Caesar arranged his men in the standard Roman formation: three lines, with the best units on the flanks. The battered Legions VIII and IX were combined into a single unit on the left flank, commanded by Mark Antony. Caesar’s best legion, the Tenth, held the right flank, under the command of Publius Sulla. Domitius Calvinus commanded the center. Caesar massed his cavalry on the right flank. He left another two thousand heavy infantrymen to guard his camp.
Pompey deployed a much bigger army, of about seven thousand cavalry and perhaps as many as forty-five thousand heavy infantrymen: nine Roman legions and the best of his Greek allied contingents. Pompey too deployed his infantrymen in three lines. He placed his best legions strategically: on the left flank, the two legions that had previously served with Caesar, commanded by Domitius Ahenobarbus; in the middle, the two Syrian legions under Scipio and, on the right flank, a legion from Cilicia (southern Turkey) along with cohorts brought over from Spain, all commanded by Afranius. In between the best units Pompey deployed the rest of his heavy infantrymen, including two thousand “beneficiaries,” junior officers whom he had personally promoted. He placed perhaps four thousand heavy infantrymen on garrison duty in his camp and the forts nearby.
The two commanders, each on horseback, spent most of the battle opposite each other: Pompey on his left flank, Caesar on his right.
Most of the legionaries in the two armies were Roman citizens, Italians by origin if not current residence, since many had settled in the east. The two cavalries were each a mixed lot. Caesar’s horsemen were in large part Gauls and Germans. Pompey’s cavalry included a large contingent of Roman aristocrats, the sons of senators and knights. But it also contained thousands of men from the east, representing a diverse group of peoples from Greece to Egypt, a few of them even kings and princes. It was a coat of many colors.
Ever the tactician, Pompey planned no ordinary battle. He knew that his infantry couldn’t beat Caesar’s veterans, but he reckoned that it wouldn’t have to. Having missed an opportunity to use the cavalry at Dyrrachium, Pompey decided to stake everything on them now. He would leverage his cavalry’s superiority in numbers, equipment, and supply. Add to that his light-armed infantry troops: slingers and archers, most of them Greeks, Syrians, or other easterners.
Pompey’s plan was to mass most of his cavalry on his left flank: about six thousand men, commanded by Titus Labienus. The rest of Pompey’s cavalry, a small force of six hundred, guarded his right flank. At the start of the battle, Labienus and his six thousand cavalry would charge Caesar’s right flank and then circle around to his rear. At the same time, several thousand slingers and archers—the artillery of the time—would strike from a distance and soften up the enemy lines. Labienus’s horsemen would drive off Caesar’s insignificant cavalry, charge into the flank of the enemy infantry, and cause a panic. It would take a series of attacks, withdrawals, and renewed attacks, but eventually the cavalry would fold up the enemy’s right wing and drive it toward his center.
Pompey gave his legions a simpler task: hold the enemy. Normally, Roman infantrymen began a battle by throwing their javelins and advancing, and then closing in with their swords. But at Pharsalus, Pompey issued an unusual order: he told the legions to stand still. A regular advance might cause Pompey’s inexperienced lines to fall into disorder. He hoped that, by standing in place, they might break the impetus of Caesar’s attack while maintaining their own good order. They would force Caesar’s men to march further to reach them, which might tire the enemy. Meanwhile, his men’s immobility might make it easier for them to wield their shields against enemy javelins. They might even be able to counterattack, but the main thing was to provide a strong wall while Pompey’s cavalry and light-armed troops hammered Caesar’s men.
It would have been a good plan if carried out by Alexander’s or Hannibal’s seasoned horsemen. Or, rather, it would have been a good plan but it lacked the element of deception. One wonders what Labienus thought of it, because back in Gaul, he had been a master at tricking the enemy. No tricks now. Caesar, who could see what Pompey was up to with his cavalry, knew how to respond. He withdrew individual cohorts from the third line of each of his legions and formed an unusual fourth line, which he positioned behind the cavalry, probably at an oblique angle. This weakened the third line but, as usual, Caesar was willing to take a risk. The enemy could not see this fourth line, which meant that Caesar could add surprise to the advantages of his terrible new weapon. The matchless professionalism of his troops allowed Caesar to take chances, but this was a move of supreme audacity, something that only an exceptional commander would have dared.
About eighty thousand men had now lined up against each other, with more guarding the camps nearby. Pompey and Caesar, each on horseback, rode down the lines with their final words to incite fellow Romans to kill each other. The men’s shouts and cries rang out in answer across the valley.
