The peace talks collapsed but not before one of Pompey’s lieutenants laid things on the line: “There can be no peace for us,” he said, “until Caesar’s head is brought in.” The Latin rings with power: nam nobis nisi Caesaris capite relato pax esse nulla potest.
It boiled the war down to its essentials—one man. As long as Caesar was alive, peace was impossible. He would never back down. If he died, no one else could hold his army together. But Pompey’s death would have been a different story, engendering among his supporters an equal measure of mourning and relief. His goal was power but theirs was a republican government, and they would be glad to go on fighting for it without him. Without Caesar, though, there would be no Caesarians, as the followers of Caesar were called.
If Pompey thought he could win a direct assault on Caesar, he would have made one. He preferred instead to starve out the enemy. It was Pompey’s by-now-familiar caution, but it made sense, as the enemy had limited food and supplies and no way to return to Italy.
The situation drove Caesar to distraction. At one point, he made the improbable move of slipping out of camp and hiring the captain of a small boat to bring him back to Brundisium. The weather turned rough and the captain wanted to turn back, but Caesar insisted on continuing because of “Caesar’s good fortune.” Luckily, Caesar came to his senses before the boat was swamped and returned to shore. Was it just a stunt to boost morale? Back at his camp, Caesar’s men hailed his safety and vowed to beat Pompey without reinforcements, all on their own.
They didn’t have to. Three months after their arrival, in April 48 B.C. (February 48, by the modern calendar), Antony finally managed to show up with the rest of Caesar’s legions. Once again, Pompey’s blockade had failed. In fact, the fault looks even greater when we consider that a Pompeian squadron of fifty ships raided Antony’s base at Brundisium. Antony fought them off, but just think what a full-scale attack could have achieved. As so often, Pompey gave up the initiative to the enemy.
Antony had actually been driven off course and landed forty miles north of Caesar. Caesar marched north to meet him, and Pompey tried to block him. Pompey failed in that, although his navy did manage to capture all of Antony’s ships, leaving Caesar’s forces cut off from Italy. Ever wily, though, Caesar beat Pompey back to Dyrrachium and cut him off from his supplies in the city. Pompey made camp on Petra, a fortified hill near the sea and a harbor, with Dyrrachium to his north and Caesar’s camp in between.
And there, the two sides sat and dug in. After more than a year of mobile warfare from Spain to the Adriatic, the struggle to control the Roman empire settled down to a rumble over a twenty-mile-square strip of hills and sand on the coast of Albania.
Pompey’s Game
Caesar had cut Pompey off from Dyrrachium but only by land. Since Pompey held command of the sea, he could ferry supplies to Petra. Caesar couldn’t stop that, but he could prevent Pompey from sending his cavalry into the hills in search of the fodder they needed for their horses.
It was a small victory but Caesar wanted to turn it into a big one. He decided to have his men build a wall, punctuated by forts, to blockade Pompey’s army. The wall eventually stretched for seventeen miles over hilly terrain. Pompey answered by building a fifteen-mile long “counterwall” to keep Caesar’s army away from his troops. There now followed the strangest battle of the war. For more than three months, the two sides were locked in a kind of armed wrestling match of raids and counter-raids.
It was a war of attrition, and attrition was Pompey’s element. He was a great organizer who liked nothing better than to twist the noose slowly around another army’s neck. Caesar was all speed. He jabbed brilliantly, looking for an opening against the foe, but Pompey ground him down.
Caesar made the mistake of playing Pompey’s game at Dyrrachium, although he tried to play it differently. As soon as he linked up with Antony, Caesar challenged Pompey to a pitched battle against his reunited forces. But Pompey was too smart to fall for that, knowing that his men were not ready to take on Caesar’s veterans in deadly combat. Later, on another occasion, Caesar led an assault on the city of Dyrrachium, but it nearly cost him his life, and the attempt failed. So Caesar put his hopes in his wall.
As a military strategy, it could hardly succeed. The wall would reduce Pompey’s supplies but not destroy them. Cut off from the city and the sea, Caesar’s men would suffer more. It was nearly a year since the last harvest, and there was little food to be found by foraging. In fact, Caesar’s troops were reduced to eating roots, which left Pompey to dub them animals and not men.
