar to be stripped of his command and handed over to the Germans for punishment. There was no chance of this extreme view being carried out but it is symptomatic of the extremely embattled political situation back in Rome which Caesar’s reports were designed to influence.]

16 to 19: Caesar crosses the Rhine

Caesar is careful to give reasons for crossing the Rhine since he, arguably, shouldn’t have been in Gaul at all and certainly not crossing the Rhine into new country. These are:

To make German tribes less inclined to invade Gaul by making them afraid of the threat in their own lands.
German tribes he’d sent envoys to had cockily said the Rhine was the limit of Roman sovereignty: he wanted to prove them wrong and worry them.
The Ubii, the only German tribe who had made peace with Rome and given hostages, begged him to come over and free them from the oppression of the Suebi.

Detailed description of the engineering involved in building a bridge over the Rhine (17). It takes 10 days from starting to collect the wood to the army crossing over into the territory of the Sugambri. The Sugambri have fled into the forest. Caesar burns all their villages, farms and crops.

He marches into the territory of the Ubii to reconfirm their friendship. The Ubii tell him the Suebi have gathered all their fighting men into a central position in their territory and are awaiting battle. But Caesar’s aim was not to conquer more territory but simply to warn the Germans what was possible to act as a deterrent from them crossing into Gaul. So after 18 days he crossed back over the bridge and had it destroyed behind him.

20 to 36: First expedition to Britain

In invading Britain Caesar was, again, exceeding his authority and so his text emphasises his justifications:

In all campaigns against the Gauls they had received help from the Britons (this seems extremely unlikely and a blatant excuse).
He wanted to spy out the lie of the land, the size of the island, its harbours and resources etc.

Caesar marches into the territory of the Morini, closest to Britain. He sends a ship under Volusenus to do a reconnaissance and, having heard the rumours, the first British tribes send envoys to him offering submission. The Morini themselves send envoys and hostages and submit.

Caesar assembles 80 transports and warships for the infantry and a further 18 for the cavalry. The remainder of the army was to mount operations against the Manippi and resistant factions of the Morini.

The landing was hard. The first place they came to they could see the enemy lining the cliffs and able to throw spears down onto a narrow beach. So they put out again and drifted seven miles or so further down the Channel before beaching again (23).

The Roman army faced real difficulties, for they had to leap off the ships while still in quite deep water, weighed down with heavy arms, get a footing and fight uphill through water. The enemy by contrast was on horses used to the terrain and water, fighting downhill into the struggling Romans.

Caesar ordered the lighter warships to be firmly beached on the right flank of the battle and soldiers use slings, bows and artillery on the enemy flank. This succeeded. While the battle hung in the balance the man holding the eagle of the Tenth Legion declared he was going to do his duty by his general and leapt into the water, thus rallying the others. The battle was scattered and confused but eventually his troops got a foothold and were able to reassert discipline. However, the cavalry ships had not yet set out from Gaul and without his cavalry Caesar wasn’t able to convert repelling the enemy into a victory.

But, the Romans having established a beachhead, the Britons send envoys suing for peace. They admit that when the man Cesar chose as envoy, Commius of the Atrebates, first arrived they had arrested him and put him in chains. Now they humbly apologise for their mistake and promise to send hostages.

Four days later the 18 transports carrying the cavalry set out but are caught in a storm so some turn back, some get lost, some keep out to sea to avoid being shipwrecked. Later that night a storm hits the transports which are anchored. ‘Several ships went to pieces; and the others, by loss of cordage, anchors, and the rest of their tackle, were rendered useless for sailing.’ 12 ships were lost.

Seeing this and calculating that the Romans won’t be able to get reinforcements, the Britons decide to renege on their deal with Caesar and revert to war. Meanwhile Caesar ordered the remaining ships to be repaired with spare parts from the 12 which were wrecked and equipment brought over from Gaul to do this.

Elements of the Seventh Legion were out collecting corn when they were attacked. Caesar took the rest of his troops from their camp and came to their rescue. Caesar makes a point of describing the skilful way the Britons use their chariots.

He fights off the attackers and decides not to escalate the engagement into a full battle but withdraws to the Roman camp. But the Britons had sent messages in all directions and gathered a huge number of armed men. So a second battle takes place which is briefly described – the Romans win, drive the enemy from the field, burn their villages and crops, then withdraw again to their camp.

Next day deputies from the tribes come to sue for peace and Caesar demands they hand over hostages. He orders these to be brought to him on the continent because that evening Caesar sets sail back to Gaul.

37 to 38: Defeat of the rebellious Morini — subjection of the Menapii

One troop of about 300 had landed back in Gaul and were marching to camp when they were attacked by a large contingent of the Morini, who had been at peace with the Romans when Caesar had left Gaul. The Romans formed a square and soon as he heard about it Caesar sent cavalry to relieve them. The combined force beat off the Morini and pursued them, killing many.

Next day Caesar sends his most trusted lieutenant, Titus Labienus, against the Morini. Previously the Morini had retreated to their marshes but it’s been a hot summer and the marshes have all dried up. So they surrendered.

As for Quintus Titurius and Lucius Cotta, the lieutenant-generals who had led legions into the territory of the Menapii, they did not return to Caesar until they had laid waste all the fields of the natives, cut down the corn-crops, and burnt the buildings, because the Menapii had all hidden in their densest forests.

Great deal of wasting and burning, isn’t there? Which has led some modern historians to accuse Caesar of genocide. Some historians have totalled up the number of Gauls killed at over a million, in a land with a population of only a million or so. Arguments about numbers killed or enslaved quickly become highly technical (and Caesar may well have been exaggerating throughout his accounts to big up his achievements) – but you can see their point.

Even the most detached reading of the text begins to weigh you down with the sheer numbers of people killed, the towns razed to the ground, the populations sold into slavery, the villages and all the agricultural land destroyed. As Tacitus has his (probably fictional) Scottish chieftain declare of the Romans, in his account of Gnaeus Julius Agricola’s campaigns in Britain a hundred years later, in the late 70s AD:

‘They make a desert and call it peace.’

When the Senate received Caesar’s dispatches for the year they declare twenty days’ thanksgiving in Rome for his achievements.

Slavery

The usual fate of the inhabitants of a captured town was to be sold into slavery. A great part of Roman war profits came from the sale of people, as well as of property.
(note to page 227 in the Oxford University Press edition)

The practice of slavery among the native Gauls, and what it meant to be sold into slavery by the Romans, and how far towns and peoples would go to avoid such a fate, strike me as being of huge importance in understanding the native societies Caesar was attacking, the fears of those peoples and their motivation in repeatedly rising up against Roman rule.

And yet the issue of slavery is mentioned nowhere in the introductions of either Hammond nor Gardiner. They both go on at length about the well-known political political situation in Rome, which is covered in numerous other books, and yet completely ignore this huge elephant in the room.

Video

A useful video summary of Caesar’s campaigns.

Roman reviews

Roman writers

The way things are by Lucretius

Plutarch’s Life of Caesar
The life of Julius Caesar by Suetonius
The Gallic War by Julius Caesar – 1
The Gallic War by Julius Caesar – 2
The Gallic War by Julius Caesar – 3
The Civil War by Julius Caesar
The Alexandrian War by Aulus Hirtius
The African War

Nero: the Man Behind the Myth @ the British Museum (2021)

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Plutarch’s life of Pompey

Pompey always maintained that simplicity in his habits which cost him no great effort; for he was naturally temperate and orderly in his desires. (18)

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (106 to 48 BC)

This is one of the longest lives, with 80 chapters. Pompey the Great was a boy wonder general, who racked up a series of military victories, both in Rome’s civil wars and against external enemies. He was awarded unprecedented military power to fight the pirates and then prosecute the war in Parthia in the 60s BC, with the result that a growing number of critics began to think him a threat to the state.

In 60 BC Pompey entered into an uneasy alliance with the two other most powerful men in Rome, Julius Caesar (who had himself been awarded extraordinary and extended powers to fight his long war in Gaul) and Marcus Crassus (the richest man in Rome) in order to bribe and strong-arm their way to successive consulships and continually renewed generalships. It was called the triumvirate.

In the later 50s the triumvirate collapsed because a) Crassus was killed on campaign in Parthia and b) Caesar’s beloved daughter, Julia, who he had given to Pompey, died young, thus breaking the family tie between them. It left Pompey and Caesar as the two most powerful men in the state, both with devoted armies behind them, eyeing each other nervously. When his political opponents in Rome tried to end Caesar’s command in Gaul he marched with his army into Italy in 49 BC, triggering a civil war against Pompey and the army of Italy, which lasted from 49 to 45, ending with complete victory for Caesar. But by this stage Pompey was already dead, having been murdered in Egypt, fleeing from a military defeat in Greece, at which point the Pompey part of the story ends.

The life

(1) Contrasts the extreme unpopularity of the father, Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo (135 to 87), hated by his soldiers for his greed and cruelty, with the tremendous popularity of the son. Plutarch says the son was persuasive, trustworthy and tactful. Now all of this contrasts strongly with the portrait of Pompey given in the Life of Crassus, where he is made to be tactless, clumsy and anti-social. This raises the strong possibility that the characters Plutarch paints are not historically accurate or even consistent across his own biographies, but that Plutarch changes and rearranges them in the context of each life to make each life more dramatic. Artistic licence. Plutarch did warn us hat he feels more like a painter than a historian.

(2) He had a boyish youthful grace which people found attractive leading many to nickname him Alexander, after the boy wonder conqueror. Many rumours of his love affairs, for example the story of Flora the old courtesan who boasted that she never left his company without bitemarks.

(3) How young Pompey quelled an attempt by mutinous troops to murder his father and then talked round the troops.

(4) On his father’s death in 87 Pompey was put on trial for misappropriation of public funds but defended himself ably and was acquitted, in fact the judge in the case, Antistius, offered him his daughter in marriage.

(5) Plutarch associates Pompey directly with Cinna‘s death, saying that Pompey went into hiding but people thought Cinna had ordered him killed, so soldiers rose up against Cinna and a centurion pursued and killed him. 84 BC. By contrast the history books say Cinna was murdered by his own troops who mutinied rather than be sent across the Adriatic to fight Sulla in Greece.

(6) Gnaeus Papirius Carbo replaced Cinna as ruler of Rome, and Pompey, not yet 23, raised an army against him in the provinces and marched to Rome to support Sulla.

(7) Pompey defeated in quick succession the forces of Carinas, Cloelius, and Brutus, then persuaded the army of Scipio the consul to come over to him, then defeated a force sent by Carbo himself. Wunderkind.

(8) When Sulla’s army approaches Pompey ensures his looks smart and Sulla greets him at Imperator and later showed great marks of respect. When Sulla wanted to send Pompey to Gaul to help Metellus, Pompey very tactfully said he didn’t want to tread on the older man’s toes but would go if requested. He was requested, he did go and performed great feats.

(9) Sulla realised how valuable Pompey was and, once he was established in power in Rome (82 BC) he and his wife Metella prevail on the young man to divorce Antistia and marry Aemilia, the step-daughter of Sulla, even though she was pregnant with another man’s child. Political marriages. [In the same spirit Sulla tried to make Julius Caesar part with his wife, but Caesar refused and was so scared of reprisals that he went into hiding.] This was cruel on Antistia whose father had been murdered by Marius’s son, Marcus, for being a partisan of Pompey’s and whose mother had killed herself in response. Anyway, fate is fate, and Amelia had barely been installed in Pompey’s house before she died giving birth to the other man’s child.

