In Heracleia, on the Via Egnatia as it began to come down to the gentler lands around Alexander the Great’s home of Pella, those who had been absent on other duties joined Pompey’s army again: men like Brutus, who had tried to be useful by trotting off obediently to places as far afield as Thessalonica; and Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, who left his fleet and hastened to catch up.
In Heracleia, Pompey took delivery of several thousand good horses and mules, sufficient to replace those he had lost. Their Dacian herdsmen had brought along none other than the King of Dacia, Burebistas, who had heard of the defeat of Gaius Caesar at Dyrrachium. Nothing would do than that King Burebistas should come himself to make a treaty of accord with this mammoth force in world events, the conqueror of the mighty Gaius Caesar, the kings Mithridates and Tigranes, and some quaint relic out of the far West named Quintus Sertorius. King Burebistas also wanted to boast to his subjects back home that he had shared a cup of wine with the fabled Pompey the Great. Who was truly Great.
Events like the arrival of King Burebistas tended to cheer Pompey up; so too did the news that the elusive Metellus Scipio and his Syrian legions were encamped at Beroea and ready to march south to Larissa the moment Pompey gave the word.
What Pompey didn’t know was that Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus, leading Caesar’s Eleventh and Twelfth Legions, was approaching Heracleia in quest of Caesar. He had encountered Metellus Scipio and the Syrian legions on the Haliacmon River and done everything in his power to tempt Scipio into battle. When Scipio and the countryside proved uncooperative, Calvinus decided to head for the Via Egnatia, sure that Caesar would come that way, and that he would be ahead of Pompey. News of Pompey’s great victory at Dyrrachium had flown all over Greece and Macedonia, so Calvinus presumed that Caesar would be retreating before the wrathful and triumphant victor. Bitterly disappointing news, but not news capable of persuading Calvinus to change sides, even if his legions had let him. They refused to believe it, and clamored to join Caesar as soon as possible. All Caesar needed, they said, was the full complement of his Gallic veterans. Once he had that, he’d wallop Pompey and the entire world.
With Calvinus was Caesar’s other squadron of Aeduan cavalry, sixty men on horseback; Calvinus used them as scouts. Riding in the lead with two of the Aeduans for company and aware that Heracleia was no more than four hours away, Calvinus kept looking for signs of Caesar’s imminence. Confirmed, he thought, when he saw two Aeduan cavalrymen canter over a hill in his path. His two Aeduan companions whooped at sight of the red-and-blue-striped shawls, kicked their horses in the ribs and galloped to meet the newcomers.
An ecstatic reunion took place while Calvinus let his horse’s head drop to graze the springtime greening. Quick chat went back and forth in Aeduan, continued for some moments. Then his own two Aeduans returned as the other two trotted off in the direction of Heracleia.
“How far to Caesar?” he asked Caragdus, who spoke Latin.
“Caesar’s not anywhere in Macedonia,” said Caragdus, scowling. “Can you imagine it, General? Those two bastards skipped off to Pompey with their squadron’s money! Thought it such a great joke that they couldn’t wait to tell us. Veredorix and I decided to keep our mouths shut and find out what we could. Just as well.”
“The Gods are passing strange,” said Calvinus slowly. “What did they know?”
“There was a battle in Dyrrachium, and Pompeius did win it—but it wasn’t a great victory, General. The idiots let Caesar get away with his army intact. Well, he lost about a thousand men—those captured alive were tortured and executed by Labienus.” The Aeduan shivered. “Caesar went south. Those two think he’s on the way to Gomphi, wherever that might be.”
“Southern Thessaly,” said Calvinus automatically.
“Oh. Anyway, the army in Heracleia belongs to Pompeius. He’s meeting with King Burebistas of the Dacians. But we’d better scuttle off in a hurry, General. Those two bastards betrayed all Caesar’s dispositions to the enemy. Veredorix and I thought of killing them, but then we decided to leave well enough alone.”
“What did you tell them about our presence here?”
“That we were scouting ahead of a foraging party. Just a couple of cohorts strong,” said Caragdus.
“Good man!” Calvinus jerked his horse’s head up. “Come on, boys, we’re going to scuttle off south in search of Caesar.”
*
Caesar had not gone the long way across the range of sere mountains which spined Greece and Macedonia on the west. Below Apollonia lay the river Aous, one of the major streams which came down from the backbone itself. A very poor road followed it into the Tymphe Mountains, traversed a pass and descended to Thessaly at the headwaters of the river Peneus. Rather than march an extra one hundred and fifty miles, Caesar and his army turned off the better roads of Epirus and proceeded at their usual thirty to thirty-five miles a day along a road which meant they needed to build only a rudimentary camp each night; they saw no one save shepherds and sheep, emerged into Thessaly well to the north of Gomphi at the town of Aeginium.
Thessaly had declared for Pompey. Like the other regions of Greece, it was organized into a league of towns, which had a council called the Thessalian League. On hearing of Pompey’s great victory at Dyrrachium, the leader of the League, Androsthenes of Gomphi, sent out word to every town to support Pompey.
Dazed at the speed with which a fit and businesslike army proceeded to reduce it, Aeginium sent frantic messages to all the other towns of the Thessalian League that a far-from-defeated-looking Caesar was in the neighborhood. Tricca was the next place to fall; Caesar moved on to Gomphi, from which city Androsthenes sent an urgent message to Pompey that Caesar had arrived long before he was expected. Gomphi fell.
Though the month was early Sextilis, the season was still spring; there were no ripe crops anywhere and the rains had been poor east of the ranges. A minor famine threatened. For this reason Caesar ensured the submission of western Thessaly; it gave him a source of supplies. He was also waiting for the rest of his legions to join him. Word had gone out recalling the Seventh, Fourteenth, Eleventh and Twelfth.
With Lucius Cassius, Sabinus, Calenus and Domitius Calvinus back in the fold, Caesar advanced due east en route to the better roads which led to the city of Larissa and the pass into Macedonia at Tempe. The best way was along the river Enipeus to Scotussa, where Caesar planned to turn north toward Larissa.
Less than ten miles short of Scotussa, Caesar dug himself a stout camp north of the Enipeus outside the village of Pharsalus; he had heard that Pompey was coming, and the lay of the land at Pharsalus was battleworthy. Typical of Caesar, he didn’t choose the best ground for himself. It always paid to seem at a bit of a disadvantage; routine generals—and he classified Pompey as a routine general—tended to go by what the manuals said, accept them as doctrine. Pompey would like Pharsalus. A line of hills to the north sloping to a little plain about two miles wide, then the swampy course of the Enipeus River. Yes, Pharsalus would do.
*
Pompey received the message from Androsthenes in Gomphi as he skirted his old training camp at Beroea. He turned immediately and headed for the pass into Thessaly at Tempe. There was no other easy way to go; the massif of Mount Olympus and its sprawling, rugged foothills prevented a straighter march. Outside the city of Larissa he was finally reunited with Metellus Scipio, and breathed a sigh of relief for many reasons, not the least important of which was those two extra and veteran legions.
Relations within the tents of the high command had deteriorated even further since leaving Heracleia. Everyone had decided it was time to put Pompey in his place, and in Larissa the long-simmering resentments and grudges all surfaced together.
It started when one of Pompey’s senior military tribunes, an Acutius Rufus, chose to summon the high command to a hearing in a military court he had taken it upon himself to convene. And there in front of Pompey and his legates he formally charged Lucius Afranius with treason for deserting his troops after Illerda; the chief prosecutor was Marcus Favonius, adhering religiously to Cato’s instructions to keep Pompey “pure.”