But the wall’s purpose was as much political as military. It meant to humiliate Pompey by showing that a smaller army could cut him off—an army that he feared to face in conventional battle. Dolabella, who was with Caesar at Dyrrachium as an officer—apparently forgiven for earlier losing a fleet in the Adriatic—wrote to Cicero, his famous father-in-law, to tell him to dump Pompey and switch to Caesar’s side, because only losers allow themselves to be blockaded.
“So what?” Pompey might have responded, and rightly so. (Cicero stayed loyal to Pompey, by the way). Pompey figured that eventually Caesar’s men would crack, and they did. After three months of siege, two of Caesar’s Gallic cavalry officers defected to Pompey because Caesar had caught them stealing money. They brought key intelligence about weak points in Caesar’s defenses. In early July (early May by our calendar), Pompey launched a series of joint land-sea attacks. Although Caesar’s forces managed to drive them back, it was not easy, and they took heavy casualties. Caesar himself had to jump in at the head of the reserves.
Not long afterward, Caesar led a counterattack. At first it went well, but then, to quote Caesar, “fortune . . . produces great changes out of little movements, as it happened then.” Caesar’s men mistakenly entered a kind of maze of abandoned walls and ditches. They paid for their error—Pompey attacked them and they panicked. Caesar now risked his life—and almost lost it—in an effort to stop them: the incident with which this book began.
But not even Caesar could stem the tide of panic. The result was a major disaster: about a thousand of his men, including thirty-two officers, were killed and others taken prisoner. Also lost were thirty-two battle standards, a sign of shame to a Roman army.
Caesar’s position looked grim, but then a surprising thing happened: nothing. Caesar expected Pompey to close in for the kill but Pompey held back. He suspected an ambush and he thought it was an unnecessary risk to attack. As far as he was concerned, he had won the war. He expected that Caesar’s hungry and defeated army would simply break up. If they managed to hang on, they could no longer do real damage.
Pompey’s soldiers now saluted him as “Imperator!”—that is, “victorious general.” Jubilant, Pompey accepted the tribute, but he didn’t repeat it. Calling himself “Imperator” would offend many, because in this case, the title came from a battle in which he had killed fellow Romans, not foreign enemies.
Anyway, Pompey had a bigger problem to worry about. Caesar was unbeaten. Caesar had expected Pompey to follow up his success and deliver the crowning blow, but he never came. Caesar felt surprise and contempt. He said to his friends, “Today the enemy would have won, if they had a commander who was a winner.”
Looking back later, Caesar accused Pompey of overconfidence, and of forgetting that the victory was due more to Caesar’s men’s bad luck than to any prowess on Pompey’s part. By not finishing the job, Pompey gave Caesar breathing space to come up with a new plan, while not bothering to do the same himself, as Caesar later sneered.
Caesar had no intention of giving up. Success spoiled Pompey, but failure stiffened Caesar’s spine. He realized that he was finished at Dyrrachium. Better withdraw eastward, over the mountains into central Greece, specifically into the rich and fertile region of Thessaly. By now, it was mid-July (mid-May by our calendar) and the winter wheat would be ripening in the fields. Caesar’s men could harvest it and eat. He also recognized that he needed to rebu
ild his men’s morale before risking another fight. He gathered the army, told the troops to take heart, and punished a few of his standard-bearers for good measure. Then, after sending the baggage train ahead at night, he withdrew his army at dawn.
In private, Caesar is supposed to have confessed that he was wrong to blockade Dyrrachium. In public, he admitted nothing. He told the troops that they should blame their loss on anyone but him. It was arrogant but shrewd. Caesar considered the army to be like a child that would be lost without faith in its father—himself. Shake that trust and he would orphan them.
As he retreated to Thessaly, Caesar did nothing less than save his army. It was an inspired display of leadership. No surprise, for, aside from the strategic blunder of blockading Dyrrachium, Caesar had offered brilliant leadership throughout the winter—spring campaign of 48 B.C. He led at every level, from the front line to intermediate-sized units to the strategist’s tent. He led directly and indirectly, by example and by mental agility. He showed an extraordinary knowledge of his men and clearheadedness about their strengths and weaknesses. He accepted setbacks but never defeat. Caesar proved himself to be a man without illusions but also without gloom.