(10) Once Sulla is secure in power in Rome, Pompey was charged with mopping up outstanding noble survivors. He was harshly judged for his delaying treatment of Carbo, 4 times consul, and but dealt mercifully with Himera and Sthenis. Perpenna was occupying Sicily until Pompey headed that way, at which he abandoned it and headed for Spain (where he was to become a grudging lieutenant to that other Marian exile, Sertorius).

(11) Sulla sends Pompey to Libya to fight Domitius Ahenobarbus. Pompey lands with a large force and defeats Domitius in a rainstorm. He arranges treaties with the cities of Libya and then invades into Numidia. It is said all this took him just 40 days and he was only 24 years old.

(12) Back at his base in Utica Pompey receives a letter from Sulla telling him to send his legions back to Italy which upsets Pompey, but his army threaten to mutiny in order to stay with him. When Pompey returns to Rome the people flock out to see him, who many are already calling Magnus or ‘the Great’ and Sulla thinks it politic to also acclaim Pompey as the great. According to Plutarch Pompey himself was one of the last to use this agnomen.

(14) Pompey asks for a triumph but Sulla refuses, saying he hasn’t even been a praetor yet let alone a consul. This was the context of Pompey allegedly muttering that more people worship the rising than the setting sun which, when he heard it, Sulla was so impressed by Pompey’s sheer cheek that he changed his mind and let Pompey have his triumph (probably in 81 BC). Pompey could easily have been elected to the Senate but it didn’t interest him so he didn’t try.

(15) Sulla resented Pompey’s popularity with the people but rarely let it show. He did, though, remark when Pompey put his name behind Lepidus‘s campaign to be elected consul in 78 BC, that Pompey had ensured that the worst man alive (Lepidus) secured more votes than the best (Catulus). Later that year Sulla died

(16) Lepidus, elected consul in 78, demanded a second consulship for the following year and, when it was refused, raised an army along with the sons of the old Marian cause. Pompey, as so often, was tasked with quelling the rebellion, defeated Lepidus at Cosa and Lepidus withdrew into Sardinia where he died the same year. Many of his supporters escaped to Spain where they joined the Marian rebel, Sertorius.

(17) Having defeated Lepidus, Pompey refused to disband his army but kept it near Rome. Many deprecated this, but it meant he was ready when the Senate ordered him to Spain to deal with the Marian rebel Sertorius. Pompey took over from Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius who was old and, to general surprise, had become addicted to luxury. This was never a problem for Pompey who was naturally moderate in all things.

(18) Pompey’s arrival in Spain rejuvenated the Roman troops. He wins a victory near Valentia.

(19) The big but inconclusive battle at the river Sucro in which he is wounded in the hand. Pompey’s respect for Metellus. The success of Sertorius’s hit and run guerrilla tactics.

(20) In 74, running low on money, Pompey wrote a famous letter to the Senate asking for more resources or saying he’d be forced to march home. LucullusPlutarch’s life of Lucullus was consul and did everything he could to get the money assigned. This was for personal reasons because he wanted to be assigned command of the army heading East to fight King Mithridates VI of Pontus (the region along the south coast of the Black sea), and didn’t want Pompey to come home and snaffle this very desirable gig.

In 73 Sertorius was murdered at a dinner party by his resentful lieutenant Perpenna. Perpenna then took to the field against Pompey but had none of his victim’s agility and strategy. Pompey engaged the rebels in plain battle and slaughtered them. Perpenna and other Roman nobles were brought before him, and Pompey had them all executed.

There’s a story that Perpenna offered Pompey Sertorius’s correspondence with lots of leading figures in Rome who had been corresponding with him about overthrowing Sulla in the popular cause – but Pompey didn’t want to revive the civil war which was only just over and so burned the correspondence unread.

(21) Pompey went on to arrange peace in Spain, before returning to Italy in 71. He arrived at the height of the Spartacus rebellion, to the great irritation of Crassus who wanted to finish it off before Pompey took the credit. So Crassus hurried up and arranged a final set piece battle with Spartacus, at which he massacred the insurgents. Yet Pompey still managed to get credit because about 5,000 escaped from the main battle and Pompey engaged with them and slaughtered them. Then wrote a letter to the Senate saying Crassus certainly defeated Spartacus in battle but he, Pompey, scotched the cause once and for all.

There was widespread fear that, not disbanding his army and with so many successes, Pompey might turn into another Sulla. But he didn’t and he went out of his way to ingratiate himself with the people, for example supporting the law to have the powers which Sulla had taken away from the people’s tribunes restored to them.

(22) His influence is indicated by the way that Marcus Crassus, the richest man in Rome, only considered putting himself forward for consul if Pompey would back him, which he did. Both men were elected consuls in 70 BC. The story of Pompey appearing in person before the two censors to resign his military command.

(23) However, the pair spent a lot of their consul year at daggers drawn. As the year of their joint office neared its end a man climbed on the public platform they were sharing and said Jupiter had appeared in a dream and told him the consuls mustn’t lay down their office till they’d become friends again. So Crassus stepped forward, took Pompey’s hand and praised him to the crowd. Having laid down his office, Pompey was seen less and less in public, and then only surrounded by a crowd to boost his sense of magnificence.

(24) Pirates A digression giving background on the rise of the pirates around the Mediterranean – caused in part because the Romans are devoting their energies to civil wars – till the pirates were said to have 1,000 ships and to have captured 400 cities. Their flaunting their power, wearing fine clothes and decorated ships was offensive. But in more practical terms the pirate plague was driving up prices and causing discontent.

(25) In 67 the tribune Aulus Gabinius proposed a law giving Pompey extraordinary power to crush the pirates, which led to impassioned speeches for and against in the Senate. But it was a very popular idea with the people.

(26) Pompey was awarded the commission divided the Mediterranean into quadrants which he assigned to subordinates tasked with sweeping them clean. In an astonishing 40 days he had routed the pirates and ended the problem in the western Med.

(27) In Rome the consul Piso conspired against Pompey, trying to limit the funding of the project and releasing ship’s crews early, so Pompey interrupted his campaign to anchor at Brindisi, march to Rome and sort things out.

Then he returned to sea, sailing East, with a stopover at Athens. Pompey closed in on the pirates’ bases in Cilicia but then amazed everyone by capturing but then setting free the pirates. He treated all of them leniently.

(28) Finally he tackles the hard core pirates at a headland off Cilicia. Pompey drove them off their boats and into a fortress which he besieged till the pirates, starving, surrendered. In less than 3 months the entire pirate problem had been sorted. He had captured 20,000 prisoners. Rather than punish them, though, Pompey very wisely resettled the pirates and their families in Greece and Asia Minor, in cities which he then granted extra land, figuring that good example, honest work and opportunity would tame them.

(29) Pompey’s dispute with Metellus (relative of the Metellus he fought alongside in Spain) who was fighting the pirates in Crete but whose authority Pompey undermined, taking the side of the pirates. Much criticism.

(30) With the end of the pirate campaign in 66 BC, one of the tribunes of the plebs, Manilius, proposes a law giving Pompey extraordinary power in the East to prosecute the war against Mithridates, taking command away from Lucius Licinius Lucullus. Debate, opposition from the nobles, but passed by the people. Pompey pretends to be vexed by the endless tasks he is given but was in reality pleased.

(31) So Pompey rallies his legions and sails for Asia Minor. Here he marches through the land, leaving nothing undisturbed that Lucullus had done. Eventually the two meet, with their armies, in Galatia. Both sets of lictors have put wreaths on their fasces but after a weary march Pompey’s are faded, so Lucullus’s lictors put their fresh wreaths on Pompey’s lictors’ fasces – which was remembered long afterwards as symbolising how Pompey had come to steal glory from Lucullus who had done all the hard work.

He’s referring to the way Pompey had a track record of arriving at the end of military campaigns and stealing the glory from, for example, Metellus in Spain and Crassus against Spartacus. Lucullus apparently compared Pompey to a lazy carrion-bird, that alights on bodies that others had killed and mocks him for having won a triumph (in 71 BC) for appearing at the end of the 3 year war against Spartacus and wiping out a relatively small number of stragglers. Right place, right time.

The two successful generals try to be civil, but behind each other’s backs, Pompey criticises Lucullus for his greed and looting and Lucullus criticises Pompey for his lust for power.

(32) Pompey’s campaign against Mithridates who shows the same ability to endlessly escape from battles and traps as he did against Lucullus. A battle fought by moonlight where the Romans massacre 10,000 Parthians.

(33) Pompey discovers young Tigranes of Armenia is in rebellion against his father, Tigranes king of kings, so allies and marches with him. The elder Tigranes comes to submit and is going to obeise himself when Pompey raises him up, sits him at his side, says he can retain his kingship and remaining provinces but a) those won by Lucullus will become Roman b) he must pay an indemnity of 6,000 talents, to which Tigranes agrees. Young Tigranes violently disagrees, insults Pompey and is put in chains. Phraates, king of the Parthians, sends an embassy suggesting the Euphrates should be the border between Roman territory and Parthian, and Pompey agrees.

(34) Pompey marches north towards and the Caucasus in search of Mithridates, and is attacked by native peoples, first the Albanians then the Iberians, both of which he thrashes.

(35) Mithridates had headed west and Pompey wanted to follow him but heard that the Albanians had rebelled again so crossed the river Cyrnus with difficulty, then marches across dry land carrying 10,000 waterskins and then crushed the Albanian army consisting of 60,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry. As always, with numbers, a healthy dose of scepticism. Rumour that the Amazons fought with the Albanians but no women’s bodies were found. Note on the location and customs of the Amazons who are said to live in the Caucasus.

(36) Pompey sets off for Hyrcania but is driven back by the wild snakes. The kings of the Elymaeans and the Medes sent ambassadors to him, and he wrote them a friendly answer. The Parthian king had burst into Gordyene and was plundering the subjects of Tigranes so Pompey he sent an armed force under Afranius.

Pompey is sent all the concubines of Mithridates but doesn’t keep them, sending them back to their homes. Folk tale of one of the concubines, Stratonice, who was daughter to a very poor old man. When Mithridates took her as a concubine the old man woke up to find his house overflowing with treasure and servants. This Stratonice had been left in charge of one of Mithridates’ fortresses but handed it over to Pompey who, chastely, handed them over to the questors to be sent back to Rome.

(37) In the castle of Caenum Pompey comes across a cache of Mithridates’ correspondence showing, among other things, the people he’d had poisoned, including one of his own sons.

(38) While Mithridates was still alive and at large with a big force, Pompey did what he’d criticised Lucullus for doing and began to administer his provinces, having meetings with kings, issuing edicts and so on.

In his campaigns Pompey had reached some of the limits of the known world. In Spain he had reached the Atlantic (which the ancients thought was the Great Ocean surrounding one unified land mass). In North Africa he had also marched as far as the Outer Sea. In the East he had nearly reached Hyrcania. Now he wanted to march south through Arabia to the Red Sea.

(39) Pompey ordered a blockade of Mithridates in his base in the Bosporus (not the Bosphorus by modern Istanbul, but the area round the Crimea in the north Black Sea) and set off south. He annexed Syria for Rome and then Judaea, and made a prisoner of Aristobulus the king. He acted more and more like a mighty sovereign, dispensing justice to lower kings. He was asked to arbitrate a dispute between the kings of Parthia and Armenia. However many of his associates and lieutenants were grasping and corrupt.

(40) A notable hanger-on of Pompey’s was the Greek would-be philosopher Demetrius, who was impertinent and greedy. He used the treasure he looted in the East to buy big properties in Rome including the ‘gardens of Demetrius’. By contrast Pompey always lived in a very modest house.