Once the trumpets sounded the start of battle, little worked out as Pompey had planned. Caesar’s legionaries ran forward against the Pompeians to throw their javelins, but when they noticed that the enemy standing still, they stopped. A dazzling display of discipline, the halt let them catch their breath and then start up again, full of energy for the attack. Even so, Pompey’s men managed to hold their ground. Locked in combat, each side soon drew its second line into the fight. The roar of battle, as the poet Lucan imagined it, included the weight of groans as if from one immense voice, the clanging of armor against crashing bodies, and the sound of sword breaking against sword.
The decisive action took place on Caesar’s right flank. Pompey’s cavalry, six thousand strong, “its wings deployed across the entire plain,” as the poet says, thundered toward the enemy. Archers and slingers followed on foot behind them, firing so many missiles so rapidly that you could almost imagine them melting in the heat. Just as planned, the assault forced Caesar’s cavalry from the field. Led by Labienus, Pompey’s cavalry redeployed in squadrons and began to surround the infantry lines on Caesar’s exposed flank. It was the high-water mark of Pompey’s effort. Then Caesar ordered his fourth line to advance. Suddenly, the Pompeian cavalry faced not an infantry’s flank but its front, with a wall of iron-tipped spears in its path. It was an obstacle that ancient cavalries never succeeded in overcoming.
“No circumstance contributed more than this to Caesar’s victory on that day,” writes Frontinus, “for as soon as Pompey’s cavalry poured forth, these cohorts routed it by an unexpected onset, and delivered it up to the rest of the troops for slaughter.”
The key to victory, according to some sources, is what Caesar told his infantrymen: aim for the enemy’s face, on the principle that vanity would make an elite horseman turn and flee. But that was nothing new; Alexander’s men too aimed for the enemy’s face. More likely, the real cause of Pompey’s defeat was panic. When the cavalry piled up against the unexpected obstacle of Caesar’s fourth line, it probably lost its nerve. Experienced men might have coolly retreated, re-formed, and attacked again, once the enemy gave them an opening. Not Pompey’s rookies. Discipline and formation were gone; all that was left was a mad dash back to safety. If Labienus tried to get the cavalry back into formation, to strike Caesar’s fourth line in its rear in turn, it was a vain attempt.
And that was that. Caesar’s fourth line massacred the archers and slingers who had been left in the lurch. Then, the model of discipline, they turned and crashed into the left flank of Pompey’s infantry line, attacking it in the rear. Caesar meanwhile ordered his third line of legionaries out of reserve and into action. Pompey’s infantry was now under attack from two sides, and, on one of them, pounded by fresh troops. It was too much: after a slow retreat at first, the Pompeians ran.
As he surveyed the ruin of his enemy, Caesar is said to have remarked, “They wanted this. In spite of all my achievements, I, Gaius Caesar, would have been condemned if I hadn’t asked my army for help.”
Pompey had already left the field and returned to camp. The battle of
Pharsalus, as he well knew, was over. The war, however, would go on. It was his job now to try to salvage as much of his army as he could.
Brilliant strategist, masterful tactician, tireless organizer, cunning diplomat, Pompey lacked only one thing: he wasn’t Caesar. Pompey understood neither Caesar’s audacity nor his agility. Knowing that Caesar’s army was strained to the breaking point, he could not conceive of the magic of Caesar’s leadership. The worse things got, the stronger Caesar made his men. Pompey couldn’t imagine Caesar coming back from the defeat of Dyrrachium and beating him in pitched battle. It took nearly superhuman effort, and that is precisely what Caesar brought to bear.
Flight
The sources paint a picture of Pompey in despair, but it is hard to trust them. In all likelihood, he tried to organize the defense of his camp. Legionaries, Thracians, and other non-Roman soldiers manned the ramparts, but few of the soldiers who streamed back from the battlefield joined them: most of them kept running. The midday sun was blazing and even the victors were exhausted, but Caesar urged them to attack. The Caesarians stormed the camp. Pompey’s officers led as many defenders as they could into the hills.
As soon as the fate of his camp was sealed, Pompey rode off through the back gate with a bodyguard of thirty cavalrymen. They headed toward Larissa.
