Antony had secured his road through the marsh with several redoubts. Each was guarded by a century of infantry and several squads of artillerymen. Rather than battle through each fortification, I took our men toward the last of the redoubts, the one closest to Antony’s camp.
Before we were out of the marsh the enemy hit us with a volley of spears, arrows, and slung stones. Up went our shields and then our legionaries were soon coming out of the water, meeting the enemy head-on, exactly as the legions are trained to fight. Our Thracian auxiliaries swarmed around the enemy flanks, as cavalry are taught to do. Antony’s men had the superior position, but we outnumbered them and were soon pressing them back. Once I had secured the redoubt against those centuries farther down the road, I turned the remainder of our cohort against the camp ditch.
I went in the vanguard with our legionaries, racing toward perhaps a hundred defenders. We caught a volley of spears, but kept our formation as we raced up the bank of the ditch. I threw myself against a man directly before me and heard the men to either side of me cracking shields at the same time. My opponent reached around my shield with a deadly thrust. Anticipating him, I slashed at his arm with my shield. As he fell back with a broken arm, I cut at the tendons of the man to my right then struck the back of the leg of the defender to my left.
Soon we had pushed the last of Antony’s men back into their camp. Rather than drive into the camp with my entire force, I sent three centuries forward to loot and burn what they could. I led the remainder along the perimeter bank. We caught another fight but soon drove the enemy back into the ditch. After that we got to the corral and caught up fifty horses. We did not bother with saddles, and many times used only a halter and a lead line instead of bridle and reins. Most of us grabbed up javelins and lances but I made sure some of the squads also got hold of lit torches. We rode through one legionary camp, setting fire to the tents as we went, but a quarter of an hour after we had taken the horses, Antony’s rearguard began pouring into the camp. Taking what small victory we had, I ordered our cohort’s immediate retreat.
We used those on horseback to guard our rear. The rest advanced in tight formation down Antony’s road. The redoubts were built to protect the camp from external attack. With an enemy at their backs, the defenders of the redoubts simply fled into the marsh. Two miles on, we found the broken palisade where Antony had crossed that morning; after that we were safe.
I rode forward with a handful of my officers, calling out the day’s password to one of the sentries. This let us enter the fortified area, where we discovered two legions belonging to Cassius now defending our camp’s southern perimeter. They were of course twelve hours late for the party, but no matter. At least we were ready to turn back a second attack.
Once I knew our army still possessed the camp, I sent for my men and asked the prefect of the Night Watch to take me to Cassius.
‘Cassius is dead. He killed himself an hour ago,’ came the answer.
‘Killed himself? I don’t understand.’
‘Nobody does. They’re saying he thought we lost the battle.’
I looked at the smouldering ruins that had been our camp. ‘Didn’t we?’
‘While we were getting battered about, Brutus’s legions broke through Caesar’s line. They destroyed the better portion of four of his legions. After that they looted Caesar’s camp, including his payroll.’
‘How bad was it for Cassius’s legions?’
‘The camp is completely destroyed, and Antony made off with our payroll. As for the legions, we took heavy casualties across the line, but we can still turn out nine legions tomorrow morning – assuming Brutus is willing to pay us.’
Food for our evening meal came from the hardtack tied to every man’s belt, the food of last resort. After that we went looking for the ruins of our tents, but with no landmarks to guide us and the roadways blocked by rubbish, we were as disoriented as the rest of the army. Finally, Scaeva put our men to work clearing an area. We were all barefoot and suffering with bruised and cut feet; I don’t think a single man had made it through the marsh with his sandals still on his feet, but no matter. We were alive.
By midnight we collapsed close to one another around small campfires. There were no bathhouses remaining and in the chilly night no one cared to bathe in the river; so we slept as we were, covered in blood and mud; the worst of it was that we stayed in our armour. We feared the enemy might attempt to take our palisade under the cover of another moonless night. Some of the men wrapped themselves in half-burned blankets. I recall I slept covered by a charred leather tarp.