(41) Pompey was on his way to deal with the king of Petra when messengers arrive bearing the news that Mithridates is finally dead. He killed himself after the revolt of his son, Pharnaces in 63 BC.

Locked up by his son, Pharnaces, Mithridates has his two young daughters poisoned then asks his bodyguard Bituitus to kill him.

The new king, Pharnaces, writes to Pompey saying he wants peace and sends the corpses of his father and entourage. Pompey is amazed at the splendour of the dead king’s accoutrements, most of which are subsequently stolen.

(42) Pompey winds up his affairs in Asia Minor then heads back to Rome in what turns into a kind of triumphal tour, stopping to be publicly praised in Mytilene, Rhodes and Athens. As he gets closer to Italy he takes more serious the rumours that his wife, Mucia, had been living a wild and debauched life, and so divorced her, winning the enmity of her family.

(43) It’s 63 BC. There is much paranoia in Rome that Pompey is returning to conquer the city as Sulla had done in 82. Crassus flees the city with his children. But on arriving at Brundisium Pompey dismissed his army, telling them to return to their homes, and continued to Rome accompanied only by close friends and entourage. This won him huge popularity and crowds turned out to cheer him in every town. He really was a golden boy (well man – aged 43).

(44) A general was not supposed to enter Rome until his triumph. Pompey asked for a dispensation to help the campaign for consul of M. Pupius Piso but Cato argued against it and it was blocked. Pompey admired Cato and suggested he marry one of Cato’s nieces and have his son marry the other one, but Cato saw through this form of bribery and refused. Nonetheless Pompey spent a fortune bribing the voters to elect Afranius consul in 60.

(45) September 61, Pompey’s awesome triumph which took 2 days. Not only was it awesome in terms of territory conquered, kings defeated and revenue brought in but Pompey’s three triumphs had been one in Africa, one in Europe and one in Asia, as if he had conquered the whole world.

(46) If he had died at this point, Pompey would have gone down as one of the greatest generals in history. Instead he was to get mixed up in politics and the immense reputation he had won would in the end go to empower his rival Julius Caesar.

Lucullus and Cato band against Pompey and, in response, Pompey found himself allying with an unpleasant character, Publius Clodius Pulcher, who dragged his name into the mud and involved him in the shameful exile of Cicero (in 58).

(47) Caesar had returned from Gaul and, seeing that Crassus and Pompey were opponents and he couldn’t ally with one without alienating the other, had the bright idea of allying with both and persuading them to join in a coalition, the triumvirate, to promote all their interests, established at secret meetings in 60. Caesar was elected consul for 59. In the same year to everyone’s surprise Pompey now married Julius Caesar’s young daughter, Julia.

(48) Pompey now organises street gangs to terrorise the opponents of his plan to get land made available for his army veterans. His strongest opponent is Cato’s son-in-law, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus. A basket of dung is emptied over his head, his lictors are beaten up. The people are cowed into passing Pompey’s law. In 59 Publius Vatinius as tribune of the plebs proposed the lex Vatinia, which granted Caesar Cisalpine Gaul and IIlyricum for five years. At the instigation of Pompey and Piso the Senate added the province of Transalpine Gaul. The consuls for the following year were to be Piso, the father-in‑law of Caesar, and Gabinius, the most extravagant of Pompey’s flatterers. That is how the triumvirate administered their power.

Of their opponents Bibulus hid in his villa, Lucullus retired from public life altogether but Cato continued haranguing them in the Senate. In fact Pompey was soon seduced by his wife into retiring into private life. Caesar had disappeared off to Gaul so the political agenda was driven by Piso who got Cicero driven into exile (58) and then had Cato sent as governor to Cyprus. (Neither of these events are described in any detail, maybe because they’re dealt with in the respective lives.)

(49) Clodius then turned his scurrilous abuse against Pompey who regretted his acquiescence in Cicero’s exile. When Cicero was recalled he helped steer the passage of a corn law which placed Pompey in absolute control of Rome’s harbours, trading-places, distributions of crops — in a word, navigation and agriculture. Pompey really was the go-to guy to get things fixed.

(50) A brief note on Pompey’s success in sailing to Sicily, Sardinia and Africa to get grain. As usual Plutarch isn’t at all interested in the details but tells an improving story about Pompey’s words of encouragement to the captain of the fleet when a big storm arises as they’re about to set sail.

(51) Plutarch explains how Caesar’s time in Gaul was spent not only fighting the various tribes but in readying his army for civil strife, and in continually sending money and treasure back to Rome to bribe officials and the people to his side. Witness the conference he called at Luca in 66 to bolster the triumvirate which was attended by Pompey, Crassus, 200 men of senatorial rank and 120 proconsuls and praetors. The deal struck was that Caesar would send back enough soldiers to ensure the election of Crassus and Pompey as consuls for the following year on condition they passed a law getting Caesar’s command in Gaul extended.

(52) Cato, now back in Rome, encouraged his brother-in-law Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus to stand for the consulship of 55 but, true to the triumvirate pact, Pompey organised a gang to attack him and his entourage in the forum, killing his torchbearer and wounding Cato himself as he went to protect Domitius. It’s like the street fighting in Renaissance Italy or, more grimly, in Weimar Germany.

At the expiry of his consulship Crassus set off to be governor of Syria with authority over the entire East. Meanwhile Pompey opened his vast and splendid circus with a series of spectaculars, the one which stuck in everyone’s minds being a battle against elephants which horrified the spectators (including Cicero who records it in a letter).

(53) Pompey was criticised for his uxoriousness i.e. retiring to his villa to enjoy life with his young wife. She was devoted to him, maybe for the simple reason that among Roman men he was remarkably faithful. He was also handsome and had charming manners. Her devotion is demonstrated by the occasion on which a fight broke out in the forum and his toga was splashed with blood. His servants carried it home to be cleaned but when Julia saw it she fainted and miscarried. This sounds like an idealised folk story. Because for the purposes of the narrative she quickly has to be gotten pregnant again and nine months later, miscarry and die (in 54 BC). Pompey was distraught and wanted her buried at a family villa but the people insisted she was buried in the Campus Martius.

Plutarch then skips very quickly over Crassus’s defeat and death in Parthia (presumably because it’s dealt with at such massive length in his life of Crassus) skipping on to the main point which is that these 2 events marked the end of the triumvirate and the unravelling of the working relationship between Caesar and Pompey. He drops into graceful moralising:

So slight a thing is fortune when compared with human nature; for she cannot satisfy its desires, since all that extent of empire and magnitude of wide-stretching domain could not suffice for two men. They had heard and read that the gods “divided the universe into three parts, and each got his share of power” and yet they did not think the Roman dominion enough for themselves, who were but two. (53)

Beginning the slide into 25 years of civil war.

(54) The issue almost immediately was whether Caesar would lay down his command. Pompey made speeches pointing out how easily he had given up his command after returning from the East. Pompey tried to get his supporters into positions of power but discovered that Caesar had been quietly doing this for some time. Government became gridlocked and as soon as the following year, 53, a tribune suggested Pompey be made dictator. Elections of consuls stalled in 52 and even opponents such as Cato suggested Pompey be made sole consul, as being better than anarchy.

Pompey approached Cato in a private capacity to give advice, but Cato was typically priggish and said he would continue speaking his mind.

(55) Pompey marries Cornelia, widow of Publius Crassus, the son of Crassus who perished along with his father in Parthia. Critics thought it bad taste to be frolicking with garlands at a time of public crisis. He supervised public life effectively, placing soldiers at trials so they could continue without the usual barracking and intimidation. He was blamed for showing partiality in some trials but overall did a good job and was awarded governorship of his provinces for another five years.

(56) Caesar’s supporters said that he, too, deserved reward, and should have his command in Gaul extended. The suggestion was made that he should be allowed to stand for the consulship in his absence. Conservatives like Cato strongly objected, saying he should relinquish his command and return as an ordinary citizen to canvas.

(57) Pompey had a serious illness at Naples. When he recovered there was widespread rejoicing in that city and then in all the towns he passed through on his way back to Rome. Plutarch says this public support gave him a misleading sense of his own power. Back when the triumvirate was formed Pompey had sent two of the legions assigned to him to Gaul with Caesar. Now he asked for them back and they came commanded by Appius who made slighting comments about Caesar’s abilities. Pompey was fooled into thinking he had widespread support and military strength in Italy.

(58) Caesar based himself near to the border with Italy and intervened extensively in Roman politics, in particular bribing key officials in his favour and sending large blocs of soldiers to swing elections in his favour. A tribune made the suggestion that both generals lay down their arms at the same moment and became private citizens, thus not presenting a threat to the other. Opponents said Caesar was a public enemy and should simply relinquish his command, full stop, as he was not more powerful in the state and in no position to make demands of the senate.

(59) Marcellus announces that Caesar is crossing the Alps with ten legions and goes to see Pompey accompanied by the senate to call on him to save the state. But when Pompey tried to levy troops he was surprised at the poor response and reluctance. One reason was that Mark Anthony read out a letter from Caesar in which he suggested that he and Pompey give up their provinces and their armies and submit themselves to the people’s judgement. Cicero proposed a compromise that Caesar give up most but not all of his provinces and retain just 2 legions while he canvassed for a consulship. Arguments. Shouting.

(60) Now news came that Caesar was marching fast into Italy. Caesar pauses at the river Rubicon because it formed the boundary between his allotted province (Cisalpine Gaul) and Italy proper. In Cisalpine Gaul he was official commander and could do as he pleased. But crossing the river was an illegal act, and represented an invasion and subversion of the law.

Caesar took the decision to lead his army across the river and into Italy with the words ‘the die is cast’. The senate immediately asked Pompey to raise the army he had promised to protect Italy, Rome and them – but were horrified to learn that Pompey would struggle to raise a proper army. The legions Caesar had only recently sent back to him were unlikely to march against their former commander.

(61) Pandemonium in Rome, with endless rumour, an outflow of the panicking rich, an influx of refugees, collapse of magistrate authority and Pompey finding it hard to fix on a strategy. He declared a state of civil war, ordered all the senators to follow him, and that evening left the city.

(62) A few days later Caesar arrived in Rome, occupied it, ransacked the treasury for funds with which to pursue Pompey. Caesar wanted Pompey and his army cleared out of Italy before his army from Spain could arrive to reinforce him. Pompey takes his army to Brundisium, occupies and fortifies it then ferries his army ship by ship across to Albania. Caesar arrives but is held at the city walls for nine days while Pompey sailed.

(63) Caesar had sent a friend of Pompey’s, Numerius, to him with free and fair terms. But Pompey had sailed. Without bloodshed Caesar had become master of Rome and Italy. Now he set about and marched all the way to Spain to recruit the armies based there.

(64) Pompey now rallies an enormous army on lad and navy at sea. He inspires the training by taking part himself, aged 58. So many nobles flocked to him that they were able to recreate the senate.

(65) This senate passed a suggestion of Cato’s that no Roman be killed except in actual battle and no Roman cities subjected. This won even more people over to Pompey’s cause.

Meanwhile Caesar also was showing great clemency. After defeating Pompey’s forces in Spain he freely released the commanders and took the soldiers into his own service then marches back to Italy, to Brundisium and crossed to Oricum. He sent an emissary suggesting they lay down their arms, have a conference and become friends as of old. Pompey dismissed it as a trick. Pompey held the coast and dominated supplies. Caesar was hard pressed.

(66) Pompey’s allies pushed him to engage in open battle but Pompey correctly judged that a) Caesar’s army was more battle hardened after years in Gaul but b) they had less supplies – so he planned a war of attrition. Caesar struck camp and marched into Thessaly. Pompey’s supporters were jubilant and behaved as if they’d already won. He was encouraged to cross back to Italy, take total control of it and Rome. But Pompey didn’t want to a) run away again b) abandon his forces in Greece to Caesar c) bring bloodshed into Italy.

