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.
Books & Boots 