At dawn, neither army bothered to turn out for battle formations. Instead, following a breakfast of hardtack, the legionaries set to work clearing the camp of debris in earnest. The auxiliaries retrieved the dead from the battlefield. From these, my men and I found footwear.
Brutus’s camp had survived without any damage, and although my men had pierced the membrane of Antony’s camp and burned perhaps a hundred tents, that damage was more symbolic than actual. Antony still possessed his payroll, plus the one he took from Cassius. Brutus owned his own great fortune and Caesar’s too. The critical issue on both sides of the battlefield was money. Antony, once he learned Caesar still lived, offered to pay Caesar’s legions from his own purse.
Bankrupt though he was, Caesar would not allow it. Instead, he borrowed money from Antony, and you can be sure Antony arranged the interest rates to his advantage. Not coin exactly but power, which amounts to the same thing in the end. They did not make a formal arrangement – not without Lepidus, who was in Rome – but the agreement was settled nonetheless. Antony would take possession of upper Gaul, Greece, Macedonia, Asia and the biggest prize, Cleopatra’s Egypt. Lepidus would have western Africa, Spain and Sicily, as before. That left Caesar with Narbonne, the southernmost province of Gaul – asliver of the empire, in other words. As before, the spoils of Italy still belonged to all three men. Their bargain left Antony preeminent, assuming they were victorious, but Caesar had no choice. Without a payroll for his men he knew they would abandon him and join Antony.
Brutus, having no partner remaining, was the real winner of the first battle at Philippi, and though he talked about restoring the Republic, even an idealist knows when he suddenly owns the world, which would be the case if he defeated Antony and Caesar. All Brutus had to do was embrace the legions and auxiliaries that had formerly pledged themselves to Cassius. No one competed with him for the command of these forces because no one but Brutus had the money at hand to pay them. To seal his new contract with the legions of Cassius, Brutus issued a thousand denarii bonus to every fighting man in our camp, regardless of his rank or nationality. That his own forces might not grow discontented, Brutus awarded the same bonus to them. We received our bonuses promptly next day, but of course the men who had formerly been under the command of Cassius could not help but think that they had lost everything when their tents were looted and burned, while the men who served Brutus still possessed the money they had already earned. In fact, the legionaries and auxiliaries in Brutus’s camp suddenly had more money than most of them had seen in their entire lives.
By such small matters are armies ruined. For his part Brutus proved incapable of understanding the problem. To his mind he had been even-handed in his generosity. His army had seized a fortune, and he paid out a bonus to everyone; Cassius had lost his camp, and Brutus would assume responsibility for feeding and paying these men going forward. What more could anyone expect of him? It was not his fault we had lost our money.
Had Brutus been less even-handed about the distribution of money, had he given his officers something like half-a-year’s salary for a bonus and provided less to the legionaries and less still to the auxiliaries, his officers would certainly have quelled the mutinous rumblings. As it was, resentment came chiefly from the officers, who complained about the foreign auxiliaries getting the same bonus they received. As with all armies the attitudes of the officers soon trickled down through the ranks. Before any of us saw his next payday, every man in the legions Cassius had once commanded cursed the name of Junius Brutus. More to the point, they did it openly and without fear of disciplinary action.
Cassius’s legions lost ten thousand men. Caesar lost almost twice that number, fully a third of his army. Antony and Brutus, in contrast, kept their legions intact, counting fewer than a thousand dead on either side. A week after the battle, we learned that on the same day we had fought at Philippi, Caesar lost an armada of transport ships in a storm off the Peloponnese. Two legions, bound for the Hellespont, gone. Had they succeeded they would have cut off our supply lines and left us poorly placed. As it was, Brutus now possessed every advantage.
