Once Caesar had taken the initiative there was no reason to delay. The defenders of the republic could call on the two legions in Italy and then on a further seven in Spain where Pompey still had a legitimate command. Caesar had to seize Italy before these could be brought home. As he marched south he found little opposition. After all the disruptions of the previous years the mood was one of apathy and Pompey and his supporters were horrified to find that there was no uprising in their favour. In March the consuls, Pompey, and the republican army managed to leave Italy. Strategically, but perhaps not psychologically, it was the right move. Pompey’s strengths lay not only in the east (where he had grateful clients from his campaigns of the 60s) but in his command in Spain, and in the provinces of Sicily and Africa which were controlled by optimate supporters. His best hope was to stretch Caesar’s resources and communications to breaking point.
In the event Pompey lasted little more than eighteen months. The summer of 49 was spent by Caesar eliminating Pompey’s armies in Spain and this important success was followed by the submission of Sicily and Sardinia. A major setback took place, however, in Africa. Here Curio, Caesar’s bribed tribune from the year 50, was sent with four legions. He found himself facing not only the local Pompeian commander but king Juba of Numidia. It was the king who lured the inexperienced and impetuous Curio into the desert on the pretence that the Numidian forces were in
Map 12
Retreat. Curio was killed in the counter-attack and most of his army destroyed: Africa, for the time being, was lost to Caesar.
It was a direct confrontation with Pompey, now training up his legions and cavalry in Macedonia, which was important. Here Caesar’s emphasis on speed and surprise paid off. The Adriatic was well guarded by Pompey’s fleet (which was led by Caesar’s old adversary Bibulus) but Caesar shipped 20,000 legionaries and 600 cavalry across to Epirus in the middle of winter and escaped capture. It was a risky operation particularly as there would be little food to feed the troops in Greece and it nearly ended in disaster two months later when Pompey, attempting to break through fortifications which Caesar had erected between him and his naval base, Dyrrachium, inflicted heavy casualties on Caesar’s smaller army. It took all Caesar’s formidable powers of leadership to regroup his forces and finally bring Pompey to bay at Pharsalus in northern Greece in August. Although he was outnumbered by 47,000 to 24,000, Caesar inflicted a crushing defeat on Pompey. Fifteen thousand of Pompey’s men died, another 24,000 were captured. Pompey fled, first to Lesbos, where his wife and younger son Sextus were sheltering, and then with them on to Egypt. Pompey must have hoped for some support there as the people of Rome had been made guardian of the young Egyptian king Ptolemy XIII by Ptolemy’s father, who owed some gratitude to Rome for having restored him to his throne in 55. However, as he stepped ashore he was murdered on the orders of the Egyptian authorities, who understood that Caesar was now the man to please. When Caesar arrived a short time afterwards he was presented with Pompey’s head, embalmed. He was sensitive enough to weep at the sight.
For seven months Caesar stayed in Egypt. It was still an independent kingdom ruled, in theory, jointly by a 21-year-old queen, Cleopatra, and her brother, the 15-year-old Ptolemy XII, but the two had fallen out. At the time Ptolemy and his courtiers and generals had the upper hand over Cleopatra, who had been forced to flee to Syria to raise troops against him. She was, however, a formidable rival. The surviving portraits of her do not confirm her as a conventional beauty but she must have had both charisma and intelligence. She was the first Hellenistic ruler of Egypt to have learnt the language (it was said that she knew nine altogether) and to have participated in Egyptian religious festivals. She grasped where her chances lay, and when Caesar boldly installed himself in the royal palace in Alexandria, she smuggled herself in wrapped in a rug. She was soon his lover. Together Caesar and Cleopatra withstood a siege by Ptolemy’s supporters (it was then that Caesar, trying to destroy his opponents’ ships, succeeded in burning down part of the famous library of Alexandria) and when he was relieved by troops from Syria Caesar managed to defeat Ptolemy and install Cleopatra as sole ruler. There are legends of them cruising the Nile together and she claimed a boy born to her later as Caesar’s son. He was named Caesarion. (Amongst the gush and poorly written biographies of Cleopatra, go for Joyce Tyldesley’s Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt, London, 2008. Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra: History, Dreams and Distortions, London, 1991, is a fascinating look at the way Cleopatra has been interpreted over the ages.)
However, the civil war was not yet over. By April 47 Caesar was on the move again. He returned to Italy via Asia Minor where, in one of the easiest victories of his career, at Zela in Pontus, he crushed an army led by Pharnaces, a son of Mithri-dates. (‘I came, I saw, I conquered,’ as he succinctly put it.) Pompey’s Adriatic fleet had also been eliminated. Caesar paused in Rome and then set out in late 47 to Africa, still resolutely held by supporters of Pompey and the old senatorial order. The troops gathered there were commanded by Quintus Metellus Scipio, last survivor of one of the noblest Roman families, and Titus Labienus, an officer of Caesar’s who, though trusted throughout the Gallic War, had thrown in his lot with Pompey in 49. With them was Cato of Utica, who personified the old conservative Rome that Caesar was now in the process of destroying. Again it was a brilliant campaign. Caesar faced immense logistical problems in landing a force large enough to take on the fourteen legions awaiting him, but as he gathered strength (he received some support from descendants of the veterans of Marius’ armies) he rounded on his enemies and the final battle at Thapsus in April 46 was a massacre. Cato committed suicide, becoming in the process a hallowed martyr of a vanishing world. Plutarch describes the nobility of his death in detail and it haunted later generations (including some of the Founding Fathers of the United States). Scipio also committed suicide when facing capture as he escaped westwards to Spain. Labienus actually reached Spain, where, with one of Pompey’s sons, Gnaeus, he mounted a last stand. Caesar arrived in late 46 for a short but savage campaign that ended in the Battle of Munda (March 45), a hard-won victory that led to the deaths of both Labienus and Gnaeus. The old order was dead.
World History