Pompey’s temper snapped. “Acutius, dismiss this illegal court!” he roared, fists clenched, face mottling. “Go on, get out before I arraign you on treason charges! As for you, Favonius, I would have thought that your experience in public life would have taught you to avoid unconstitutional prosecutions! Get out! Get out! Get out!”
The court dissolved, but Favonius wasn’t done. He began to lie in wait for Pompey, to hector him at every opportunity with Afranius’s falseness, and Afranius, almost deprived of breath at the impudence of it, hammered away in Pompey’s other ear with demands that he dismiss Favonius from his service. Petreius sided with Afranius, naturally, and hammered away too.
Active command of the army had devolved upon Labienus, whose lightest punishment for the most minor infringement was a flogging; the troops muttered and shivered, looked sideways with darkling glances, plotted how to expose Labienus to the spears during the battle everyone knew was coming.
Over dinner, Ahenobarbus struck.
“And how’s our dear Agamemnon, King of Kings?” he enquired as he strolled in on Favonius’s arm.
Jaw dropped, Pompey stared. “What did you call me?”
“Agamemnon, King of Kings,” said Ahenobarbus, sneering.
“Meaning?” asked Pompey dangerously.
“Why, that you’re in the same position as Agamemnon, King of Kings. Titular head of the army of a thousand ships, titular head of a group of kings, any one of whom has as much right to call himself King of Kings as you do. But it’s over a millennium since the Greeks invaded Priam’s homeland. You’d think something would have changed, wouldn’t you? But it hasn’t. In modern Rome we still suffer Agamemnon, King of Kings.”
“Cast yourself in the role of Achilles, have you, Ahenobarbus? Going to sulk beside your ships while the world goes to pieces and the best men die?” asked Pompey, lips white.
“Well, I’m not sure,” said Ahenobarbus, comfortably disposed on his couch between Favonius and Lentulus Spinther. He selected a hothouse grape from bunches ferried across from Chalcidean Pallene, where this profitable little industry had grown up inside linen-draped frames. “Actually,” he went on, spitting out seeds and reaching for the whole bunch, “I was thinking more of the role of Agamemnon, King of Kings.”
“Hear, hear,” barked Favonius, searching in vain for some simpler fare—and profoundly glad that Cato wasn’t present to see how Pompey’s high command were living in this Romanized land of luxurious plenty. Hothouse grapes! Chian wine twenty years in the amphora! Sea urchins galloped from Rhizus and sauced with an exotic version of garum! Baby quail filched from new mothers to slide down the gullet of Lentulus Crus!
“Want the command tent, do you, Ahenobarbus?”
“I’m not sure I’d say no.”
“Why,” asked Pompey, tearing savagely at some cheesed bread, “would you want the aggravation?”
“The aggravation,” said Ahenobarbus, bald pate sporting a pretty wreath of spring flowers, “lies in the fact that Agamemnon, King of Kings, never wants to give battle.”
“A wise course,” said Pompey, hanging onto his temper grimly. “My strategy is to wear Caesar down by Fabian means. Engaging the man is an unnecessary risk. We lie between him and good supply lines. Greece is in drought. As summer comes in, he’ll be hungry. By autumn he will have looted Greece of everything edible. And in winter he’ll capitulate. My son Gnaeus is so snugly based in Corcyra that he’ll get nothing across the Adriatic, Gaius Cassius has won a big victory against Pomponius off Messana—”
“I heard,” Lentulus Spinther interrupted, “that after this much-lauded victory, Gaius Cassius went on to do battle with Caesar’s old legate Sulpicius. And that a legion of Caesar’s watching from the shore became so fed up with the way Sulpicius was handling the battle that they rowed out, boarded Cassius’s ships, and trounced him. He had to slip over the side of his flagship to get away.”
“Well, yes, that is true,” Pompey admitted.
“Fabian means,” said Lentulus Crus between mouthfuls of succulent squid sauced with their own sepia ink, “are ridiculous, Pompeius. Caesar can’t win; we all know that. You’re always griping about our lack of money, so why are you so determined on these Fabian tactics?”
“Strategy, not tactics,” said Pompey.
“Whatever—who cares?” asked Lentulus Crus loftily. “I say that the moment we find Caesar, we give battle. Get it over and done with. Then head home for Italia and a few proscriptions.”
Brutus lay listening to all this in growing horror. His own participation in the siege of Dyrrachium had been minuscule; at any chance he volunteered to ride for Thessalonica or Athens or anywhere far from that frenzied, revolting cesspool. Only at Heracleia had he realized what kind of dissension was going on between Pompey and his legates. At Heracleia he heard of the doings of Labienus. At Heracleia he began to realize that Pompey’s own legates would end in ruining him.
Oh, why had he ever left Tarsus, Publius Sestius and that careful state of neutrality? How could he collect the interest on debts from people like Deiotarus and Ariobarzanes while they were funding Pompey’s war? How would he manage if these intransigent boars did manage to thrust Pompey into the battle he so clearly didn’t want? He was right, he was right! Fabian tactics—strategy—would win in the end. And wasn’t it worth it, to spare Roman lives, ensure a minimum of bloodshed? What would he do if someone thrust a sword into his hand and told him to fight?
“Caesar’s done for,” said Metellus Scipio, who didn’t agree with his son-in-law in this matter. He sighed happily, smiled. “I will be the Pontifex Maximus at last.”
Ahenobarbus sat bolt upright. “You’ll what?”
“Be the Pontifex Maximus at last.”
“Over my dead body!” yelled Ahenobarbus. “That’s one public honor belongs to me and my family!”
“Gerrae!” said Lentulus Spinther, grinning. “You can’t even get yourself elected a priest, Ahenobarbus, let alone get yourself elected Pontifex Maximus. You’re a born loser.”
“I will do what my grandfather did, Spinther! I’ll be voted in as pontifex and Pontifex Maximus at the same election!”
“No! It’s going to be a race between me and Scipio.”
“Neither of you stands a chance!” gasped Metellus Scipio, outraged. “I’m the next Pontifex Maximus!”
The clang of a knife thrown against precious gold plate set everyone jumping; Pompey slid off his couch and walked from the room without looking back.
*
On the fifth day of Sextilis, Pompey and his army arrived at Pharsalus to find Caesar occupying the ground on this north side of the river, but to the east.
“Excellent!” said Pompey to Faustus Sulla, who, dear boy, was just about the only one among the legates he could bear to talk to. Never criticized, just did what tata-in-law said. Well, there was Brutus. Another good fellow. But he skulked so! Kept himself out of sight, never wanted to attend the councils or even the dinners. “If we put ourselves here on this nice slope up to the hills, Faustus, we’re well above Caesar’s lie and between him and Larissa, Tempe and access to Macedonia.”
“Is it going to be a battle?” asked Faustus Sulla.
“I wish not. But I fear so.”
“Why are they so determined on it?”
“Oh,” said Pompey, sighing, “because they’re none of them soldiers save Labienus. They don’t understand.”
“Labienus is set on fighting too.”
“Labienus wants to pit himself against Caesar. He’s dying for the chance. He believes he’s the better general.”
“And is he?”
Pompey shrugged. “In all honesty, Faustus, I have absolutely no idea. Though Labienus should. He was Caesar’s right-hand man for years in Gallia Comata. Therefore I’m inclined to say yes.”
“Is it for tomorrow?”
Seeming to shrink, Pompey shook his head. “No, not yet.”
The morrow brought Caesar out to deploy. Pompey did not follow suit. After a wait of some hours, Caesar sent his troops back into his camp and put them in the shade. Only spring, yes, but the sun was hot and the air, perhaps because of the swampiness of the river, was suffocatingly humid.