(67) So he chose to pursue Caesar, cutting his lines of communication and depriving him of supplies. Plutarch describes Pompey’s suspicions of Cato, who was with him in his camp but who he suspected would demand he lay down his command the second Caesar was defeated. Plutarch paints a grim picture of the politicking and squabbling among the politicians who had accompanied him and spent all their time criticising his plans. It affected his judgement.

(68) Pompey’s army comes out into the plain of Pharsalia. Various of his lieutenants vow not to return to camp until they had routed the enemy. That evening signs and portents are seen in the sky (as they always are). Pompey dreams he is laying tributes in the temple of Venus who was, of course, Caesar’s ancestor. At dawn Caesar was delighted to learn from his scouts that Pompey was preparing for battle.

(69) Pompey had twice as many men as Caesar, 40,000 to 22,000. But Caesar’s army assembled in quiet and confidence whereas Pompey’s were shouting and milling about in their inexperience.

(70) Plutarch takes a chapter to moralise on the pitiful tragic outcome of greed and folly which saw Roman pitted against Roman, family member against family member, when if they had united they could have conquered Scythia, Parthia even India.

(71) The Battle of Pharsalia 9 August 48 BC. Caesar’s troops scatter Pompey’s cavalry with the tactic of pushing their spears up into their faces. Then encircle Pompey’s infantry who panic.

(72) Caesar’s legions triumphed and pushed on into Pompey’s camp. Pompey left the battlefield to sit in his tent in shock, then rallied his men and rode away. 6,000 were killed. Caesar’s men found Pompey’s tents adorned with garlands, dressed for a feast. Such was their inexperience of battle and foolish hopes.

(73) Pompey escaped with a handful of companions. Plutarch paints him as mournfully reviewing the sudden collapse in his fortunes, the first time he’d ever lost a battle. He escaped to the coast and took a fisherman’s boat to a port where he boarded a merchantman. Its captain, Peticius, just happened to have had a dream the night before in which Pompey came imploring. Now he sculls up in a boat with a handful of companions in poor shape. Peticius takes them aboard and offers them a meal.

(74) They sail to Mytilene to take on board Pompey’s wife and son. He sends them a messenger. In best melodramatic tradition the messenger doesn’t say anything but his tears tell the story and Cornelia flings herself on the ground where she lies a long time motionless. Odd that this is the universal attitude of despair in these texts, compared with our modern stock attitude which would be thrashing around and ranting.

Cornelia is given a speech out of a Greek tragedy bewailing her lot, as wife to Publius Crassus, who met a miserable death in Parthia, and now wishing she had killed herself then and not brought bad luck to Pompey.

(75) Pompey is given a stock speech in reply about Fortune and they are only mortals and might rise again. Cornelia sends for her things. The people of Mytilene want to invite Pompey in but he refuses and says the conqueror will come soon enough. More interesting is the little digression in which Pompey was said to have had a conversation with the local philosopher, Cratippus, about Providence. Plutarch slips in the moral of the entire book:

For when Pompey raised questions about Providence, Cratippus might have answered that the state now required a monarchy because it was so badly administered.

The Romans mismanaged their way into a disastrous civil war.

(76) At its next stop the ship is met by some of Pompey’s navy. This has survived intact and he laments the fact that he didn’t make more use of it but allowed himself to be lured into battle far from the sea. He learns Cato rescued many of the soldiers and is shipping them over to Libya. He has been joined by his lieutenants and 60 or so senators. The plan is to recruit more men from the cities. Emissaries are sent out. Pompey and advisers debate where to hole up while they recuperate their forces. Some argue for Libya, some for far-off Parthia. But the strongest voices are for Egypt which is only three days’ sail ,away and where the young king Ptolemy owes his throne to Pompey.

(77) So they sail south to Egypt in a Seleucian trireme from Cyprus, accompanied by warships and merchant ships. When they arrive they discover Ptolemy is at war with his sister Cleopatra. Ptolemy’s advisers hold a conclave on what to do, led by Potheinus the eunuch. Theodotus the rhetorician wins the day by arguing they should kill Pompey thus pleasing Caesar and removing the threat.

(78) Pompey was in a small boat which had approached the shore. Potheinus and Theodotus deputed the task of receiving him to some Roman soldiers who had gravitated to Ptolemy’s court, Achillas, Septimius and Salvius. When the Romans saw a handful of men coming towards them in an ordinary boat, none of the pomp of the pharaoh, they sensed something was wrong. But as the Egyptian boat came up they and the Romans in it hailed them they saw other boats being manned on the shore. To fly would show lack of confidence and trigger attack. So Pompey embraced his wife who was already weeping as if he were dead, and taking a few servants, Philip and Scythe, stepped into the Egyptian boat.

(79) The men in the boat were cold and distant from Pompey. He took out his notebook to practice the speech to Ptolemy in Greek which he had practiced. As they reached the shore Pompey stretched his arm up to be helped to his feet and Septimius ran him through with a sword from behind, then Achillas and Salvius stabbed him, too. Pompey drew his toga over his face and fell.

(80) From the Roman fleet a mighty groan then they set sail and left before the Egyptian fleet could come out. The Egyptians cut off Pompey’s head and threw his body into the sea. His servant Philip waited till they’d left then scavenged along the shore for enough wood to build a pyre. Along comes an old Roman, a veteran, and offers to help, and so these two poor men built and supervised the burning of one of the greatest Romans of all.

Next day a ship carrying Lucius Lentulus comes into view, he lands and sees the pyre and asks Philip about his master’s fate, and delivers a lament as from a tragedy. Then he was captured by the Egyptians and also put to death.

Plutarch ends his narrative by tying up the loose ends. When Caesar landed and was presented with the head of Pompey he was disgusted, when shown his ring he burst into tears. He had Achillas and Potheinus put to death. King Ptolemy was defeated in battle and disappeared into the interior never to be heard of again. The sophist Theodotus fled but many years later, after Caesar’s assassination, Brutus tracked him down in Asia and had him put to death with many tortures. The ashes of Pompey were taken to his widow who buried them at his country house near Alba.

Roman reviews

Roman writers

Plutarch
Plutarch’s Lives of Marius and Sulla
Plutarch’s life of Sertorius
Plutarch’s Life of Lucullus
Plutarch’s Life of Crassus
Plutarch’s Life of Pompey
Plutarch’s Life of Cicero
Plutarch’s Life of Caesar
Plutarch’s Life of Cato the Younger
Plutarch’s Life of Antony
Plutarch’s Life of Brutus

Nero: the Man Behind the Myth @ the British Museum (2021)

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by Simon on May 9, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, War

Tagged Achillas, Aemilia, Afranius, agnomen, Amazons, Ancient history, ancient Rome, Antistia, Aristobulus, Armenia, Asia, Athens, Aulus Gabinius, battle of Pharsalia, Biography, Bituitus, Black Sea, Brutus, Caenum, Campus Martius, Carinas, Cato, Cato the Younger, Catulus, Cicero, Cilicia, Cinna, Cisalpine Gaul, civil war, Cleopatra, Cloelius, consulship, Cornelia, Cratippus, Cyprus, Demetrius, Domitius Ahenobarbus, Egypt, Elymaeans, First Triumvirate, Fortune, Gaul, Gnaeus Papirius Carbo, Gnaeus Pompeius, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, Greece, history, Hyrcania, IIlyricum, Italy, Julius Caesar, King Mithridates VI, Lepidus, lex Vatinia, Libya, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, Lucius Lentulus, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, Manilius, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, Marcus Crassus, Marcus Pupius Piso, Mark Anthony, Medes, Mediterranean, Metellus, Mytilene, Numerius, Numidia, Parallel Lives, Parthia, Parthian Empire, Perpenna, Peticius, Pharnaces, Philip, Phraates, pirates, Plutarch, Pompey, Pompey the Great, Pontus, Potheinus, Ptolemy, Publius Clodius Pulcher, Publius Crassus, Publius Vatinius, Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius, Rhodes, Roman history, Roman Senate, Rubicon, Salvius, Sardinia, Scipio, Scythe, Scythia, Septimius, Sertorius, Spartacus, Stratonice, Sulla, Theodotus, Thessaly, Tigranes, tribunate, trireme, triumvirate, Utica

Posted by Simon on May 9, 2022

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Cataline’s War by Sallust (42 BC)

Cataline’s War

As far as we know this was the first of Sallust’s historical works, written in 42 BC (maybe). It’s shorter than The Jugurthine War, with 61 brief ‘chapters’, apart from the two longer chapters containing the famous speeches to the Senate of Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger (51 and 52).

Summary

(Chapters 1 to 4) Introductory meditation on the importance of mind and reason in human affairs. Animals only have their bodies but humans have Mind and Reason and so should make the most of them. Sallust combines this insistence on Reason with the claim that human societies have declined: if only they were all and everywhere ruled by virtus or ‘mental excellence’, but in fact:

sloth has usurped the place of industry, and lawlessness and insolence have superseded self-restraint and justice…Thus the sway is always passing to the best man from the hands of his inferior.

Men who merely serve their bodies eat and sleep their way through life, leaving no trace, like cattle. Of ‘wakened’ men, some serve by deeds, some by words, and Sallust says that, of the latter, he considers writing history a particularly eminent achievement of the mind.

Sallust tells us that when he was a young man he was ambitious for public life, only to discover that ‘shamelessness, bribery and rapacity held sway’. But when he quit public life he didn’t want to rusticate but to use his mind. So he resolved to fulfil ‘a cherished purpose’ which worldly ambition had distracted him from, and to write a history of the Roman people, or at least portions of it. He was attracted to the Catiline conspiracy due to the extraordinary nature of the crime. So much for the Introduction.

(5) The character of Lucius Sergius Catilina, know in English as Catiline. From the start he had ‘an evil and depraved nature’. ‘Reckless, cunning, treacherous…violent in his passions.’ His disordered mind ever craved the monstrous, incredible, gigantic.’

But, importantly, it wasn’t his character alone which condemned Catiline – it was the fallen nature of the times which allowed such a character to flourish. This is a kind of dialectical theory: events are formed by a combination of bad individual character and the lax nature of the society which lets it flourish. Catiline is the result of the combination of bad character and ‘the corruption of public morals’.

(6 to 7) A digression on the founding of Rome: Aeneas, Romulus and Remus and then the city’s growth, the doughty quality of its warriors, alliances with other tribes. At first kings ruled wisely, but when corruption (inevitably) crept in and monarchy degenerated into ‘a lawless tyranny’, then the Romans created the system of paired consuls (in 509 BC according to legend). The aim was very consciously to prevent one person from ever having absolute power and the arrogance which goes with it. This freedom bred brave fighting men who competed fiercely with each other to win glory (7).

(8) He makes the point that Athens’ fame is greater than her deeds really warrant because she had educated men to write timeless histories about her achievements.

(9) He gives a laughably idealised view of ‘the good old days’ when upstanding morals, harmony and justice ruled and greed was unknown and the Romans ruled by ‘kindness’. When Romans were ‘lavish in their offerings to the gods, frugal in the home, loyal to their friends’.

(10 to 13) But then Rome grew big and rich, and when she defeated Carthage (in 146 BC), Fortune grew cruel and intervened to confuse her affairs. Hence the lust for money and power, the two roots of all evil.

Finally, when the disease had spread like a deadly plague, the state was changed and a government second to none in equity and excellence became cruel and intolerable.