With news of the disaster, Brutus took heart and spoke to his officers of our coming victory over the tyrants. ‘Even the gods hate tyranny!’ he told us. A confirmed atheist, I could name a great many tyrants whom the gods permitted to thrive, but I was happy nonetheless. I thought Brutus would take courage from the news and press forward. But no, he refused to change from his defensive strategy. In fact, he now insisted his legions stay behind the camp palisade. ‘No need to risk another battle,’ he said. ‘We will wait for Antony and Caesar to make a second attack on our camp, and when they fail to breach our defences, we will turn our cavalry loose on their retreat!’
Brave words and fine policy – if only the enemy had behaved as halfwits. Instead, Antony had his men construct a siege camp between our southern camp’s palisade and his own fortifications. He set it close to the marsh for defensive purposes and then arranged for a low wall to connect the new camp to his old one. By this means, he meant to keep his advance position well stocked with artillery. This new wall included several redoubts. These were all bristling with artillery, though the effort was wasted. Brutus made no attempt to stop the construction of Antony’s new camp or the wall connecting it to the old camp. Once it was established, Antony’s artillery began sending stones into our southern camp. Brutus’s answer was to order us to move our bedrolls back half-a-furlong; in that way the stones landed harmlessly on vacant ground.
Our real worry was the road Antony and Cassius had built through the marsh, for it connected us with Antony’s camp and could not be easily destroyed. Even after it had become impassable for cavalry because the hard-packed mud washed away in the rain, it still functioned for infantry. The only answer was to build a palisade along the southern perimeter of our camp.
Antony’s and Caesar’s camps did indeed turn into mud pits, and supplies grew progressively more difficult for them to acquire. None of this mattered. With Brutus cowering behind his camp palisade, our men were the ones who lost heart. The desertions began with our sentries fleeing to Antony’s new camp. When Antony happily received these men, entire cohorts of auxiliaries began going over. Then even the legions lost courage. With reviving fortunes, Caesar came from his sickbed and began to appear each morning on the battlefield. And still Brutus preferred to keep his army behind the camp palisades. As for himself, he rarely left his commander’s tent except to attend his staff meetings.
Within a fortnight Brutus had lost five thousand men to desertions, though no one would admit such a number. Some of these men rode as a complete cohort into Antony’s camp with their officers in the lead. They took whatever grain and supplies they could carry as a bribe. Others, like the Thracians I commanded, slipped away into the east, going back home with their thousand denarii bonuses wrapped in their packs and whatever goods they could steal. A patrol might be sent out and never come back. Sentry posts were routinely abandoned overnight. Those officers foolish enough to make a search for deserters would often lose the search party as well. The stones Antony sent into our camp now carried notes promising amnesty to every deserting officer and money paid to him at once if he brought his men along. Those who refused such generosity were told not to hope for mercy later. And of course every day it rained. Without a tent, and no one in the southern camp had one, high ground is only slightly better than low. I can still recall shivering in the dark as I listened to rocks falling out of the sky, each with a promise of amnesty or death.
Brutus’s staff of legates pressed for a fight while they could still put an army in the field. Brutus’s speeches, which became more convoluted as time went on, assured us we had only to wait for our victory. I will not say the man rambled or that he seemed to be growing mad as time passed. He had come to his conclusion half-a-year before. Unable to admit the dynamics had changed, he argued the old opinion in the face of new evidence. To his thinking, nothing in the plan was faulty. Why adjust a perfectly logical strategy? We were winning this war! Body counts had given us all some assurance in the beginning, but after the desertions no one cared to hear about our splendid advantages. In the end, Brutus still argued that our moral superiority would answer, but I must tell you the word freedom, so lovely in the abstract when Brutus had said it in the early days, very soon came to sound like ‘death-by-sword’.
Brutus compared himself to Pompey Magnus at Pharsalus, pressed by his staff to fight when waiting would have meant victory. His history was accurate, but the situation he faced was quite different. At Pharsalus. Caesar was trapped and vastly outnumbered. Hubris and a lust for Caesar’s blood caused Pompey’s staff to insist on finishing matters at once. Here we enjoyed the advantage of high ground in a potential fight, but our numbers were dwindling and our legions were in a mutinous mood. There was no certainty of winning anything without a fight. When Brutus finally relented and turned his army out for a battle, he still insisted we would be better off waiting for winter. He said he acted against his better judgment. It was a sorry way for an army to take the field.