That afternoon Pompey called his legates together. “I have decided,” he announced, on his feet and inviting no one to sit. “We will give battle here at Pharsalus.”
“Oh, good!” said Labienus. “I’ll start the preparations.”
“No, no, not tomorrow!” cried Pompey, looking horrified.
Nor the next day. Thinking to stretch his men’s legs, he led them out for a walk—or so his legates assumed, since he put them in places where only a fool would have attacked after a long uphill run. Since Caesar was not a fool, he didn’t attack.
But on the eighth day of Sextilis, with the sun sliding down behind his camp, Pompey called his legates together again, this time in his command tent and around a large map his cartographers had drawn up for him upon calfskin.
“Tomorrow,” said Pompey tersely, and stepped back. “Labienus, explain the plan.”
“It’s to be a cavalry battle,” Labienus began, moving up to the map and beckoning everyone to cluster around. “By that I mean that we’ll use our enormous superiority in cavalry as the lever to defeat Caesar, who has only a thousand Germans. Note, by the way, that our skirmish with them revealed that Caesar has armed some of his foot in the same way the Ubii foot fight among the Ubii horse. They’re dangerous, but far too few. We’ll deploy here, with our long axis positioned between the river and the hills. At nine Roman legions we’ll outnumber Caesar, who must keep one of his nine in reserve. That’s where we’re lucky. We have fifteen thousand foreign auxiliary infantry as our reserve. The ground favors us; we’re slightly uphill. For that reason, we’ll draw up further away from Caesar’s front line than usual. Nor will we charge. Puff his men out before they reach our front line. We’re going to pack our infantry tightly because I’m massing six thousand cavalry on the left wing—here, against the hills. A thousand cavalry on our right, against the river—the ground’s too swampy for good horse work. A thousand archers and slingers will be interposed between the first legion of foot on the left and my six thousand horse.”
Labienus paused, glared at each of the men around him with fierce intensity. “The infantry will be drawn up in three separate blocks each comprising ten ranks. All three blocks will charge at the same moment. We have more weight than Caesar, who I’m very reliably informed has only four thousand men per legion due to his losses over the months in Epirus. Our legions are at full strength. We’ll let him charge us with breathless men and roll his front line back. But the real beauty of the plan is in the cavalry. There’s no way Caesar can resist six thousand horse charging his right. While the archer-slinger unit bombards the legion on his far right, my cavalry will drive forward like a landslide, repulse Caesar’s scant cavalry, then swing behind his lines and take him in the rear.” He stepped back, grinning broadly. “Pompeius, it’s all yours.”
“Well, I haven’t much more to add,” said Pompey, sweating in the humid air. “Labienus will command the six thousand horse on my left. As to the infantry, I’ll put the First and Third Legions on my left wing. Ahenobarbus, you’ll command. Then five legions in the center, including the two Syrian. Scipio, you’ll command the center. Spinther, you’ll command my right, closest to the river. You’ll have the eighteen cohorts not in legions. Brutus, you’ll second-in-command Spinther. Faustus, you’ll second-in-command Scipio. Afranius and Petreius, you’ll second-in-command Ahenobarbus. Favonius and Lentulus Crus, you’re in charge of the foreign levies drawn up in reserve. Young Marcus Cicero, you can have the cavalry reserve. Torquatus, take the reserve archers and slingers. Labienus, depute someone to command the thousand horse on the river. The rest of you can sort yourselves out among the legions. Understood?”
Everyone nodded, weighed down by the solemnity of the moment.
Afterward Pompey went off with Faustus Sulla. “There,” he said, “they have what they wanted. I couldn’t hold out any longer.”
“Are you well, Magnus?”
“As well as I’ll ever be, Faustus.” Pompey patted his son-in-law in much the same affectionate way as he had patted Cicero on leaving Dyrrachium. “Don’t worry about me, Faustus, truly. I’m an old man. Fifty-eight in less than two months. There’s a time… It’s hollow, all this ripping and clawing for power. Always a dozen men drooling at the prospect of tearing the First Man down.” He laughed wearily. “Fancy finding the energy to quarrel over which one of them will take Caesar’s place as Pontifex Maximus! As if it matters, Faustus. It doesn’t. They’ll all go too.”
“Magnus, don’t talk like this!”
“Why not? Tomorrow decides everything. I didn’t want it, but I’m not sorry. A decision of any kind is preferable to a continuation of life in my high command.” He dropped an arm about Faustus’s shoulders. “Come, it’s time to call the army to assembly. I have to tell them that tomorrow is the day.”
By the time the army had been summoned and the obligatory pre-battle oration given, darkness had fallen. An augur, Pompey then took the auspices himself. Because no cattle were available, the victim was to be a pure white sheep; a round dozen animals had been herded into a pen, washed, combed, readied for the augur’s expert eye to choose the most suitable offering. But when Pompey indicated a placid-looking bi-dentalis ewe and the cultarius and popa opened the gate, all twelve animals bolted for freedom. Only after a chase was the victim, dirtied and distressed, caught and sacrificed. Not a good omen. The army stirred and muttered; Pompey took the trouble to descend from the augural platform after the sacrifice and go among them, speaking reassuringly. The liver had been perfect, all was well, nothing to worry about.
Then the worst happened. The men were facing east toward Caesar’s camp, still milling and murmuring, when a mighty fireball streaked across the indigo sky like a falling comet of white flames. Down, down, down, leaving a trail of sparks in its wake, not to fall on Caesar’s camp— which might have been a good omen—but to disappear into the darkness far beyond. The unrest began all over again; this time Pompey couldn’t dispel it.
He went to bed in fatalistic mood, convinced that whatever the morrow might bring, it would be to his ultimate good. Why was a fireball a bad omen? What might Nigidius Figulus have made of it, that walking encyclopaedia of ancient Etruscan augural phenomena? Might the Etruscans not have thought it a good omen? Romans went only as far as livers, with the occasional foray into entrails and birds, whereas the Etruscans had catalogued everything.
The thunder woke him up several hours before dawn, sitting straight up in bed and wondering if he had leaped as high as the leather ceiling. Because his sleep had been interrupted at the right moment, he could remember his dream as vividly as if it were still going on. The temple of Venus Victrix at the top of his stone theater, where the statue of Venus had Julia’s face and slender body. He had been in it and decorating it with trophies of battle, while crowds and crowds in the auditorium applauded in huge delight. Oh, such a good omen! Except that the trophies of battle were trophies from his own side: his best silver armor, unmistakable with its cuirass depicting the victory of the Gods over the Titans; Lentulus Crus’s enormous ruby quizzing glass; Faustus Sulla’s lock of hair from his father Sulla’s bright red-gold tresses; Scipio’s helmet, which had belonged to his ancestor Scipio Africanus and still bore the same moth-eaten, faded egret’s feathers in its crest; and, most horrifying trophy of all, the glossy-pated head of Ahenobarbus on a German spear. Flower wreathed.
Shivering from cold, sweating from heat, Pompey lay down again and closed his eyes upon the flaring white lightning, listened as the thunder rolled away across the hills behind him. When the drumming rain came down in torrents, he drifted back into an uneasy sleep, his mind still going over the details of that awful dream.
*
Dawn brought a thick fog and windless, enervating air. In Caesar’s camp all was stirring; the mules were being loaded up, the wagon teams harnessed, everyone getting into marching mode.