(11) Sulla set a bad example. All men began to rob and pillage. The army was demoralised by the luxury of the Eastern nations they conquered. They learned to pillage homes and temples.

(12) Riches and greed made them lose their modesty and chasteness. Look at the temples of our forefathers, adorned with piety; compare them with the vast palaces of the modern nobles, overflowing with pillaged loot.

(13) The super-rich of his day (meaning Lucullus and Pompey) have carved waterways through mountains to feed their fishponds and build villas jutting out over the sea. Indulgence of all passions: men who dress as women, women who sell themselves. Gluttony.

(14) This, then, was the corrupt setting in which Catiline flourished. The wantons, gluttons, gamesters and criminals that he attracted. And if he did know anyone honest, they quickly became corrupted by his company.

(15) Catiline had many affairs. Lastly he is thought to have murdered his stepson in order to marry Aurelia Orestilla. Some say it was guilt at this which hastened his conspiracy.

(16) Catiline set up a veritable school of corruption for young men. Finally he conceived the idea of overthrowing the government for two reasons: 1. he was hugely in debt 2. a large number of veterans of Sulla’s wars had burned through their spoils and property and were ready for war. There was no army in Italy, Pompey being away in Syria. So he had motive and opportunity.

(17) From June 64 onwards Catiline sounds out likely co-conspirators. Sallust gives a list. Many said Marcus Crassus was connected, out of his rivalry with Pompey.

(18 to 19) The so-called First Conspiracy of Catiline 66 BC. A number of desperate men coalesced round Gnaeus Piso and a plan to assassinate that year’s consuls and overthrow the Senate. The date for action was set for January, then February, 65 but nothing came of it.

(19) Crassus who knew Gnaeus Piso was a desperate man had him sent as praetor to Hither Spain. In the event Piso was murdered by his own cavalry in Spain, though whether he was cruel and unjust to the locals and his own men, or whether Pompey put them up to it, who knows.

(20) Back to 64 BC and Sallust has Catiline give a (presumably largely fictional) speech to the conspirators. Sallust has him characterising the ruling class of Rome as rich and tyrannical and he and his conspirators as yearning for freedom and himself as a humble servant to be used for their liberation. Demagogic rhetoric.

(21) When they press him to be more specific, Catiline offers his listeners ‘abolition of debts, the proscription of the rich, offices, priesthoods, plunder, and all the other spoils that war and the license of victors can offer’. The most interesting idea is the way he revived memories of Sulla whose second dictatorship was a time of state-sanctioned murdering, plundering and looting.

(22) Sallust reports that people say that Sallust then bound the conspirators to him by passing round ‘bowls of human blood mixed with wine’. This implies the blood came from somewhere so, a human sacrifice (?).

(23) Quintus Curius, a man guilty of many shameful crimes whom the censors had expelled from the Senate because of his immorality, boasts to his mistress Flavia about this big important conspiracy he’s involved in, and then Flavia blabs to others. The rumour spreads and motivates many nobles to support Cicero for the consulship (elected in 64 to hold it in 63 BC).

(24) Cicero’s election alarms Catiline who intensifies his efforts: he stockpiles weapons at strategic locations. Men borrow and the few women supporters prostitute themselves to raise money. Catiline plans to win the city slaves to his side then set fire to Rome.

(25) The character of the leading woman accomplice, Sempronia, a gifted, well-educated woman who was immoral and unchaste, ‘had often broken her word, repudiated her debts and been privy to murder.’

(26) Despite all this, Catiline stood for the consulship for the following year, 63. Soon after taking up his consulship (i.e. January 63) Cicero got Quintus Curius to reveal the conspiracy to him. Cicero surrounds himself with a bodyguard. The day of the election comes and Catiline fails to be elected consul, making him all the more desperate.

(27) Catiline sends conspirators to various key locations, plans fires, calls a second conference of conspirators and identifies Cicero as their main obstacle.

(28) Gaius Cornelius, a knight, and Lucius Vargunteius, a senator, offer to pay a formal call on Cicero and then kill him. Curius blabs this plan to Flavia, who tells Cicero, who then makes sure not to be at home to visitors the next morning i.e. the time of the planned assassination visit.

Meanwhile, the Catiline emissary Manlius in Etruria works on various constituencies:

the general population, ripe for revolution because of penury and resentment at having lost their lands under Sulla
brigands of various nationalities
some members of Sulla’s colonies who had been stripped by prodigal living of the last of their great booty

(29) Cicero presents details of the plot before the Senate which takes the extreme step of awarding him extraordinary powers.

(30) Lucius Saenius reads a letter from Faesulae, stating that Gaius Manlius had taken the field with a large force on the twenty-seventh day of October. Rumours of subversive meetings, transportation of arms, and insurrections of slaves at Capua and in Apulia. The Senate sends generals to these locations and offers rewards for information, that gladiators be mustered and a watch kept at key points in Rome.

What all this really brings home is the consequences of not having an independent police force which acts for the good of the state but instead having to rely on the mustering of specific cohorts of troops under ad hoc leaders or generals. Far more unreliable and uncertain.

(31) Am atmosphere of fear and anxiety spreads across Rome. Catiline decides to face it out and comes to the Senate on 3 November when Cicero delivers a brilliant speech against him. Catiline makes a speech declaring his nobility and honesty and slurring Cicero as a low-born immigrant. But he is shouted down by the Senate and yells back that he will put out his own personal fire through a general conflagration.

(32) Catiline sneaks out of the city that night to join Manlius and his forces in Etruria, leaving behind conspirators to recruit more to the cause.

(33) Gaius Manlius sends a delegation from his army to Marcius Rex with a message which Sallust quotes in full, justifying the rebels as simply seeking their own safety and freedom from impositions.

(34) Quintus Marcius replies that the rebels must lay down their arms and put their case to the Senate. Catiline sends letters to nobles claiming that everything was slander by his enemies and he was leaving for exile in Massilia in the best interests of the state.

(35) But he sent a very different letter to Quintus Catulus, which is quoted in full. He claims to be: ‘Maddened by wrongs and slights, since I have been robbed of the fruits of my toil and energy and was unable to attain to a position of honour’ and so taking up arms on behalf of the poor and oppressed everywhere.

(36) Catiline arrives at Manlius’s camp and distributes arms. When it hears this the Senate declares Catiline and Manlius traitors and gives a deadline for the other conspirators to surrender. But none do and Sallust is moved to wonder at the obstinate wickedness of men who wanted to ruin Rome at the height of its peace and plenty, a plague of wickedness.

(37) Sallust reflects that Rome was like a cesspool which attracted the poorest, meanest elements, and this huge throng of the poor were roused by Catiline because they had nothing to lose and longed for change. Again, the insurrection of Sulla is mentioned as a time when poor or mediocre men suddenly saw their fortunes transformed. Poor labourers from the country hoped for better things. And men of the party opposed to the Senate wished for anyone else in power. In other words, there’s quite a list of disaffected groups which Catiline appealed to.

(38) Since the restoration of the tribunes of the plebs powers (Sulla took them away in 81, Pompey restored them in 70 BC) many populist rabble rousers had arisen who promised the people anything in order to get into power. But then Sallust is just as critical of many nobles who defended the Senate but for their own selfish reasons.

(39) Pompey’s restoration had left the rich, the few, with more power – control of the consulship, the provinces, the army and the law courts. Sallust thinks this power might have been destabilised in Catiline’s conflagration allowing a Great Man to take advantage of the situation. He doesn’t name names but probably means either Crassus or Caesar. Throughout the crisis Lentulus worked to gain supporters for the conspiracy from all classes.

(40) Lentulus gets Publius Umbrenus to approach the envoys of the Allobroges, a Gaulish tribe, to see if they will join. When they complain about the unfairness of Roman rule over them, Umbrenus takes them to the house of Decimus Brutus and discloses the conspiracy to them.

(41) The Allobroges ponder whether to join or not but decide not to and inform Quintus Fabius Sanga, their nation’s main patron in Rome, who alerts Cicero. Cicero tells them to feign interest, play along, and try and extract the names of all the conspirators.

(42) There were disturbances in Hither and Further Gaul and at places in Italy, as of bad planning and bad management by the conspirators, and the magistrates arrest many.

(43) The plan is firmed up: when Catiline arrives at Faesulae with his army, Lucius Bestia, tribune of the commons, should convoke an assembly and denounce Cicero which would be the signal for a general uprising: fires were to be set at twelve important points in the city to create confusion; Cethegus was to assassinate Cicero; other assassinations to be carried out; the eldest sons of several noble families to kill their fathers. Then all the supporters to leave the city and join Catiline’s army.

(44) The Allobroges meet again with the conspirators and demand signed proofs of their commitment. They are to leave the city accompanied by Titus Volturcius of Crotona.

(45) Knowing of all this Cicero sent some praetors and their soldiers to arrest the Allobroges and Volturcius at the Milvian Bridge.

(46) Cicero was uncertain how to behave. But he has the signed evidence he needs, now, and had the praetors bring the leading conspirators in Rome to him (being Lentulus, Cethegus, Statilius and Gabinius) and took them to the Temple of Concord where he convoked the Senate. Then he presented before them all the written and verbal evidence.

(47) When Volturcius was offered amnesty he spilled the beans, gave an exact account of the plans and mentioned other senior conspirators. Lentulus tries to deny everything till his letter is read out incriminating him. Ancient Rome not only had no police but no public prison, so the suspects had to be handed over to individual private citizens to be held pending trial.

(48) With the revelation of the plot the commons swing behind Cicero as saviour and execrate the conspirators.

(49) Lucius Tarquinius is arrested on his way to Catiline, brought before the Senate and, once offered a pardon, tells the same story as Volturcius, detailed: the intended fires, the murder of loyal men and the march of the rebels. He also implicated Crassus, who he says sent a message to Catiline that very day. Great discussion of whether this is true, but the Senate declares it a lie, and Sallust himself mentions that he heard Crassus declare it was a libel concocted by Cicero.

(50) Despite their arrest the ringleaders get their freedmen and slaves to scour the streets trying to raise insurrection. The Senate had by now had another session and declared the prisoners guilty, as well as half a dozen other senior nobles. What should be done with them? The consul-elect for the following year, Decimus Junius Silanus, says death. Julius Caesar influences many when he rejects the death penalty and says they just need to be tightly guarded.

(51) Sallust gives what claims to be the full verbatim speech of Caesar to the Senate, by far the longest chapter in the book at 43 lines and a rhetorical set piece. It echoes Sallust’s insistence at the start of the text that man is at his best when he uses pure intellect unclouded by passion and bias. Caesar says passion, fear, revenge must not motivate the Senate’s decision. Men will remember the conspirators’ end more than their malfeasance. Therefore the Senate must act clearheadedly in its own interests. They will be setting a precedent. They must consider how it will appear to aftertimes. Once you start punishing people without due process of law, you set a ball rolling which you can’t control. Caesar, also, invokes the memory of Sulla’s dictatorship and how the very people who welcomed his first few proscriptions found themselves caught up and executed in later ones. (cf the French Revolution.) This is why the Porcian laws had been passed, which exempted Roman citizens from degrading and shameful forms of punishment, such as whipping, scourging, or crucifixion.

Caesar sums up by recommending that the guilty men have their property confiscated and be held in strongholds in free cities, in other words in the nearest thing the Romans had to prisons.

(52) Caesar’s speech is then followed by a similarly long set-piece speech from Marcus Porcius Cato: he says they all know him as a scourge of luxury and decadence. He asks if they are ready to throw away their wealth and security. He introduces the idea that, although they have some of the conspirators in custody, Catiline himself and his army is still at large beyond Rome, in fact there are several armed groups around Italy still capable of attaching the city. If they show themselves soft now that will encourage the remaining conspirators. Therefore, although they had not actually got round to committing any acts of treason, Cato argues that the prisoners should be treated as if they had and executed.