The day was cold and cloudy, but there was no rain. Rain might have given us an advantage had we come to fight in earnest. We had been told we were going to fight if the enemy answered, and of course Antony and Caesar came out to dance.
My Thracians now gone, I commanded a cohort of our Spartan lancers, these in the service of the very legions I had recruited in Egypt. We were grouped with several thousand other auxiliary cavalry at the northern reaches of the battlefield. We had a forest and hills to our right. It was not good land for a flanking attack but I thought we might see skirmishes if Caesar sent archers to harass our wing. I was well placed to have a look at the enemy, and without the dust of summer to hinder my vision, I could see Caesar’s legions as they formed for battle, with Caesar riding a fine white horse. He was a proud boy with that great army at his back; no tears for Maecenas to wipe from his cheeks on this fine morning.
I did not waste my breath whispering to the gods, but at the sight of young Caesar I did pray to whatever daemons inhabited the forest and marsh that I might have one more chance at the coward. But of course the perverse spirits of that great marsh at Philippi had teased me with the only opportunity I was ever going to have.
The fight lasted less than an hour, time enough for Brutus and the rest of the nobility to escape. They took with them our camp guards and the two legions holding the marsh. And of course the money. Once we knew what he had done, those of us left behind threw down our weapons.
The remainder of the day was spent sorting out the officers from the rank and file. Our camp was plundered. Nothing we owned stayed with us, even the hardtack tied to our belts. Half of us, those belonging to the southern camp, had been living without tents for the better part of a month; so another few nights in the open was no more onerous than usual. Those officers at or above the rank of a centurion were held in the new camp Antony had built. The rank and file were taken into the armies of Caesar or Antony after swearing an oath of loyalty. Men were happy to serve Antony. Those obliged to join Caesar made a brave face of it. All the same not a soul had any regrets leaving the armies of Cassius or Brutus, the one a fool, the other a coward. As for the auxiliaries, most were relieved of their property and set free.
We stayed on that field until news came that Brutus had committed suicide. He did this not in shame for his cowardice but to escape capture. After his death his staff turned themselves over without a fight. The day after these men arrived, the officers were all taken to the battlefield. First in line were the great men. After that, no one bothered sorting us out by ranks; they only insisted we stand in an orderly fashion. Scaeva stood before me, Horace behind. The three of us had been together as prisoners since our surrender. This was a consolation for me, for I counted them as my friends.
Caesar and Antony waited at the front of the line. They were seated and wrapped in robes, for the day was quite cold. They were attended, naturally, by friends and counsellors who might help them make their choices. Antony had fortified himself for the occasion; Caesar was cold-bloodedly sober. The captives stepped forward to receive judgment. Many of these men were known. If Antony or Caesar did not recognise them, one of their friends usually did. Men who were known on sight were generally proscribed. Their property was already gone. It only remained to take their heads. Others were sons of proscribed men. These men Caesar thought might be quite dangerous in the future, and so he took their lives while he had the opportunity. That is to say, he nodded his golden locks like Homer’s Zeus atop Mount Olympus, and a bloodied centurion stepped up to execute the man. The stroke was with a gladius. Properly aimed, the sword slipped under the ribs and into the heart. The heads of the proscribed nobility were removed at a distance from our party and placed in wine jars for the long journey home. Once in Rome the heads would be set up on the speaker’s platform in the Forum. Nobility had the right to speak before their execution, but any fellow giving a political speech was taken down at once. Most men asked a favour for their families; these appeals were always directed at Antony’s party, where one of Antony’s slaves took notes.