“He won’t fight!” Caesar had barked when he came to wake Mark Antony a good hour before first light. “The river’s running a banker after this storm, the ground’s soggy, the troops are wet, da de da de da… Same old Pompeius, same old list of excuses. We’re moving for Scotussa, Antonius, before Pompeius can get up off his arse to stop our slipping by him. Ye Gods, what a slug he is! Will nothing tempt him to fight?”
From which exasperated diatribe the sleepy Antony deduced that the old boy was touchy again.
In that grey, lustrous pall it was impossible to see as far as the lower ground between his own camp and Pompey’s; the pulling of stakes continued unabated.
Until an Aeduan scout came galloping up to where Caesar stood watching the beautiful order of nine legions and a thousand horse troopers preparing to move out silently, efficiently.
“General, General!” the man gasped, sliding off his horse. “General, Gnaeus Pompeius is outside his camp and lined up for—for battle! It really looks as if he means to fight!”
“Cacat!”
That exclamation having escaped his lips, no more followed. Caesar started barking orders in a fluent stream.
“Calenus, have the noncombatants get every last animal to the back of the camp! At the double! Sabinus, start the men tearing the front ramparts to pieces and filling in the ditch—I want every man out quicker than the capite censi can fill the bleachers at the circus! Antonius, get the cavalry saddled up for war, not a ride. You—you—you—you—form up the legions as we discussed. We’ll fight exactly as planned.”
When the fog lifted, Caesar’s army waited on the plain as if no march had ever been on the agenda for that morning.
Pompey had drawn his lines up facing east—which meant he had the rising sun facing him—on a front a mile and a half long between the line of hills and the river, a huge host of cavalry on his left wing, a much smaller contingent on his right.
Caesar, though he had the smaller army, strung his infantry front out a little longer, so that the Tenth, on his right, faced Pompey’s archer-slinger detachment and part of Labienus’s horse. From right to left he put the Tenth, Seventh, Thirteenth, Eleventh, Twelfth, Sixth, Eighth and Ninth. The Fourteenth, which he had thinned down from ten to eight cohorts when re-forming his legions at Aeginium, he positioned concealed behind his thousand German horse on the right wing. They were curiously armed; instead of their customary pila the men each carried a long, barbed siege spear. His left, against the river, would have to fend for itself without cavalry to stiffen it. Publius Sulla, a knacky soldier, had command of Caesar’s right; his center went to Calvinus; his left was in the charge of Mark Antony. He had nothing in reserve.
Positioned on a rise behind those eight cohorts of the Fourteenth armed with siege spears, Caesar sat Toes in his usual fashion, side on, one leg hooked round the two front pommels. Risky for any other horseman, not so for Caesar, who could twist in the tiniest fraction of time fully into the saddle and be off at a gallop. He liked his troops to see, should they cast a glance behind, that the General was absolutely relaxed, totally confident.
Oh, Pompeius, you fool! You fool! You’ve let Labienus general this battle. You’ve staked your all on three silly, flimsy things—that your horse has the weight to outflank my right and come round behind me to roll me up—that your infantry has the weight to knock my boys back— and that you’ll tire my boys out by making them run all the way to you. Caesar’s eyes went to where Pompey sat on his big white Public Horse behind his archer-slingers, neatly opposite Caesar. I am sorry for you, Pompeius. You can’t win this one, and it’s the big one.
Every detail had been worked out three days before, gone over each day since. When Labienus’s cavalry charged, Pompey’s infantry did not, though Caesar’s infantry did. But they paused halfway to get their breath back, then punched into Pompey’s line like a great hammer. The thousand Germans on Caesar’s right fell back before Labienus’s charge without truly engaging; rather than waste time pursuing them, Labienus wheeled right the moment he got to the back third of the Tenth. And ran straight into a wall of siege spears the eight cohorts of the Fourteenth—who had practised the technique for three days—jabbed into the faces of Galatians and Cappadocians. Exactly, thought Labienus, mind whirling, like an old Greek phalanx. His cavalry broke, which was the signal for the Germans to fall upon his flank like wolves, and the signal for the Tenth to wheel sideways and slaughter the archer-slinger contingent before wading fearlessly into Labienus’s disarrayed cavalry, horses screaming and going down, riders screaming and going down, panic everywhere.
Elsewhere the pattern was the same; Pharsalus was more a rout than a battle. It lasted a scant hour. Pompey’s foreign auxiliaries held in reserve fled the moment they saw the horse begin to falter. Most of the legions stayed to fight, including the Syrian, the First and the Third, but the eighteen cohorts against the river on Pompey’s right scattered everywhere, leaving Antony complete victor along the Enipeus.
*
Pompey left the field at an orderly trot the moment he realized he was done for. Rot Labienus and his scornful dismissal of Caesar’s soldiers as raw recruits from across the Padus! Those were veteran legions out there and they fought as one unit, so competently and with such businesslike, rational flair! I was right, my legates were wrong. Just what is Labienus up to? No one will ever defeat Caesar on a battlefield. The man is on top of everything. Better strategy, better tactics. I’m done for. Is that what Labienus has been aiming for all along, high command?
He rode back to his camp, entered his general’s tent and sat with his head between his hands for a long time. Not weeping; the time for tears was past.
And so Marcus Favonius, Lentulus Spinther and Lentulus Crus found him, sitting with his head between his hands.
“Pompeius, you must get up,” said Favonius, going across to put a hand on his silver-sheathed back.
Pompey said no word, made no movement.
“Pompeius, you must get up!” cried Lentulus Spinther. “It’s finished, we’re broken.”
“Caesar will be inside our camp, you must escape!” gasped Lentulus Crus, trembling.
His hands fell; Pompey lifted his head. “Escape where?” he asked apathetically.
“I don’t know! Anywhere, anywhere at all! Please, Pompeius, come with us now!” begged Lentulus Crus.
Pompey’s eyes cleared enough to see that all three men were clad in the dress of Greek merchants—tunic, chlamys cape, broad-brimmed hat, ankle boots. “Like that? In disguise?” he asked.
“It’s better,” said Favonius, who bore another and similar outfit. “Come, Pompeius, stand up, do! I’ll help you out of your armor and into these.” So Pompey stood and allowed himself to be transformed from a Roman commander-in-chief to a Greek businessman. When it was attended to, he looked about the confines of his tent dazedly, then seemed to come to himself. He chuckled, followed his shepherds out.
They left the camp through the gate nearest to the Larissa road on horseback and cantered off before Caesar reached the camp. Larissa was only thirty miles away, a short enough journey not to need a change of horse, but all four horses were blown before they rode in through the Scotussa gate.
Even so, the news of Caesar’s victory at Pharsalus had preceded them; Larissa, emphatically attached to Pompey’s cause, was thronged with confused townsfolk who wandered this way and that, audibly wondering what would be their fate when Caesar came.
“He’ll not harm you,” said Pompey, dismounting in the agora and removing his hat. “Go about your normal business. Caesar is a merciful man; he’ll not harm you.”
Of course he was recognized, but not, thanks be to all the Gods, reviled for losing. What was it I once said to Sulla? asked Pompey of himself, surrounded by weeping partisans offering help. What was it I said to Sulla on that road outside Beneventum? When he was so drunk? More people worship the rising than the setting sun…. Yes, that was it. Caesar’s sun is rising. Mine has set.
A half-strength squadron of thirty Galatian horse troopers rallied around, offering to escort Pompey and his companions wherever they would like to go—provided, that is, that it was eastward along the road back to Galatia and a little peace. They were all Gauls, a part of those thousand men Caesar had sent to Deiotarus as a gift, a way of making sure the men didn’t die, but couldn’t live to rebel either. Mostly Treveri who had learned a little broken Greek since being relocated so far from home.