When it came to cunning and strategic insight, Pompey was Caesar’s equal. In organizational skill, Pompey was his superior. His strategic withdrawal from Italy was masterful. His defense of Dyrrachium was shrewd. But he lacked Caesar’s audacity and speed. His army could not compete in pitched battle. He failed to destroy Caesar when he had him at his mercy at Dyrrachium. Worst of all, Pompey was capable of self-delusion. Eventually, Caesar too would fall prey to this weakness, but in 48 B.C., his mind was still as cold as the snows of Gaul and as sharp as a wolf’s tooth.
The Essence of Decision
“War is a harsh teacher.” After his experience in the first year and a half of war, each of our three generals would have nodded in agreement to this saying of Thucydides. They each faced surprises and reversals.
About a year and a half after the outbreak of war, Hannibal and Caesar had each penetrated to the heart of enemy territory. Although they took great risks to get there, neither succeeded in conquering his opponent’s stronghold. Caesar was driven back from Dyrrachium, while Hannibal didn’t even try to take Rome. Neither man had taken his last shot yet, however—far from it.
About eighteen months after the start of his war, Alexander had not yet reached the enemy’s homeland, but he had conquered its rich, western rim. Like Hannibal, he had defeated the enemy in two pitched battles; Hannibal also won a third battle that was effectively a massacre. Caesar hadn’t found an enemy willing to fight him in a pitched battle, but he had conquered Italy and Spain as well as Sicily and Sardinia even so, with seemingly little effort.
Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar each found himself challenged by the enemy’s game. Each man began the war with the hope that the enemy would honor the standard protocols of warfare in the Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman worlds: decision by pitched battle. The enemy had other options, though, and he chose to exercise them, and none of the three would-be conquerors found it easy going.
Take Alexander. When he crossed the Hellespont, he thought that he had a viable fleet. He quickly came to the conclusion that he didn’t, and sent most of his ships home. But he was hasty, as the fleet would have come in handy in later operations. Alexander thought that he could shut down the Persian navy by making war on it by land and taking its naval bases. He turned out to be too optimistic. The siege of Halicarnassus was costly and left the harbor in Persia’s hands. Some of Persia’s ports on the mainland proved too difficult to take, and Persia easily reconquered the islands that had gone over to Alexander. In Memnon of Rhodes, Alexander had a frighteningly competent opponent. In fact, a year after he invaded Anatolia, Alexander faced the real threat of a Persian invasion of Greece.
Two things saved him. First and foremost, Divine Providence intervened. Memnon died of a sudden illness in spring 333. Second, Alexander had superb strategic intuition, which let him guess Persia’s default mode correctly. As soon as Memnon died, Darius called off the invasion of Greece and called his Greek mercenaries into service in a land battle against Alexander instead. For Persia, it was strategic suicide. For the Macedonians, it was confirmation of the enemy’s fatal flaws.
Hannibal too learned hard lessons. Losing the sight in one eye was the least of them for a tough soldier. He faced the frustration of leading an army that was too tired to make more of its victory than to eat and rest. He got the first glimpse of an enemy that, no matter the size of its defeat, had no intention of surrendering. And he learned that Rome knew how to fight back, not merely with power but cunning.
By its attack on Spain, Rome threatened Hannibal’s base. It demonstrated as well a strategic tenacity that Persia lacked. In order to respond, Hannibal needed support and reinforcements. The home government in Carthage could provide those in time, if it agreed. What it could not provide, however, was another general as good as Hannibal. The great man had no peer.
Fabius’s strategy in Italy might have troubled Hannibal even more than the battle for Spain. If the Romans avoided pitched battle, he could not win but at best survive. Hannibal needed big victories to attract allies away from Rome and toward him. Otherwise, his small army could harass the Romans but not defeat them. His main hope was to lure Rome back into the arena of pitched battle. It was a good hope, as things turned out, because the Romans did not stick to Fabius’s strategy.