(53) Cato’s argument wins. Senators who had been swayed by Caesar are won over by Cato. The guilty men are sentenced to death.

But then Sallust goes off on an extended digression. He describes how he has often read about and meditated on Roman history and why a small poor town managed to conquer the world. He became convinced it was due to the merit of specific citizens. In his time he has only known two of the first rank, Caesar and Cato. And so now he gives us a comparative portrait of both.

(54) Caesar became great though compassion and generosity, Cato through his stern righteousness. ‘One was a refuge for the unfortunate, the other a scourge for the wicked.’ It is interesting that he dwells on Caesar’s clementia or forgiveness, a quality Caesar was at great pains to promote.

(55) Digression over, we return to the narrative. Immediately following the Senate’s decision, Cicero in person led the guilty men to a dungeon called the Carcer, the so‑called ‘Mamertine Prison’, near the north-western corner of the Roman Forum. Here Lentulus, Cethegus, Statilius, Gabinius, and Caeparius were brought and the tresviri capitales (minor magistrates who had charge of prisons and executions and performed certain police duties) executed them by strangulation / hanging / garroting (the words used vary in different translations).

(56) Meanwhile, in central Italy, Catiline joined his force with Manlius’s to make up a force of two legions, albeit poorly armed. The loyal general Antonius pursues them from one camp to another.

(57) But when news arrived at Cataline’s camp that the chief conspirators had been executed in Rome, many began to desert. Cataline led the remainder north with a view to crossing the Alps. The loyalist Antonius is joined by Quintus Metellus Celer, with three legions. Seeing he is trapped between the enemy army and the mountains, Catiline addresses his men in a set piece exhortation:

(58) He starts by basely accusing Lentulus of cowardice. Then he says they’re trapped between two armies so must fight their way out. Once again Catiline casts himself and them as freedom fighters battling the oppression of the privileged few. There is no escape. They have to fight and sell their lives dear.

(59) The disposition of each army for the battle.

(60) It was a hard fight. Catiline proved himself ‘a valiant soldier and… skilful leader.’ When his centre was broken and he realised he is losing, Catiline plunged into the thick of the fight and was cut down.

(61) It is striking that Sallust’s account began with such an extended passage about the corruption of the times, and the decline of Roman morality, and then lingers on Catiline’s wretched corruption – and yet it ends with a hymn to the bravery of the soldiers on both sides who fought and fell like true men. It’s an incongruent ending.

Thoughts

No police

Any force could only be achieved via soldiers. In other words, the army plays such a prominent role in politics and the history of the Republic because there was no other force, no other source of authority and enforcement on the streets. This explains the extraordinary wrecking impact of the street gangs led by Publius Clodius Pulcher and Titus Annius Milo in the 50s, but it indicates a profound weakness at the centre of the Roman state.

Lack of courts and prisons

Cicero doesn’t know what to do with his defendants and has to convene the Senate to ask their advice. And then the Senate doesn’t know what to do with them, either. Classicists love their subject because of the dignity and sophistication of the people they describe and yet, stepping back, you can’t help thinking that Rome’s civic arrangements were pitifully inadequate to requirements. They were, quite literally, making it up as they went along, and this is part of the explanation for the sense of the ramshackle stumbling from one crisis to another which characterises the last 50 years of the Republic.

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Nero: the Man Behind the Myth @ the British Museum (2021)

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by Simon on April 25, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Literature, War

Posted by Simon on April 25, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/04/25/catalines-war-sallust/

The Jugurthine War by Sallust (41 BC)

The Jugurthine War by Gaius Sallustius Crispus is divided into 114 short numbered sections, generally referred to as ‘chapters’, although most of them are only a page or less in length. Sallust probably wrote it in 41 BC after he had abandoned a career in politics.

Summary

(Chapters 1 to 4) Introduction.

(5 to 6) Jugurtha’s family and Jugurtha’s character. He was the illegitimate nephew of the King of Numidia, Micipsa (ruled 149 to 118 BC). (Numidia consisted of the northern and coastal territory of what is now the modern state of Algeria.)

(8) Jugurtha is seconded to the Roman army of Scipio Aemilianus which is fighting against the Numantians. Jugurtha quickly learns warcraft and becomes popular with the army and Scipio.

(9) Alarmed at Jugurtha’s prowess, King Micipsa decides that, upon his death, he will divide his kingdom between his natural sons Adherbal and Hiempsal, and Jugurtha.

(12) Micipsa duly dies in 118 BC and his kingdom is divided up as he wished, but Jugurtha swiftly moves to have the younger son, Hiempsal, assassinated.

(13) Jugurtha turns to attack Adherbal and the latter flees to Rome to ask for help.

(14) Fearing the Senate will take Adherbal’s side, Jugurtha sends ambassadors to Rome, who confront Adherbal in the Senate-house, where Adherbal makes a speech.

(15 to 16) Bribed by Jugurtha, the Senate decides not to punish him but to divide Numidia between Jugurtha and Adherbal. Jugurtha bribes Roman officials to make sure he gets the more fertile western part of Numidia.

(17 to 19) Digression: a description of the geography and inhabitants of Africa which, as far as I can see, is fanciful and worthless.

(20 to 21) 113 BC Jugurtha invades Adherbal’s part of the kingdom, defeats him and besieges him in Cirta.

(22) Roman deputies arrive to broker a peace deal but Jugurtha ignores them.

(23 to 24) Adherbal’s distress prompts him to write a letter to the Senate.

(25 to 26) Jugurtha ignores a second Roman deputation, this time headed by Marcus Scaurus, a respected member of the aristocracy, takes Cirta and puts Adherdal to death along with Roman merchants who happened to be in the city, thus scandalising Roman public opinion.

(27 to 28) 111 BC The Senate decides Jugurtha has gone far enough, votes for war and sends one of that year’s consuls, Lucius Calpurnius Bestia to warn him.

(29 to 30) Jugurtha bribes Calpurnius and makes a treaty with him, according to which he hands over his war elephants and pays a trivial fine, a treaty which key figures in the Senate, also in receipt of bribes, proceed to ratify.

(29 to 30) But when the treaty is discussed at Rome the tribune Gaius Memmius spearheads popular opposition to it and demands an inquiry.

(33 to 34) Jugurtha is summoned to Rome and realises it is wise to attend. But while there he a) bribes tribunes of the plebs to veto proceedings so he is not called to testify to the Senate; and b) manages to arrange the assassination of his cousin and rival, Massiva. Heavily bribed, the Senate again wanted to look the other way but was forced by popular outcry to order Jugurtha to quit Italy (instead of throwing him in prison).

(35 to 36) 110 BC Spurius Postumius Albinus, successor to Calpurnius as consul, renews the war but lacks energy to drive it home, before returning to Rome and leaving his brother, Aulus Postumius Albinus, in command.

(37 to 38) Aulus allows himself to be lured into the desert where he is defeated, losing half his army. The other half is forced to ‘pass under the yoke’ in a disgraceful sign of submission. Aulus is forced to conclude a dishonourable treaty with Jugurtha.

(39) Outraged, the Senate annuls the treaty and sends back Albinus to continue the war.

(40 to 41) The people demand an inquiry into the conduct of a whole series of nobles who have clearly been bribed by Jugurtha to repeatedly let him go free or signed corrupt treaties with him. Sallust gives a summary of the opposing popular and senatorial factions.

(43 to 44) The Senate finally appoints a capable military commander, Quintus Metellus, who proceeds to retrain and rediscipline the lax army of Africa (109 BC). He picks his senior officers on merit rather than good family connections, and so appoints the former tribune Gaius Marius to a senior command. Sallust gives a brief profile of Marius, the man who was to dominate Roman politics in the years after the war.

(46) Spurning Jugurtha’s bribery and offers of peace, Metellus marches into Numidia.

(47) Metellus establishes a garrison in Vacca and talks some of Jugurtha’s lieutenants into deserting him.

(48 to 54) Metellus’s lieutenant, Rutilius, puts to flight Bomilcar, the general of Jugurtha, but Roman stragglers are picked off by Jugurtha’s forces.

(55) Metellus’s success is celebrated in Rome.

(56) Metellus besieges the town of Zama, Marius repulses Jugurtha at Sicca.

(57 to 60) Metellus’s camp is taken by surprise by Jugurtha’s forces.

(61) Metellus raises the siege and goes into winter quarters. He persuades Bomilcar to come over to the Roman side.

(62) Metellus makes a treaty with Jugurtha, who breaks it.

(63 to 65) Profile of Marius who is ambitious for the consulship. When the patrician Metellus pooh-poohs his ambitions, Marius becomes resentful and schemes against his commander. In the years to come experiences like this will help to define Marius as the leader of a ‘Popular’ or ‘People’s’ party.

(66 to 67) The Vaccians surprise the Roman garrison and kill all the Romans except for Turpilius, the governor.

(68 to 69) Metellus recovers Vacca and puts Turpilius to death for treachery.

(70 to 72) Bomilcar and Nabdalsa conspire against Jugurtha but Jugurtha discovers their plot.

(73) Finally, Metellus gives Marius leave to return to Rome where he successfully campaigns to be elected consul and is given command of the army in Numidia i.e. replacing Metellus.

(74) Meanwhile, Metellus defeats Jugurtha who flees to the town of Thala (108 BC).

(75 to 76) Metellus pursues Jugurtha who abandons Thala, and Metellus takes possession of it.

(77 to 78) Metellus receives a deputation from Leptis who explain its strategic and economic importance.

(79) History of the Philaeni.

(80 to 81) Jugurtha collects an army of Getulians and wins the support of Bocchus I, King of Mauritania and Jugurtha’s father-in-law. The two kings march towards the town of Cirta.

(82 to 83) Upon hearing that Marius has been appointed to replace him, a very irritated Metellus ceases prosecuting the war, reverting to diplomatic efforts to separate King Bocchus from Jugurtha.

(84 to 85) Back in Rome, a description of Marius’s popularity with the people of Rome and scorn for the nobility i.e. a man after Sallust’s heart. Marius gives a very long speech to the people castigating the Optimates (the nobility) as apathetic, resting on the laurels of their ancestors and haughtily despising Marius for being a ‘new man’ i.e. not coming from an ancient and venerable family. Then he sails for Africa.

(86 to 87) 107 BC Marius arrives in Africa, where Metellus hands over command without actually having to meet him.

(87 to 88) Reception of Metellus in Rome and the plans of Marius.

(89 to 91) Marius marches against Capsa and takes it.

(92 to 94) Marius gains a fortress which the Numidians thought impregnable after a junior soldier discovers a secret way up the hill it’s built on.

(95 to 96) Arrival of the quaestor Lucius Cornelius Sulla in Marius’s camp, his character and ambitions. The rivalry between these two men will become the central thread of Roman politics.

(97 to 98) Jugurtha and Bocchus’s massed armies attack Marius and catch him by surprise. The Roman army is forced to form protective circles to survive.

(99) As night falls the Numidians retire to a badly organised camp and at dawn Marius, having rallied the Roman troops, surprises them and routs them with great slaughter.

(100) Marius’s vigilance and discipline.

(101) Marius fights a second battle at Cirta against Jugurtha and Bocchus and gains a second victory over them (106 BC).

(102) Marius receives a deputation from Bocchus and sends Sulla and Manlius to confer with him.

(103) King Bocchus intends to send ambassadors to Rome but before they leave Africa they are set upon and stripped by robbers. They take refuge in the Roman camp and are entertained by Sulla during the absence of Marius.