Freshly mounted, Pompey, Favonius and the two Lentuli rode out of Larissa’s Thessalonica Gate, hidden between the troopers. When they reached the Peneus River inside the Tempe Pass, they encountered a seagoing barge whose captain, ferrying a load of homegrown vegetables to the market in Dium, offered to take the four fugitives as far as Dium. With thanks to the Gallic horsemen, Pompey and his three friends boarded the barge.
“More sensible,” said Lentulus Spinther, recovering faster than the other three. “Caesar will be looking for us on the road to Thessalonica, but not on a barge full of vegetables.”
In Dium, a few miles up the coast from the mouth of the Peneus River, the four had another stroke of luck. There tied up at a wharf, having just emptied its cargo of millet and chickpea from Italian Gaul, was a neat little Roman merchantman with a genuinely Roman captain named Marcus Peticius.
“No need to tell me who you are,” said Peticius, shaking Pompey warmly by the hand. “Where would you like to go?”
For once Lentulus Crus had done the right thing; before he left the camp, he filched every silver denarius and sestertius he could find, perhaps as atonement for forgetting to empty Rome’s money and bullion out of the Treasury. “Name your price, Marcus Peticius,” he said magnificently. “Pompeius, where to?”
“Amphipolis,” said Pompey, plucking a name out of his memory.
“Good choice!” said Peticius cheerfully. “I’ll pick up a nice load of mountain ash there—hard to get in Aquileia.”
*
For Caesar, victor and owner of the field of Pharsalus, a very mixed day, that ninth one of Sextilis. His own losses had been minimal; the Pompeian losses at six thousand dead might have been far worse.
“They would have it thus,” he said sadly to Antony, Publius Sulla, Calvinus and Calenus when the tidying-up began. “They held my deeds as nothing and would have condemned me had I not appealed to my soldiers for help.”
“Good boys,” said Antony affectionately.
“Always good boys.” Caesar’s lips set. “Except the Ninth.”
The bulk of Pompey’s army had vanished; Caesar did not exert himself to pursue it. Even so, it was nearing sunset when he finally found the time to enter and inspect Pompey’s camp.
“Ye Gods!” he breathed. “Weren’t they sure of winning!”
Every tent had been decorated, including those of the ranker soldiers. Evidence that a great feast had been ordered lay all over the place: piles of vegetables, fish which must have been sent fresh that morning from the coast and placidly put in shade to the sound of battle, hundreds upon hundreds of newly slaughtered lamb carcasses, mounds of bread, pots of stew, jars of softened chickpea and ground sesame seed in oil and garlic, cakes sticky with honey, olives by the tub, many cheeses, strings of sausages.
“Pollio,” said Caesar to his very junior legate, Gaius Asinius Pollio, “there’s no point in transferring all this food from their camp to ours. Start moving our men over here to enjoy a victory feast donated to them by the enemy.” He grunted. “It will have to take place tonight. By tomorrow, a lot of this stuff will have perished. I don’t want sick soldiers.”
However, it was the tents of Pompey’s legates really opened every pair of eyes. By ironic coincidence, Caesar reached Lentulus Crus’s quarters last. “Shades of that palace on the sea at Gytheum!” he said (a reference no one understood), shaking his head. “No wonder he couldn’t be bothered emptying the Treasury! A man might be pardoned for presuming he’d looted the Treasury for himself.”
Gold plate was strewn everywhere, the couches were Tyrian purple, the pillows pearl embroidered, the tables in the corners were priceless citrus-wood; in Lentulus Crus’s sleeping chamber the inspection party found a huge bathtub of rare red marble with lion’s paw feet. The kitchen, an open area behind the tent’s back, yielded barrels packed with snow in which reposed the most delicate fish—shrimps, sea urchins, oysters, dug-mullets. More snow-packed barrels contained various kinds of little birds, lambs’ livers and kidneys, herbified sausages. The bread was rising, the sauces all lined up in pots ready to heat.
“Hmmm,” said Caesar, “this is where we feast tonight! And for once, Antonius, you’ll be able to eat and drink to your heart’s content. Though,” he ended with a chuckle, “it’s back to the same old stuff tomorrow night. I will not live like Sampsiceramus when I’m on campaign. I daresay Crus got the snow from Mount Olympus.”
Accompanied only by Calvinus, he sat down in Pompey’s command tent to investigate the chests of papers and documents found there.
“One has to trot out that old saw and proclaim to the world that one has burned the enemy’s papers—Pompeius did that once, in Osca after Sertorius died—but it’s a foolish man who doesn’t have a good look first.”
“Will you burn them?” Calvinus asked, smiling.
“Oh, definitely! In great public state, as Pompeius did. But I read at a glance, Calvinus. We’ll establish a system. I’ll con everything first, and anything I think might be worth reading at leisure I’ll hand to you.”
Among many dozens of fascinating pieces of paper was the last will and testament of King Ptolemy Auletes, late of Egypt.
“Well, well!” said Caesar thoughtfully. “I think this is one document I won’t sacrifice to the fire. It might come in quite handy in the future.”
Everyone rose rather late the following morning, Caesar included; he had stayed up until nearly dawn reading those chests and chests of papers. Very informative indeed.
While the legions completed the burning of bodies and other inevitable duties consequent upon victory, Caesar and his legates rode out along the road to Larissa. Where they encountered the bulk of Pompey’s Roman troops. Twenty-three thousand men cried for pardon, which Caesar was pleased to grant. He then offered places in his own legions for any men who wanted to volunteer.
“Why, Caesar?” asked Publius Sulla, astonished. “We’ve won the war here at Pharsalus!”
The pale, unsettling eyes rested on Sulla’s nephew with cool irony. “Rubbish, Publius!” he said. “The war’s not over. Pompeius is still at large. So too are Labienus, Cato, all Pompeius’s fleet commanders—and fleets!—and at least a dozen other dangerous men. This war won’t be over until they’ve all submitted to me.”
“Submitted to you?” Publius Sulla frowned, then relaxed. “Oh! You mean submitted to Rome.”
“I,” said Caesar, “am Rome, Publius. Pharsalus has proved it.”
*
For Brutus, Pharsalus was a nightmare. Wondering whether Pompey had understood his torment, he had been enormously grateful for the fact that Pompey had deputed him to Lentulus Spinther on the right flank at the river. But Antony and the Eighth and Ninth had faced them, and though the Ninth in particular had been replenished with the more inexperienced men of the Fourteenth, no one could say afterward that they hadn’t punished the enemy. Given a horse and told to look after the outermost cohorts, Brutus sat the animal in serviceable steel armor and eyed the ivory eagle hilt of his sword like a small animal fascinated by a snake.
He never did draw it. Suddenly chaos broke loose, the world was filled with his own men screaming “Hercules Invictus!” and the men of the Ninth screaming some unintelligible warcry; he discovered, appalled, that hand-to-hand combat in a legion’s front line was not a precious pairing-off of one man against another, but a massive push, push, push of mail-clad bodies while other mail-clad bodies pushed, pushed, pushed in the opposite direction. Swords stabbed and flickered, shields were used like rams and levers—how did they ever remember who was who, friend or enemy? Did they really have time to look at the color of a helmet crest? Transfixed, Brutus simply sat his horse and watched.
The news of the collapse of Pompey’s left and his cavalry traveled down the line in some way he didn’t understand, except that men ceased to cry “Hercules Invictus!” and started crying quarter instead. Caesar’s Ninth wore blue horsehair plumes. When the yellow plumes of his own cohorts seemed suddenly to vanish before a sea of blue ones, Brutus kicked his restive mount in the ribs and bolted for the river.