Those not recognised were asked to identify themselves. This involved giving a name and home, a declaration of citizenship, and of course past military experience. Caesar took the lead in these interrogations, chiefly because Antony soon grew bored with the whole spectacle. He remained only that he might cull out old friends or a bright young officer of reputation; otherwise, if he did not bother to speak up for a man, Caesar usually killed the fellow.
As we got close to the front of the line I expected I would die and only cared to do it with dignity. It was difficult in the circumstances. I could hear Caesar’s petulant voice as we came slowly forward. In Rome, young Caesar had been playing the role of an outraged prince denied his inheritance. At Philippi, he was a mighty imperator dispensing justice. In both instances he sounded like a boy out of his depth.
To those not related to a proscribed man, Caesar held out hope as he interrogated them; he even pretended kindness. In fact, he let a few of the young officers of no importance walk away with impunity so that the others might hope. With many he played games of chance. Some of the wagers involved dice, but the ones I witnessed were far stranger. A young officer with no political coin had the chance to guess the direction a certain bird would fly when it left its perch. ‘Quick now. Tell me where it goes!’ The fellow pointed, and all present, even Antony, waited curiously until the bird finally departed. Down went the man, for the bird had not flown in the direction he had indicated. This game hadn’t gone quite fast enough, so the next victim had to guess the number of fingers Caesar held behind his back. ‘You can trust me. I’ll play fair.’
‘Three!’ the poor youth cried, trembling at the prospect of one-in-five odds.
‘On your life, you wager it is three and not four or five?’
‘It is four!’
Caesar pulled his hand from behind his back, ‘Too bad for you. Three was the right answer.’ The flash of the gladius. The sound of another body hitting the muddy field.
‘What is your name?’ This to Scaeva.
Scaeva gave his name.
‘Cassius Scaeva? Are you a relative of the assassin Cassius Longinus?’
‘I have relatives who were freed by his ancestors.’
Caesar nodded, and the executioner stepped forward. The blade of the gladius swept into Scaeva’s side. As the blade withdrew Scaeva fell to his knees with a heavy grunt and rolled forward, nearly touching Caesar’s feet.
‘What is your name?’ Caesar was speaking to me, but I had no voice. I could hardly breathe, for I had thought Scaeva, of all men, would earn Caesar’s mercy. ‘Do you have a name?’ The voice seemed to come from a great distance. I heard him without quite understanding that Caesar was talking to me. I was watching the body of a man I counted my friend dragged away.
‘His name is Quintus Dellius.’
Caesar glared at Horace, who had spoken up for me. Of course Horace had not been asked to speak; for his impertinence he was now in mortal danger.
‘Mine is Horatius Flaccus – Horace,’ he added, though Caesar had not asked his name.
Mark Antony opened his eyes and blinked, for he had dozed off as we approached. His face became drunkenly animated as he cried out, ‘By the gods, Horace! What are you doing here?’
‘I really don’t know, Antony! Brutus got me so drunk I was an officer before I knew it. I have never been so drunk in my life.’
‘That is saying a good deal. Tell me, did our friend Brutus by chance promise you undying glory?’
‘He promised me the glory of Achilles.’
‘Achilles died young, Horace.’
‘It seemed only a small detail at the time.’
‘I expect so. I’ll take this one, Caesar. Horace promises me he will never again lift a sword in anger. Don’t you, lad?’
‘I swear it, Antony! But will you bring Dellius with you as well?’ Antony looked in my direction without seeming at first to recognise me. ‘He is really the most amazing man with a sword! The bravest man I have ever known – after you, that is. And Caesar, of course. You won’t regret it. I swear to you he is a fine and honourable man as well.’
‘What is the name?’ Antony asked, for I apparently now looked vaguely familiar.
‘Quintus Dellius, Imperator,’ I answered.
‘Dolabella’s creature? The mathematician?’
‘I served Dolabella, Imperator.’
Antony looked at Caesar. ‘I’ll take Dellius as well.’
Caesar shrugged indifferently, then turned his gaze to the man behind me. ‘What is your name?’