As for Caesar; he had the most serious trouble of all with an enemy who refused to play by his rules. That reflected both Pompey’s clearheadedness and Caesar’s philosophy of the offensive. Had Caesar been less aggressive, he would have evacuated Dyrrachium when Pompey’s refusal to fight a pitched battle there became clear. Instead, Caesar could have gone to Thessaly and either tempted Pompey into battle there or at least wintered in easier conditions. But Caesar risked everything on a battle of attrition at Dyrrachium, where he stood at a distinct disadvantage. Like Fabius, Pompey preferred attrition to pitched battle. At Dyrrachium, Caesar lost not only the battle but nearly the entire war. Only Pompey’s overconfidence allowed Caesar to live to fight another day.
Like Hannibal, Caesar suffered from a subordinate who was not up to his level of competence: Curio lost North Africa for Caesar as Hasdrubal had cost Carthage major setbacks in Spain. Alexander did better with Antigonus in Anatolia.
After eighteen months of war, all three men had suffered setbacks. Alexander had responded most effectively, but he faced the least competent enemy. Caesar was in the most serious trouble, Hannibal somewhere in between.
But the period of coping with the enemy’s initial resistance was over. Each of our generals was about to face a crisis that could decide the war.
4
CLASH
ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 1, 331 B.C., on a broad and treeless plain beneath the Zagros Mountains in what is today Iraqi Kurdistan, the cavalry charged. Once the trumpet sounded, thousands of horsemen from out of the Eurasian steppe, all heavily armed—some to the point that even their horses wore armor—came hurtling out of the Persian lines. They aimed at outflanking and outfighting the Macedonians and driving the enemy’s lines into chaos. It was the start of Gaugamela, the greatest battle that Alexander and Darius would ever fight.
A little more than a century later and three thousand miles to the west, on an August morning in 216 B.C., the harsh and mournful sound of the Celtic war horn rang out in the valley of the Aufidus River in southern Italy. The Celts were fighting for a large Carthaginian army that was about to clash with an even more massive Roman force. The Carthaginian cavalry charged up a lane between the river and the left flank of the Roman infantry. The Celts attacked with a hail of javelins, followed by lances and long swords. Alongside them rode squadrons of Spanish cavalry armed with spears and falcatas, curved swords with a deadly eighteen-inch blade. The sixty-five hundred Celts and Spaniards outnumbered the twenty-four hundred Roman horsemen by more tha
n two to one. In the narrow space between the river and the Roman infantry, there was no room to maneuver, so the cavalrymen on both sides dismounted and fought on foot. It was an old-fashioned, blood-and-guts, hand-to-hand fight. The worst day in the history of the Roman army—the battle of Cannae—had begun.
A little more than 150 years later and three hundred miles to the east, on a hot, steamy summer day in 48 B.C., six thousand cavalrymen advanced across the central Greek plain to the rumble of the commander’s horn and the cry of the trumpet. Well armed, well fed, well led, they were the sons of aristocrats and kings, making up a mosaic of nationalities from Gaul to Italy to Greece. Wearing chain-mail armor or tunics, plumed helmets or felt caps, brandishing javelins and lances, long swords and scimitars, they galloped over the gap separating them from their enemy. Only a thousand cavalrymen, most of them Gauls and Germans, rode on the other side. The attackers planned to roll them up, charge into the flank of the enemy’s infantry, and plunge his army into chaos. In spite of the international cast of cavalrymen, this was a Roman conflict. It was the great civil war between Caesar and Pompey and its bloodiest battle—the battle of Pharsalus—was under way.
Three great battles, three dramatic charges: Hollywood couldn’t have done it better. But screenwriters have it easier than conquerors. They don’t have to argue with their audience in order to write a climax into the script; the audience demands it. Moviegoers love a crisis; military strategists are less predictable. Having overcome initial setbacks, each of our three great commanders now wanted to force a decision via pitched battle, but he had to get the enemy to oblige. If the enemy respects the conqueror’s reputation as a giant of the battlefield, the enemy might prefer an indirect strategy such as a war of attrition or a counteroffensive in another theater.
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