All day and into the night he hid in the swampy overflow of the Enipeus, never for a moment letting go of his horse’s reins. Finally, when the cheers, shouts and laughter of Caesar’s feasting and victorious troops began to die away with the embers of their fires, he pulled himself upon the horse’s back and rode off toward Larissa.
There, given civilian Greek clothing by a sympathetic man of Larissa who also offered him shelter, Brutus sat down at once and wrote to Caesar.
Caesar, this is Marcus Junius Brutus, once your friend. Please, I beg you, pardon me for my presumption in deciding to ally myself with Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and the Senate in exile. For many months I have regretted my action in leaving Tarsus and Publius Sestius and my legateship there. I deserted my post like a silly boy in quest of adventure. But this kind of adventure has not proven to my taste. I am, I discover, unmartial to the point of ridiculousness and quite without the will to wage war.
I have heard it broadcast through the town that you are offering pardon to all Pompeians of all ranks provided they have not been pardoned before. I also heard that you are willing to pardon any man a second time if one of your own men intercedes for him. That is not necessary in my case. I cry for pardon as a first offender. Will you extend it to me, if not for my own unworthy sake, for the sake of my mother and your dear dead daughter, Julia?
It was in answer to this letter that Caesar rode down the road to Larissa with his legates.
“Find me Marcus Junius Brutus,” he said to the town ethnarch, who presented himself at once to plead for his people. “Bring him to me and Larissa will suffer no consequences.”
The Brutus who came, still in Greek dress, was abject, thin, hangdog, unable to lift his face to the man on the horse.
“Brutus, Brutus, what is this?” he heard the familiar deep voice say, then felt two hands on his shoulders. Someone took him into strong, steely arms; Brutus felt the touch of a pair of lips. He finally looked up. Caesar. Who else had eyes like that? Who else combined enough power and beauty to devastate his mother?
“My dear Brutus, I am so delighted to see you!” said Caesar, one arm around his shoulders, walking away from his legates, still mounted and watching sardonically.
“Am I pardoned?” whispered Brutus, who thought the weight and heat of that arm was about equal to his mother’s, and terribly reminiscent of her. Lead to burden him down, kill him.
“I wouldn’t presume to think you needed to be pardoned, my boy!” said Caesar. “Where’s your stuff? Have you a horse? You’re coming with me this moment, I need you desperately. As usual, I have no one with the kind of mind capable of dealing with facts, figures, minutiae. And I can promise you,” that warm and friendly voice went on, “that in years to come you will do better by far under my aegis than ever you could have under Pompeius’s.”
*
“What do you intend to do about the fugitives, Caesar?” asked Antony that afternoon, back at Pharsalus.
“Follow Pompeius’s tracks, first and foremost. Is there any word? Has he been seen since he left Larissa?”
“There are stories of a ship in Dium,” said Calenus, “and of Amphipolis.”
Caesar blinked. “Amphipolis? Then he’s heading east, not west or south. What of Labienus, Faustus Sulla, Metellus Scipio, Afranius, Petreius?”
“The only one we can be sure of, Caesar—aside from dear little Marcus Brutus—is Ahenobarbus.”
“That is true, Antonius. The only one of the great men to die on the field of Pharsalus. And the second one of my enemies to go. Though I confess I won’t miss him the way I will Bibulus. Are his ashes taken care of?”
“On their way to his wife already,” said Pollio, who found himself entrusted with all kinds of tasks.
“Good.”
“We march tomorrow?” asked Calvinus.
“That we do.”
“There might be a large number of refugees heading in the direction of Brundisium,” said Publius Sulla.
“For which reason I’ve already sent to Publius Vatinius in Salona. Quintus Cornificius can maintain Illyricum for the moment. Vatinius can go to command Brundisium and turn the refugees away.” Caesar grinned at Antony. “And you may rest easy, Antonius. I’ve heard that Gnaeus Pompeius the son has released your brother from detention on Corcyra. Safe and well.”
“I’ll offer to Jupiter for that!”
In the morning, Pharsalus returned to a sleepy, swampy river valley amid the Thessalian hills; Caesar’s army dispersed. With him on the road to Asia Province, Caesar took two legions only, both made up of volunteers from Pompey’s defeated legions. His own veterans were to return to a well-deserved furlough in Italian Campania under the command of Antony. With Caesar went Brutus and Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus, whom Caesar found himself liking more and more. A good man in a hard situation, that was Calvinus.
The march to Amphipolis was done in Caesar’s usual swift manner; if Pompey’s old legionaries found the pace a little more hectic than they were used to, they didn’t complain. The truth was that Caesar ran a good army; a man always knew where he stood.
Eighty miles east of Thessalonica on the Via Egnatia and located where the widened river Strymon flowed out of Lake Cercinitis on its short course to the sea, Amphipolis was a shipbuilding and timber town. The trees grew far inland and were sent down the Strymon as logs to be dismembered and reconstructed in Amphipolis.
Here Marcus Favonius waited alone for the pursuit he knew would come.
“I cry pardon, Caesar,” he said when they met, another one whom defeat at Pharsalus had changed out of all recognition. His strident manner and his aping of Cato were gone.
“I grant it with great good will, Favonius. Brutus is with me, and very anxious to see you.”
“Ah, you pardoned him too.”
“Of course. It’s no part of my policy to punish decent men for mistaken ideals. What I hope is to see us all together in Rome one day, working together for Rome’s well-being. What do you want to do? I’ll give you a letter for Vatinius in Brundisium saying whatever you wish.”
“I wish,” said Favonius, tears on his lashes, “that none of this had ever happened.”
“So do I,” said Caesar sincerely.
“Yes, I can understand that.” He drew a breath. “For myself, I want only to retire to my estates in Lucania and live a quiet life. No war, no politics, no strife, no dissent. Peace, Caesar. That’s all I want. Peace.”
“Do you know where the others have gone?”
“Mitylene was their next port of call, but I doubt they have any intention of staying there. The Lentuli say they’ll remain with Pompeius, at least for the time being. Just before he left, Pompeius had messages from some of the others. Labienus, Afranius, Petreius, Metellus Scipio, Faustus Sulla and some others have headed for Africa. I know nothing else.”
“And Cato? Cicero?”
“Who knows? But I think Cato will head for Africa once he finds out so many others are going there. After all, there is a pro-Pompeian government in Africa Province. I doubt it will submit to you without a fight, Caesar.”
“I doubt that too. Thank you, Marcus Favonius.”
That evening there was a quiet dinner alone with Brutus, but at dawn Caesar was on his way toward the Hellespont, Calvinus by his side and Brutus, to whom Caesar was most tender, ensconced in a comfortable gig with a servant to minister to him.
Favonius rode out to watch, he hoped for the last time, the silvery column of Roman legions stride off down a Roman-made road, straight where it could be straight, easily graded, unexhausting. But in the end all Favonius saw was Caesar, riding a mettlesome brown stallion with the ease and grace of a much younger man. He would, Favonius knew, be scarcely out of sight of the Amphipolan walls before he was down and marching on his feet. Horses were for battles, parades and spectacles. How could a man so sure of his own majesty be so down to earth? A most curious mixture, Gaius Julius Caesar. The sparse gold hair fluttered like ribbons in the keen wind off the Aegaean Sea, the spine was absolutely straight, the legs hanging down unsupported as powerful and sinewy as ever. One of the handsomest men in Rome, yet never pretty like Memmius or effete like Silius. Descended from Venus and Romulus. Well, who knew? Maybe the Gods did love their own best. Oh, Cato, don’t go on resisting him! No one can. He will be King of Rome—but only if he wants to be.
