AUTHOR’S NOTE

Read most modern histories of Rome or biographies of the lives of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra and you will be told that Caesar “dallied” in Egypt with Cleopatra for several months in 48-47 B.C., following his defeat of Pompey the Great at the Battle of Pharsalus. What those books don’t tell you is that “dalliance” was a bitter, life-or-death struggle for Caesar that lasted for seven long months against a well-equipped, well-led, and determined Egyptian army that had just murdered Pompey and was bent on also eliminating Caesar.

This book tells the story of those desperate, bloody months, when Caesar was cut off from reinforcements and supplies and apparently ignored by his deputy Mark Antony at Rome, when Caesar’s life and career were on the line day after day after day.

Most importantly, this is also the story of the little more than nine hundred men of the 6th Legion, the key troops in Caesar’s little force with him in Egypt, hardened Spanish soldiers with seventeen years of military service under their belts. For, without these men, Cleopatra’s kidnappers, Caesar would not have survived the war in Egypt or gone on to Pontus to achieve one of his most famous victories, after which he would boast, “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

This is the third book in this series of histories of individual legions of ancient Rome, following my previous books on the subject, Caesar’s Legion, the story of the 10th Legion, Julius Caesar’s favorite unit, and Nero’s Killing Machine, the history of the remarkable 14th, a legion that in the course of its career went from the shame of being wiped out to fame as the victors over Queen Boudicca and her rebel British army.

Prior to the 2002 publication of Caesar’s Legion, never before had a comprehensive history of an individual Roman legion been published. Because ancient history is often seen as a subject too dry to be interesting, a subject to be left behind in the schoolroom, in writing these books I made the conscious decision to make the histories of the legions as interesting and as exciting as I could without losing sight of the facts.

In my American histories, books such as Standing Bear Is a Person, I have gone to great lengths to include copious endnotes and detailed citations, because the sources are many and varied, and because the story affects the lives of people today, descendants of the people I’ve written about, and I owe it to them to support the details I’ve put on paper with relevant attributions.

These legion histories are different. I chose not to load them down with footnotes, often a barrier to readership by newcomers to history. In the place of footnotes, on the pages of these legion books I tell you which classical author was the source of a conversation, speech, or claim I document. And in the appendices you’ll find, in addition to a detailed list of my secondary sources, extensive summaries of the lives and works of my primary classical sources, with comments on their accuracy and usefulness.

In writing these books I have relied heavily on classical sources. Even then, Caesar and other classical authors colored and propagandized their personal accounts of the events they describe. Recorded Roman history is full of holes, and modern authors usually can only fill those holes with informed speculation. Just the same, some obvious clues abound in ancient texts if the reader is prepared to look for them, and to look for them in more than one source.

I have also brought to light several aspects overlooked by other authors. One is the reenlistment factor. In the imperial era each legion generally discharged its men en masse when their twenty-year enlistments were up and filled their places with mass enlistments of new recruits. These discharge and reenlistment dates vary by legion. Read Tacitus in particular and you will be able to calculate the discharge and reenlistment years for virtually every legion and the Praetorian Guard for several hundred years. Pinpoint one date, and then work forward and back for the others—twenty years in the imperial era, sixteen years prior to it. By going back to the year an Augustan legion was founded, you can even establish in which year its enlistment period was upped from sixteen to twenty years by Augustus between 6 B.C. and A.D. 11. (Not surprisingly, the Praetorian Guard was the last unit to make the change.) The foundation dates of some legions are easier to establish than others—for the survivors of the large number of units founded by Caesar in his massive 49 B.C. conscription program, for instance.

Then there are the gaps in Caesar’s memoirs, gaps apparently created by his editor Hirtius and publisher Balbus. Some of their erasures are obvious, with the text saying “as stated before,” but with no such previous statement remaining. Other erasures are less obvious, with events suddenly jumping to a new episode. The strike by Caesar’s legions following the Battle of Pharsalus is a typical example. The strike is simply deleted, and the next thing we know, Caesar is riding off with his still-loyal cavalry to give chase to Pompey, with the 6th Legion (up to that point a Pompeian legion) marching on his heels to support him. Yet, not one of the legions that had fought for Caesar at the Battle of Pharsalus follows him. Every one is taken back to Italy by Mark Antony, and no explanation is given why. But we are told that the four legions made to camp at Rome continued to be in a state of mutiny for the next eighteen months. Either Caesar himself or his contemporary editor and publisher could not bring themselves to admit the strike took place and simply glossed over the event.