(104) Bocchus’s ambassadors finally make it to Rome. The answer which they receive from the Senate.

(105 to 107) Bocchus invites Sulla to his camp for a conference.

(108 to 109) Negotiations between Sulla and Bocchus.

(110 to 113) Speech of Bocchus to Sulla and Sulla’s reply. In sum: Bocchus is persuaded to betray Jugurtha.

(114) Jugurtha is invited to Bocchus’s camp expecting another of their comradely meetings. Instead he is arrested and then taken in chains to Rome. All his followers are massacred. For bringing the war to an end Marius is awarded a formal triumph through Rome (104 BC), much to the enduring resentment of Sulla who feels it was he who carried out all the dangerous negotiations.

For his treachery, Bocchus is awarded the western half of Numidia and made ‘a friend of the Roman people’. Jugurtha is dragged through the streets as part of Marius’s triumph and then dies in a Roman prison.

Thoughts

Corruption

Rome fought many wars. Sallust chooses to describe the Jugurthine war because it exemplifies his central theme of the decline and fall of the Roman aristocracy and state. Even at the time it became a running scandal that the war dragged on for such a long time because Jugurtha successfully bribed officials who were sent to negotiate with him and then, when he actually visited Rome, enough senators and tribunes to prevent any serious steps being taken against him.

Marius and Sulla

As this summary shows, the two key figures who were to dominate Roman politics for the next 20 years, down to 78 BC – Marius and Sulla – first served together, got to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and built up grudges against each other, during the protracted campaigns of the Jugurthine War, and Sallust’s digressions to give us portraits of each man are historically important, given the roles they were to go on and play during the civil war between them.

Patchy

Sallust’s descriptions of Africa’s geography and peoples are worthless hearsay and legend. Woodman expresses the general puzzlement of scholars at the fact that we know that Sallust actually served in Africa and yet his description of the territory is terrible. And he served in the army in Africa, and yet the same goes for his descriptions of military manoeuvres and battles, particularly the long drawn-out Battle of the Muthul, which are obscure and confusing.

Autopsy

Incidentally, his brief description of Sallust’s puzzling ignorance of African geography also highlights the odd way with words of the editor and translator of the Penguin edition of Sallust, A.J. Woodman. Woodman ponders whether Sallust had an ‘autoptic’ view of Africa and had performed an ‘autopsy’ (page xxi). I don’t think I’d ever read the word ‘autoptic’ before and never come across ‘autopsy’ referring to geography. On looking them up I learned that ‘autoptic’ means ‘seen with one’s own eyes; belonging to, or connected with, personal observation’ and, in this context, an ‘autopsy’ can mean a personal survey of a place or event.

So Woodman is technically correct to use the words autopsy and autoptic to discuss the extent to which the digression describing the geography of Africa in the Jugurthine War is based on Sallust’s first-hand experience, or was copied from secondary sources.

Odd use of the word, though, isn’t it? And, along with his misleading use of ‘prowess’ to translate virtus (described in the previous blog post) and other oddities, Woodman’s lexical eccentricity eventually drove me from reading the Penguin translation altogether. I read the older translations which are available online.

War crimes

I couldn’t help being disturbed by the Roman war crimes which Sallust describes. The Roman army behaved abominably. For example, at the end of 107 BC Marius made a dangerous desert march to Capsa in the far south where, after the town surrendered, he executed all the inhabitants, men, women and children. This kind of thing happens several times.

Sallust always justifies and explains these tactics, giving the impression they were not standard, that they were part of a deliberate strategy of intimidation or terror. Nonetheless, especially given the time when I was reading Sallust – as Putin’s Russia continued to devastate Ukraine, murdering innumerable innocent civilians – these ancient acts read like inexcusable atrocities and war crimes.

Roman reviews

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The Jugurthine War by Sallust (41 BC)
The Catiline Conspiracy by Sallust (42 BC)

Nero: the Man Behind the Myth @ the British Museum (2021)

Woodman’s odd way with words:

disclose xi

exploit our endurance xvii

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by Simon on April 22, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Ancient history, History, War

Posted by Simon on April 22, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/04/22/the-jugurthine-war-sallust/

Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland (2003) – 2

Including the timeline, the text of Rubicon is 400 pages long. Julius Caesar, whose life and death signified the end of the Republic, makes his first appearance on page 111. In other words, three-quarters of the text is devoted to the 70 or so years covering the super-famous events of: the life of Julius Caesar, the civil war with Pompey, Caesar’s assassination just as he was about to assume absolute power, the civil war between his assassins (Brutus, Cassius) and Caesar’s adopted heir Octavian in partnership with Caesar’s closest ally Mark Anthony; and then the war between Octavian and Anthony which ended with the latter’s defeat and suicide and the former’s ascent to supreme power in about 30 BC.

This is probably the most famous part of Roman history, covered in hundreds of thousands of papers and articles, tens of thousands of books, and scores of Hollywood movies. How does Tom Holland handle it?

A pacy page-turner

To quote the title of a Somerset Maugham book, with ‘The Mixture as Before’. The narrative is fast-moving and pacy, with enough facts and dates to give a sense of thriller-style, page-turning momentum.

Holland likes using flashy ‘contemporary’ references to make it all feel more accessible or relevant to our times (‘stormtroopers’, ‘big business’, ‘financial lobby’, ‘hit squads’, ‘glad handing’ 202, ‘moral majority’ 212, ‘low rent’, ‘gangster chic’, ‘star quality’ 233, ‘mutually assured destruction’ 294, ‘blitzkrieg’ 307).

In the same spirit some of the chapter titles are quotes designed to make it all sound cool and referential (chapter titles like ‘Luck be a Lady’, ‘Return of the Native’ and ‘The Debt to Pleasure’).

All the chapters have jokey sub-headings. ‘The winner takes it all’ is a humorous reference to the Abba song, ‘Mutually assured destruction’ a reference to a completely different realm of human activity. They are perky and humorous but my heart sank when I came to the one titled ‘The war against terror’ (p.169).

Oh dear. A touch of the Mary Beards. Thinking that making references to 9/11-related events makes your history more relevant, when it often does the opposite – as the years pass, what was once a cool, topical reference itself becomes dated and dusty, until it eventually requires a footnote of its own to be understood. The war against terror was the talk of the town in 2003 when this book was published, but has been superseded by a number of other impressive crises since.

But those are details. The main point is that Holland’s handling of the key characters in the story, described in pop psychology (‘the two old enemies were at daggers drawn’) dressed up in airport thriller phraseology, makes the narrative fantastically gripping and exciting to read.

Holland brings the crucial players of these fraught decades – Sulla, Pompey, Cicero, Cato, Caesar, Lucullus, Crassus, Clodia – to life with a vividness I’ve never encountered before. And he very effectively sets these characters amid the relentlessly poisonous machinations of republican politics. Holland takes you deep into a world of toxic and unending political and personal rivalries, feuds and conspiracies. It is, as no less an authority as Boris Johnson is quoted as saying, a gripping read.

It’s also fantastically complicated. You need to get to know each of the main players and then follow Holland’s detailed description of how they reacted to (or created) each successive political crisis in a state which seems – in his account – to be permanently teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

But his account has other merits. The fast-moving narrative is regularly interspersed with passages which slow down to describe Roman culture and values, or key locations and buildings in ancient Rome, or aspects of the arcane, over-complex and ever-evolving Roman constitution. I found these consistently illuminating and interesting.

Rather than try to capture the impossible complexity of the political story, in this blog post I’ll list the most interesting social and cultural facts that Holland describes.

Social and cultural history

Fathers and children

A Roman father was at liberty to reject a baby born to his wife. He had to undertake a ceremony to actively accept it as his own. Many sons and more daughter were abandoned on the city’s many rubbish dumps (a fact Mary Beard repeats several times in her history of ancient Rome, SPQR) (p.112). A third of babies died before reaching their first year. Which might be why Latin has no specific word for ‘baby’.

As soon as possible, boys were taught to harden their minds and bodies in readiness for warfare and citizenship. Girls were prepared for marriage. Many were married off as soon as legally possible, aged 12. However, daughters never ceased to be wards of their fathers i.e. owed more allegiance to father and family than to their husband. A daughter who didn’t try to influence her husband in the name of her father’s interests was regarded as a bad daughter (p.115).

Marriage politics

Because more girls than boys were likely to be abandoned at birth, there was a permanent imbalance between the sexes, with fewer eligible wives. Thus there was no such thing as a ‘spinster’ (unmarried older woman) in ancient Rome (p.118). When it came to marriage, love was nothing, politics was everything. Which explains why we read of the marriages of the most powerful being contracted or terminated with surprising speed and ruthlessness, as the political situation shifted and the need for a new marriage alliance became clear.

Caesar’s first marriage

Which is why a young Julius Caesar accepted with alacrity the offer of the daughter of Rome’s strongman, Cinna, in marriage, because it tied him to the ruling administration. But after Cinna was murdered by his own troops and Sulla returned to Rome for his second and longer period of dictatorship, Caesar’s canny marriage became a liability.

In fact his marital alliance might even have prompted Caesar’s execution in the massacre of his opponents which Sulla carried out. In the end Caesar was lucky – other contacts and connections redeemed him in Sulla’s eyes. The dictator simply ordered him to divorce her.

To everyone’s surprise, Caesar refused to and, knowing the likely consequences, promptly left Rome to join a Roman army campaigning in the East, in Anatolia. Here he made his name in the siege of Mytilene, capital of the island of Lesbos, which was holding out against Sulla’s imposition of Rome rule.

An aristocrat’s house

An aristocrat’s house wasn’t considered a home. It wasn’t somewhere he could retreat to privacy and intimacy. On the contrary it was a stage on which he displayed his magnificence. The hall of Julius Caesar’s father’s house was lined with the wax death masks of his successful ancestors, with lines connecting them backwards in time all the way to Aeneas, legendary prince of Troy and forebear of Romulus and, through him, back to the goddess Venus herself.

An aristocrat’s house was more like an office, with the hall full of clients queueing to ask favours or political colleagues waiting to discuss deals. They didn’t smoke because no-one smoked because tobacco hadn’t been discovered. Otherwise they would have been full of smoke-filled rooms and grateful clients kissing the hands of their patron, promising loyalty in return for favours, exactly as in The Godfather.

Staffing the Roman army

The Roman Army had no military academy; there was no education or training in military affairs. Instead staff officers were appointed on the basis of contacts and family. There was some meritocracy in the field (the best officers were promoted) but it began with, and was rooted in, belonging to the senatorial or aristocratic elite and having the right connections (p.124).

For hundreds of years the Roman army had been manned by peasant farmers recruited off the land and officered by their social superiors. But by the last century BC two big things had changed. The pattern of peasant smallholdings which used to lattice the Italian landscape had been severely eroded. The rich had been buying up land for a century or more to such an extent that, when Spartacus led his rebels through central Italy, they found themselves moving through an agricultural wasteland, vast fields manned by slaves in chain gangs with only the very occasional large villa and farm complex. The peasant smallholder, the backbone of the Roman army, had disappeared.

Second thing was that, while military campaigns were restricted to Italy, they were generally of short duration. Even the first Punic War in Sicily wasn’t very far away and troops could be rotated. But once armies were sent to Carthage (149 BC) or against Mithradates in faraway Turkey in the 90s, or even further east towards Armenia or Parthia, then these were campaigns far from home which might last for years.