*
Mitylene was panic stricken too. Panic was spreading all over the East at the result of this clash between two Roman titans, so unexpected, so horrifying. For no one knew this Caesar save at second or third or fourth hand; all his governorships had been in the West, and those far-off days when he had been in the East were obscure. Mitylene knew that when Lucullus besieged it in Sulla’s name, this Gaius Caesar had fought in the front lines and won a corona civica for valor. Hardly anyone knew of the battle he had generaled against the forces of Mithridates outside Tralles in Asia Province, though Tralles knew that it had erected a statue of him in a little temple to Victory near the site of the battle, and flocked now to tidy the temple up, make sure the statue was in good repair. To find, awestruck, that a palm seed had germinated between the flags at the base of Caesar’s statue, the sign of a great victory. And the sign of a great man. Tralles talked.
Rome had dominated the world of Our Sea for so long now that any convulsion within the ranks of the Roman powerful sent cracks racing through every land around it like the cracks which spread after an earthquake. What was going to happen? What would the new structure of the world be like? Was Caesar a reasonable man of Sulla’s kind, would he institute measures to relieve the squeezing of governors and tax farmers? Or would he be another Pompeius Magnus, encourage the depredations of governors and tax farmers? In Asia Province, utterly exhausted by Metellus Scipio, Lentulus Crus and one of Pompey’s minor legates, Titus Ampius Balbus, every island, city and district scrambled to tear down its statues of Pompey the Great and erect statues to Gaius Caesar; traffic was very heavy to the temple of Victory outside Tralles, where an authentic likeness of the new First Man in Rome existed. In Ephesus some of the coastal cities of Asia Province clubbed together to commission a copy of Caesar’s Tralles statue from the famous studios at Aphrodisias. It stood in the center of the agora and said on its plinth: GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR, SON OF GAIUS, PONTIFEX MAXIMUS, IMPERATOR, CONSUL FOR THE SECOND TIME, DESCENDED FROM ARES AND APHRODITE, GOD MADE MANIFEST AND COMMON SAVIOR OF MANKIND. Heady stuff, particularly because it chose to put Caesar’s descent from Mars and his son, Romulus, ahead of his descent from Venus and her son, Aeneas. Asia Province was very busy doing its homework.
It was into this atmosphere of mingled panic and sycophantic adulation that Pompey stepped when he disembarked with the two Lentuli in Mitylene harbor on the big island of Lesbos. All of Lesbos had declared for him long since, but to receive him, a beaten man, was difficult and delicate. His arrival indicated that he was not yet forced from the arena, that perhaps in time to come there would be another Pharsalus. Only—could he win? The word was that Caesar had never lost a battle (the “great victory” in Dyrrachium was now being called hollow), that no one could defeat him.
Pompey handled the situation well, maintaining his Greek dress and informing the ethnarchs in council that Caesar was most famous for his clemency.
“Be nice to him” was his advice. “He rules the world.”
Cornelia Metella and young Sextus were waiting for him. A curious reunion, dominated by Sextus, who threw his arms about his adored father and wept bitterly.
“Don’t cry,” said Pompey, stroking the brown, rather straight hair; Sextus was the only one of his three children to inherit Mucia Tertia’s darker coloring.
“I should have been there as your cadet!”
“And you would have been, had events marched slower. But you did a better job, Sextus. You looked after Cornelia for me.”
“Women’s work!”
“No, men’s work. The family is the nucleus of all Roman thought, Sextus, and the wife of Pompeius Magnus is a very important person. So too his sons.”
“I won’t leave you again!”
“I hope not. We must offer to the Lares and Penates and Vesta that one day we are all reunited.” Pompey eased Sextus out of his arms, gave him his handkerchief to blow his nose and dry his eyes. “Now you can do me a good turn. Start a letter to your brother, Gnaeus. I’ll be with you soon to finish it.”
Only after Sextus, sniffling and clutching the handkerchief, had gone off to do his father’s bidding did Pompey have the opportunity to look at Cornelia Metella properly.
She hadn’t changed. Still supercilious looking, haughty, a trifle remote. But the grey eyes were red-rimmed, swollen, and gazed at him with genuine grief. He walked forward to kiss her hand.
“A sad day,” he said.
“Tata?”
“Gone in the direction of Africa, I think. In time we’ll find out. He wasn’t hurt at Pharsalus.” How hard to say that word! “Cornelia,” he said, playing with her fingers, “you have my full permission to divorce me. If you do, your property will remain yours. At least I was clever enough to put the villa in the Alban Hills in your name. I didn’t lose that when I had to sell so much to fund this war. Nor the villa on the Campus Martius. Nor the house on the Carinae. Those are mine, you and my sons may lose them to Caesar.”
“I thought he wasn’t going to proscribe.”
“He won’t proscribe. But the property of the leaders in this war will be confiscate, Cornelia. That’s custom and tradition. He won’t stand in the way of it. Therefore I think it’s safer and more sensible for you to divorce me.”
She shook her head, gave one of her rare and rather awkward smiles. “No, Magnus. I am your wife. I will remain your wife.”
“Then go home, at least.” He released her hand, waved his own about aimlessly. “I don’t know what will become of me! I don’t know what’s the best thing to do. I don’t know where to go from here, but I can’t stay here either. Life with me won’t be very comfortable, Cornelia. I’m a marked man. Caesar knows he has to apprehend me. While I’m at liberty I represent a nucleus for the gathering of another war.”
“Like Sextus, I won’t leave you again. But surely the place to go is Africa. We should sail for Utica at once, Magnus.”
“Should we?” The vivid blue eyes were emerging once more from his puffy face, shrinking, like his body, from the anguish, the pain, the blow to his pride he still found impossible to govern. “Cornelia, it has been terrible. I don’t mean Caesar or the war, I mean my associates in this venture. Oh, not your father! He’s been a tower of strength. But he wasn’t there for most of it. The bickering, the carping, the constant faultfinding.”
“They found fault with you?”
“Perpetually. It wore me down. Perhaps I could have coped better with Caesar if I’d had control of my own command tent. But I didn’t. Labienus generaled, Cornelia, not me. That man! How did Caesar ever put up with him? He’s a barbarian. I do believe that he can only achieve physical satisfaction from putting men’s eyes out—oh, worse acts I can’t speak of to you! And though Ahenobarbus died very gallantly on the field, he tormented me at every opportunity. He called me Agamemnon, King of Kings.”
The shocks and dislocations of the past two months had done much for Cornelia Metella; the spoiled amateur scholar had gained a measure of compassion, some much-needed sensitivity to the feelings of others. So she didn’t make the mistake of interpreting Pompey’s words as evidence of self-pity. He was like a noble old rock, worn away by the constant dripping of corrosive water.
“Dear Magnus, I think the trouble was that they deemed war as another kind of Senate. They didn’t begin to understand that politics has nothing to do with military matters. They passed the Senatus Consultum Ultimum to make sure Caesar wouldn’t be able to order them about. How then could they let you order them about?”
He smiled wryly. “That is very true. It should also tell you why I shrink from going to Africa. Your tata will go, yes. But so will Labienus and Cato. What would be different in Africa? I wouldn’t own my command tent there either.”
“Then we should seek shelter with the King of the Parthians, Magnus,” she said decisively. “You sent your cousin Hirrus to see Orodes. He hasn’t come back, though he’s safe. Ecbatana is one place won’t see either Caesar or Labienus.”
“But what would it be like to look up at seven captured Roman Eagles? I’d be living with the shade of Crassus.”