At other places in Caesar’s memoirs, and the accounts appended to them, one legion or another mysteriously turns up on a different side, or on the other side of the Roman world, the explanation having been eliminated from the original text. Or, as in the case of the 4th and 6th Legions at the Battle of Pharsalus, Caesar can only bring himself to describe them as “the Spanish cohorts.” And Caesar’s editors provide no explanation for the 6th Legion serving both Pompey and Caesar.

By knowing that the 6th Legion was one of those Pompeian units that surrendered to Caesar in Spain in 49 B.C.; by knowing that Afranius escaped from Spain by sea with a number of men and joined Pompey in Greece; by knowing, from Caesar, that Pompey had seven “Spanish cohorts” in his army at Pharsalus, units that had not escaped from Italy with him; by knowing, again from Caesar, that less than a thousand men of the 6th Legion followed Caesar from the Pharsalus battlefield while all Caesar’s own infantry remained behind, the truth can be deduced.

The accounts of other authors often fill in the gaps in Caesar’s own story. Appian, for example, while not always the most accurate of historians, provides otherwise missing details such as the events of the night Caesar was lured into an ambush at the port town of Durrës (Dyrrhachium) in 48 B.C., events not described in Caesar’s commentaries.

On the other hand, some other classical authors can confuse the picture—the ever unreliable Suetonius, for example, in his life of Caesar, has the 6th Legion on Caesar’s side at the Battle of Dyrrhachium, and suffering heavily during one of Pompey’s attacks. Yet all the other evidence tells us that at that time the 6th was on Pompey’s side, while, from Caesar, we know that the Caesarian legion that took the heavy casualties at Dyrrhachium was actually the 9th, not the 6th.

Spend time reading a variety of classical authors covering the same events with the eye of a detective, applying a modicum of logic, and the picture becomes clearer.

The works of numerous classical writers who documented the wars, campaigns, battles, skirmishes, and most importantly the men of the legions of Rome have come down to us. Apart from Caesar, Appian, Plutarch, and Tacitus, those authors include Suetonius, Polybius, Cassius Dio, Josephus, Cicero, Pliny the Younger, Seneca, Livy, and Arrian. Without the labors of these writers the books in this series would not have been possible.

All speeches and conversations in this book are taken from dialogue and narrative in classical texts, and are faithful to those original sources. For the sake of continuity, the Roman calendar—which in republican times, until Caesar changed it in 47 B.C., varied by some two months from our own (it was a difference of sixty-seven days by 46 B.C., when Caesar corrected the calendar), is used throughout this work.

Place names are generally first referred to in their original form and thereafter by their modern name, where known, to permit readers to readily identify locations involved. Personal names created by English writers of more recent times and familiar to modern readers have been used instead of those technically correct—Mark Antony instead of Marcus Antonius, Julius Caesar for Gaius Julius Caesar, Octavian for Caesar Octavianus, Pompey for Pompeius, Caligula for Gaius, Vespasian for Vespasianus, Trajan for Traianus, Hadrian for Hadrianus, and so on.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was fashionable for some authors to refer to legions as regiments, cohorts as battalions, maniples as companies, centurions as captains, tribunes as colonels, and legates as generals. In this work, Roman military terms such as legion, cohort, maniple, and centurion have been retained, as it’s felt they will be familiar to most readers and convey more of a flavor of the time. Because of a lack of popular familiarity with the term legate, “general” and/or “brigadier general” is used here. “Colonel” and tribune are both used, to give a sense of relative status.

Likewise, so that readers can relate in comparison to today’s military, when referred to in the military sense praetors are given as “major generals,” and consuls and proconsuls as “lieutenant generals.” In this way, reference to a lieutenant general, for example, will immediately tell the reader that the figure concerned is or has been a consul. I am aware this is akin to having a foot in two camps and may not please purists, but my aim is to make these books broadly accessible.

In this book I have quite deliberately skipped over the early battles of the civil war, in Italy and Spain, the Battle of Dyrrhachium in Albania, and the later key Battles of Thapsus in Africa and Munda in Spain, because these are covered in considerable detail in other books in this series— Caesar’s Legion and Nero’s Killing Machine. In the former I also give a detailed account of the Battle of Pharsalus, but from the point of view of the 10th Legion, on Caesar’s side. In this book I again describe Pharsalus, but this time from the point of view of the 6th Legion, on Pompey’s side, to depict the path to the 6th Legion’s change of sides in 48 B.C.

For this book is essentially about the 6th Legion. If it had not been for the tough veterans of the 6th, who fought and won desperate battles for Caesar against enormous odds, Caesar’s career, and his life, would have ended in Egypt, or at the subsequent Battle of Zela in Turkey. These are the men who made Rome great—one or two extraordinary men, and many more ordinary men who often did extraordinary things. I hope that via these pages I can help you come to know them.