An army made up of peasant farmers who volunteered to fight for one year was no longer nearly enough to supply the Republic’s needs. Which is why in 107 BC Gaius Marius had been forced to abandon a time-honoured rule that the army only admitted citizens with property, and to pass a new law admitting the poorest of the poor to the army. The state would supply their arms. In other words, the legions had become professionalised (p.166). In a telling summary Holland says that, possession of a farm was longer the qualification for being a soldier – it became the reward.

Roman law

The one area of life which competed with the military as the launch pad for a career in public life was the law. The Republic had no public prosecutor or police service. Therefore law cases were taken out by private individuals and prosecuted, in public, by the best advocates.

Law cases were heard in public. There were two permanent law tribunals set up in the Forum. This meant law cases had always been public performances, where advocates used all the tricks in the book, including mimicry, appeals to the audience, brutal sarcasm and threats, to win the crowd and a judge over. Knowledge of the law was considered secondary to eloquence, in the widest sense.

Which is why the Romans used the same word, actor, for a prosecuting lawyer or a performer on a stage. Though the social classes involved were miles apart, the skills required were surprisingly similar.

As well as no police force or prosecutor’s office, the Republic also had no prison system which meant that losing a high profile case led to a handful of extreme punishments – to fines, confiscations of property, or exile, or death. (When Julius Caesar suggested that the members of the Catiline conspiracy be imprisoned for life, his suggestion was laughed to scorn and Cato the Younger won the day with his suggestion that they simply be executed in the good old-fashioned way, p.208).

Anyone convicted of a crime was stripped of their citizenship and, if they set foot back in Italy after exile, could be murdered with impunity. To put it mildly, this added a life-or-death edge, excitement and bitterness, to law cases (p.125).

Cicero

The most famous lawyer from this period, and the figure we know most about in the history of the whole Republic, was Marcus Tullius Cicero, lawyer, scholar, philosopher and statesman. We know him simply because such a vast amount of his writings have survived, including no fewer than 1,000 letters.

Mary Beard’s history of Rome relies heavily on Cicero’s letters and texts and the aspects of the life of an ambitious, upper class Roman which they document in such detail.

Holland, also, uses this goldmine of information to good effect, going into great detail about Cicero’s life and achievements, or, more accurately, the way his life intertwined with the political tribulations and crises of his times. Cicero was elected to each of the principal Roman offices (quaestor, aedile, praetor, and consul) on his first try and at the earliest age at which he was legally allowed to run for them. He was friend and ally of key players, such as Pompey the Great, as the Republic hurtled towards its final civil war.

Slavery

The rebellion of Spartacus and his gladiators in 73 BC, which turned into a massive slave rebellion, was treated with disappointing brevity in Mary Beard’s history. Here Holland uses the Spartacus uprising as a peg on which to hang a couple of pages describing slavery in late Republican Rome.

Slavery in ancient Rome was on an awesome scale and of numbing brutality. Possibly as many as a million slaves had been imported into Italy, where they performed a huge variety of roles. Some were the pampered favourites of the very rich who sometimes set them free (such as Cicero’s devoted secretary Tiro, whom he freed). Many were the sole slave in an ordinary urban household. But huge numbers were worked to death in the fields or in the vast mines of southern Spain: ‘Syrians toiling in Spanish mines, Gauls in chain-gangs on Sicilian estates’ (p.171).

Beard and Holland presumably used the same source when they both give the estimate that as many as 40,000 slaves toiled in the Spanish mines! Field workers in Italy wore shackles and chains, were branded, fed the minimum possible, endlessly punished with the whip or elaborate tortures and, when they were finally broken, abandoned in the countryside to die and rot (p.146).

Educated Romans’ obsession with libertas must be understood as the product of a slave society, indeed a citizen’s freedom gained meaning and spice by comparison with the radically unfree who he saw all around him and in his own household. Just like the rhetoric of ‘freedom’ tossed about by Confederate politicians and journalists in 1860s America was undermined by the presence of 4 million slaves, so all the ‘lofty’ posturing about ‘freedom’ by Roman writers must be set against the slave labour which underpinned their entire way of life.

At the great Greek free port of Delos it was said that up to 10,000 slaves might be sold in a single day (p.170).

During the late second century the Gauls beyond the Alps discovered wine and became addicted to it. The Romans sold it to them at inflated prices. By the time Caesar arrived in Gaul in the 50s BC, the price had stabilised: Romans sold Gauls a jar of wine in exchange for one slave. The result was that the Gaulish tribes were continually raiding each other to capture slaves to sell to the Romans, thus depopulating their own land, not unlike black Africans over a millennium and a half later (p.247).

Contemporaries reported that Caesar’s conquest of Gaul involved, in total, some 1 million dead and 1 million sold into slavery. (p.281)

Pompey and the pirates

During the first century the number of pirates sailing the Mediterranean increased notably. Capture by pirates became a real and continual risk. Caesar himself was captured in 75 BC. When they demanded a ransom of 20 talents Caesar indignantly insisted he was worth 50. He also promised that he would return, capture and crucify his captors, and he kept his word (p.169).

It was well known that the pirates grouped together in leagues with leaders who called themselves kings. They not only attacked ships at sea but raided and plundered inland, too. Intimidated coastal towns paid security money. Some harbours made a good living hosting pirate fleets.

People captured by pirates and not eminent enough to be ransomed, were generally sold into the vast slave industry which fuelled Roman wealth.

Pirates, just as much as the hundreds of thousands who joined Spartacus’s rebellion, were the product of war and social breakdown. They didn’t seek to change or overthrow the system, but to live better lives, which is why they set up parallel structures of power, with their own elections and leaders.

Eventually pirates threatened the shipping lanes which were the lifeblood of Rome’s economy. In 74 BC the Senate appointed one Marcus Antonius to clear the seas, but he was roundly trounced by a pirate fleet off Crete and the chains the Romans had brought to shackle the pirates were used on their owners, who were then hung from the yardarms (p.173).

Things came to a head when, in 68 BC, a pirate fleet sailed into Rome’s own harbour, the port town of Ostia, burned the consular war fleet as it lay at anchor and then set Ostia itself alight. The people rioted in the Forum and demanded something be done, so the Senate appointed young Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus to the job, giving him command of 500 ships and 120,000 men.

To everyone’s surprise it took Pompey only three months to defeat the pirates at sea, storm their final stronghold, defeat their leaders and end the scourge of piracy for good (p.175).

A new decadence

It was in these last years of the Republic, the 80s, 70s, 60s and 50s, that wealth on an unprecedented scale led to the flaunting and decadence which most of us (well, I) associate more with the Emperors.

Buildings

On his return from years campaigning in Asia, Lucius Licinius Lucullus spent the loot he had acquired abroad building huge country villas and flashy coastal palaces complete with elaborate landscaping and gardens containing rare plants. Lucullus’s longest lasting legacy to Italy was to bring back cherry trees from the area of Pontus on the Black Sea (p.186).

Julius Caesar had a villa built in the countryside and the minute it was finished, had it demolished for failing to quite reach his desired specifications (p.197).

Haute cuisine

Then as now, was associated with nobs and snobs, an indicator of decadence at a time when many people struggled to feed their families. New fads and fashions swept through the Republic’s wealthy, including the serving of dormice, scallops, fatted hares, peacocks and sows’ vulvas (p.187).

Pisciculture

Most treasured were fish and the super rich began building elaborate fish ponds which they stocked with the rarest species, lampreys and bearded mullet. Cicero and Cato railed against the ‘fish fanciers’ and the decadence which this ostentatious obsession with pisciculture signified but the fashion just spread (p.187).

Dancing

Dancing was another activity associated with licentious Greece and heartily disapproved of by stern old senators. Cicero thought that a culture that permitted dance culture was on the point of catastrophe. In all seriousness, he attributed the decline of Greece to its permissiveness about dance, which rots the mind (pages 193 to 194).

Dandies

Young Julius Caesar was a dandy (p.321), famous for the fastidious arrangement of his toga but he was far from unique. He was one of the first among an increasing band of young men about town in the 70s and 60s who paraded the latest fashions, for dress, cuisine, even haircuts. Pompey’s quiff, Caesar’s hair brushed forwards, the new generation were dedicated followers of fashion.

Slumming

Holland even describes a growing fashion for the absolutely bluest of blue-blooded aristocrats to affect a working class accent, the equivalent of Mockney, knowing and superior and ironic and satirical all at the same time (p.191).

Unrepublican, unmanly

Conservatives summed up all these traits under the heading of effeminacy. Only women should care about their hair or their clothes. The task of a Roman aristocrat was to be tough, manly, virile and hard; to cultivate the military virtues, to undergo the same vicissitudes as his men while on campaign and to live frugally and wisely back in the big bad city. What disconcerted the conservatives was that Pompey and Caesar managed to combine both, being notably stylish men about town in their twenties but also proving to be charismatic leaders of astonishingly successful armies.

In the end, it wasn’t fancy fish and foppish hairstyles which did for the Republic. It wasn’t a lack of manliness, it was the precise opposite, an excess of toxic masculinity. It was the collapse of the Republic’s elaborate, complex, multi-layered system of elections and magistracies designed to hold competitive alpha males in check, and their replacement by a simpler, more blood-soaked order in which possession of an army – such as Caesar’s battle-hardened Army of Gaul – which was the key to power.

Credit

Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland was published in 2003 by Little, Brown. All references are to the 2004 Abacus paperback.

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Nero: the Man Behind the Myth @ the British Museum (2021)

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by Simon on March 2, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Slavery, War

Posted by Simon on March 2, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/03/02/rubicon-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-the-roman-republic-tom-holland-2/

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All posts in category War

Context

The African War

1 to 6: Arrival

7 to 19: Operations near Ruspina

19 to 36: Waiting at Ruspina

37 to 48: Operations near Uzitta

49 to 66: Caesar takes the offensive

67 to 78: The Pompeians lose the initiative

79 to 86: The battle of Thapsus

87 to 98: Final stages of the campaign

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The Alexandrian War

1 to 4: Military preparations

5 to 9: the water supply poisoned

10 to 25: Naval engagements

26 to 33: The last stages

34 to 41: Events in Asia

42 to 47: Events in Illyricum

48 to 64: Events in Further Spain

65 to 78: Operations in the East leading up to the battle of Zela, August 47 BC

78: good administration

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Were the Romans good governors?

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Part 3: The great confrontation (112 sections)

1 to 6: Caesar in Italy – Pompey’s preparations

7 to 19: Negotiations in Epirus

20 to 22: Trouble in Italy

23 to 30: Antony runs the gauntlet

31 to 38: The lieutenants in Macedon

39 to 58: Stalemate at Dyrrachium

59 to 74: Setbacks for Caesar

75 to 81: Caesar moves to Thessaly

82 to 84: Pompey follows

85 to 101: The battle of Pharsalus

102 to 105: The death of Pompey

106 to 112: Caesar at Alexandria

Thoughts

The war instinct

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Gardner’s introduction

How it was written

The Civil War

A note on the army

Part 1: The struggle begins (87 chapters)

1 to 6: Intransigence at Rome

7 to 15: Caesar reacts

16 to 23: The siege of Corfinium

24 to 29: Pompey leaves Italy

30 to 33: Caesar’s Senate

34 to 36: Resistance at Massilia

37 to 55: The first Spanish campaign – Ilerda

56 to 58: The naval fight at Massilia

59 to 80: Spain – a war of attrition

81 to 87: The Pompeians capitulate

Part 2: Securing the West (44 chapters)

1 to 16: The siege of Massilia

17 to 21: Spain – surrender of Varro

22: Massilia capitulates

23 to 36: Africa – Curio’s campaign

37 to 44: Curio’s last stand

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Book 5: The second rebellion

1 to 8: Illyricum and Gaulish rebels

9 to 25: Second expedition to Britain