“Where else is there?”
“Egypt.”
“It’s not far enough away.”
“No, but it’s a place to jump off from. Can you imagine how much the people of the Indus or Serica might pay to gain a Roman general? I could win that world for my employer. The Egyptians know how to get to Taprobane. In Taprobane there will be someone who knows how to get to Serica or the Indus.”
She smiled broadly, a nice sight. “Magnus, that’s brilliant! Yes, let’s you and I and Sextus go to Serica!”
*
He didn’t stay long in Mitylene, but when he heard that the great philosopher Cratippus was there, he went to seek an audience.
“I am honored, Pompeius,” said the old man in the pure white robe with the pure white beard flowing down its front.
“No, the honor is mine.” Pompey made no attempt to sit down, stood looking into the rheumy eyes and wondering why they showed no sign of wisdom. Didn’t philosophers always look wise?
“Let us walk,” said Cratippus, putting his arm through Pompey’s. “The garden is so beautiful. Done in the Roman style, of course. We Greeks have not the gift of gardening. I have always thought that the Roman appreciation of Nature’s beauty is an indication of the innate worth of the Roman people. We Greeks deflected our love of beauty into man-made things, whereas you Romans have the genius to insert your man-made things into Nature as if they belonged there. Bridges, aqueducts… So perfect! We never understood the beauty of the arch. Nature,” Cratippus rambled on, “is never linear, Gnaeus Pompeius. Nature is round, like the globe.”
“I have never grasped the roundness of the globe.”
“Didn’t Eratosthenes prove it when he measured the shadow on the same plane in Upper and Lower Egypt? Flatness has an edge. And if there is an edge, why don’t the waters of Oceanus flow off it like a cataract? No, Gnaeus Pompeius, the world is a globe, closed on itself like a fist. The tips of its fingers kiss the back of its palm. And that, you know, is a kind of infinity.”
“I wondered,” said Pompey, searching for words, “if you could tell me anything about the Gods.”
“I can tell you much, but what did you want to know?”
“Well, something about their form. What godhead is.”
“I think you Romans are closer to that answer than we Greeks. We set up our Gods as facsimiles of men and women, with all the failings, desires, appetites and evils thereof. Whereas the Roman Gods—the true Roman Gods—have no faces, no sex, no form. You say numina. Inside the air, a part of the air. A kind of infinity.”
“But how do they exist, Cratippus?”
The watery eyes, Pompey saw, were very dark but had a pale ring around the outside of each iris. Arcus senilis, the sign of coming death. He was not long for this world. This globe.
“They exist as themselves.”
“No, what are they like?”
“Themselves. We can have no comprehension of what that might be because we do not know them. We Greeks gave them human personae because we could grasp at nothing else. But in order to make them Gods, we gave them superhuman powers. I believe,” said Cratippus gently, “that all the Gods are actually a part of one great God. Again, you Romans come closer to that truth. You know that all your Gods are a part of your great God, Jupiter Optimus Maximus.”
“And does this great God live in the air?”
“I think it lives everywhere. Above, below, inside, outside, around, about. I think we are a part of it.”
Pompey wet his lips, came at last to what preyed on his mind. “Do we live on after we die?”
“Ah! The eternal question. A kind of infinity.”
“By definition, the Gods or a great God are immortal. We die. But do we continue to live?”
“Immortality is not the same as infinity. There are many different kinds of immortality. The long life of God—but is it infinitely long? I do not think so. I think God is born and reborn in immeasurably long cycles. Whereas infinity is unchanging. It had no beginning, it will have no end. As for us—I do not know. Beyond any doubt, Gnaeus Pompius, you will be immortal. Your name and your deeds will live on for millennia after you are vanished. That is a sweet thought. And is it not to own godhead?”
Pompey went away no more enlightened. Well, wasn’t that what they always said? Try to pin a Greek down and you ended with nothing. A kind of infinity.
*
He set sail from Mitylene with Cornelia Metella, Sextus and the two Lentuli and island-hopped down the eastern Aegaean Sea, staying nowhere longer than an overnight sleep, encountering no one he knew until he rounded the corner of Lycia and docked in the big Pamphylian city of Attaleia. There he found no less than sixty members of the Senate in exile. None terribly distinguished, all terribly bewildered. Attaleia announced its undying loyalty and gave Pompey twelve neat and seaworthy triremes together with a letter from his son Gnaeus, still on the island of Corcyra. How did word get around so quickly?
Father, I have sent this same letter to many places. Please, I beg of you, don’t give up! I have heard of your frightful ordeals in the command tent from Cicero, who was here but has now gone. That Labienus! Cicero told me.
He arrived with Cato and a thousand recovered wounded troops. Then Cato announced that he would take the soldiers on to Africa, but that it was inappropriate for a mere praetor to command when a consular—he meant Cicero—was available for command. His aim was to put himself and the men under Cicero’s authority, but you know that old bag of wind better than I do, so you can imagine what his answer was. He wanted nothing to do with further resistance, troops or Cato. When Cato realized that Cicero was secretly bent on going back to Italia, he lost his temper and went for Cicero with feet and fists. I had to drag him off. The moment he could, Cicero fled to Patrae, taking his brother Quintus and nephew Quintus with him. They had been staying with me. I imagine the three of them are now squabbling in Patrae.
Cato took my transports—I have no need of them—and set sail for Africa. Unfortunately I had no one I could give him as a pilot, so I told him to point the bows of his ships south and let the winds and currents take him. One consolation is that Africa shuts Our Sea in on the south, so he can’t help but fetch up somewhere in Africa.
What this tells me is that the war against Caesar is far from over. Resistance will crystallize in Africa Province as the refugees all head there. We are still alive and kicking, and we still own the seas. Please, I beg you, my beloved father, gather what ships you can and come either to me or to Africa.
Pompey’s answer was brief.
My dearest son, forget me. I can do nothing to help the Republican cause. My day is over. Nor, candidly, can I face the thought of the command tent with Cato and Labienus breathing down my neck. My race is run. What you do is your choice. But beware Cato and Labienus. The one is a rigid ideologue, the other a savage.
Cornelia, Sextus and I are going far, far away. I will not say where in case this letter is intercepted. The two Lentuli, who have accompanied me until now, will leave me before I reveal my destination. I hope to elude them here in Attaleia.
Look after yourself, my son. I love you.
Early in September came the time for departure; Pompey’s ship slipped out of harbor without the knowledge of the two Lentuli or the sixty refugee senators. He had taken three of the triremes but left the other nine to be sent to Gnaeus in Corcyra.
They called in to Cilician Syedra briefly, then crossed the water to Paphos in Cyprus. The prefect of Cyprus, now under Roman rule from Cilicia, was one of the sons of Appius Claudius Pulcher Censor and very keen to do what he could to help Pompey.
“I am so sorry your father died so suddenly,” said Pompey.
“And I,” said Gaius Claudius Pulcher, who didn’t look sorry. “Though he’d quite gone off his head, you know.”
“I had heard something of it. At least he was spared things like Pharsalus.” How hard it was to say that word “Pharsalus”!
“Yes. He and I have always been yours, but I can’t say the same for the whole patrician Claudian clan.”
“All the Famous Families are split, Gaius Claudius.”
“You can’t stay here, unfortunately. Antioch and Syria have declared for Caesar, and Sestius in the governor’s palace at Tarsus has always inclined toward Caesar. He’ll declare openly any day.”
“How is the wind for Egypt?”
Gaius Claudius stiffened. “I wouldn’t go there, Magnus.”
“Why not?”
“There’s civil war.”