Meanwhile, Caesar’s men were itching to gorge themselves on the luxurious food and to loot the silver plate laid out under ivy-covered bowers in Pompey’s camp. Caesar, however, drove them forward in pursuit—another sign of their discipline. They found the Pompeians on a nearby hill that lacked water, and immediately began to surround it with an earthwork. But the enemy fled and took to the ridges in the direction of Larissa. Caesar would not let them escape. He divided his forces and left most of them to defend his camp and Pompey’s. Taking four legions, he tracked down the enemy to another hill a few miles away, and had his weary men immediately begin building a wall to cut them off. As night began falling, the Pompeians finally sent representatives to negotiate surrender. Caesar offered lenient terms and the enemy surrendered the next morning. Only a few senators had escaped during the night.
The results of Pharsalus were, as often in great battles, lopsided. Caesar lost only 230 men (including 30 officers), according to his claims, but other writers raised the figure to 1,200 men. Caesar says his men killed 15,000 Pompeians and accepted surrender from another 24,000; another eyewitness source estimated Pompey’s losses at only 6,000 men. One thing is certain: the dead included Domitius Ahenobarbus, Caesar’s archenemy, who was killed by Caesar’s cavalry as he fled from Pompey’s camp to the nearby hill. Caesar claimed the honors of victory: 180 military standards and 9 legionary eagles.
The same day that the last Pompeians surrendered, Caesar hurried to Larissa, but Pompey had already escaped. He was fleeing to the coast, ready to board a ship to go east. Pompey had no intention of giving up. Why should he have? He still claimed the title of supreme commander of the Roman state, and he was not without the means of backing it up. He still had about seven thousand soldiers at Dyrrachium. He still commanded a fleet of six hundred warships. He still knew more powerful people who owed him favors than most Romans could ever dream of meeting.
So Pompey slipped out of Caesar’s hands and prepared to continue the struggle. Caesar followed, eager to end the war.
THE ESSENCE OF DECISION
Gaugamela, Cannae, and Pharsalus: these killing fields saw too much skill not to impress and too much blood not to appall. Six thousand to seven thousand men were killed at Pharsalus, on a conservative estimate. Gaugamela could hardly have been less bloody, but Cannae wins the prize. With roughly 55,000 men killed—most of them Romans—it was one of the bloodiest days in human history. It gives one pause to think that most of the damage was inflicted by professional killers.
The three winning armies moved with grace and precision. Alexander’s men adopted a new battle formation as easily as a new pair of shoes. Hannibal’s Africans turned on the legionaries with parade ground exactness. Caesar’s legionaries stopped in midcharge as if doing a favorite dance step. Alexander’s and Hannibal’s army each blended cavalry and infantry as smoothly as liquid oxygen and hydrogen in rocket fuel—and as explosively. What Caesar’s force, with its inadequate cavalry, lacked in versatility, it made up for in suppleness.
The genius of the winning generals is equally impressive. Each man correctly analyzed his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses and responded with ingenuity and pluck. By forcing the enemy into a slugging match on the Macedonian right wing Alexander bogged down the Persians’ best cavalry and opened a path toward Darius. By neutralizing Rome’s cavalry, Hannibal cleared the field for a choreographed massacre of the Roman legions. By surprising Pompey’s cavalry with a solid front of fresh infantrymen, Caesar destroyed his opponent’s offensive capability.
Each of the winning commanders displayed a healthy mix of respect and contempt for his foe. Through spying or intuition, each of them guessed his enemy’s plan. Caesar knew that Pompey’s cavalry had the numbers to destroy him but he was confident that it lacked the backbone. Hannibal sized up the legionaries’ power and their clumsiness. Alexander knew what a Persian cavalry charge could do, but he had faith that his light-armed troops, specialists in darting between horsemen, could stop the enemy in his track.
Each of the winners took operational and tactical risks. Alexander and Hannibal had bodyguards but fought in the front; Caesar held farther back but was on the battlefield. Caesar took the chance of thinning out his third infantry line in order to form a fourth line to throw at Pompey’s cavalry. Hannibal knew that his Celts were hard to discipline, but he counted on his ability to keep their battle line bending in retreat without breaking. Alexander bet that his left flank under Parmenio could hold out long enough against the enemy’s charge for him to destroy Darius.
We must also salute the winners’ ability to hold their armies together. Although Alexander’s army had a relatively easy time of things on the road to Gaugamela, they still faced fear, as shown by their responses first to an eclipse and then the sight of Darius’s huge force. Alexander had to reassure them.
Hannibal’s force had just faced six difficult months against Fabius. But those deprivations were nothing compared with what they had suffered crossing the Apennines, and that, in turn, paled next to the problems of crossing the Alps. So, by the time they faced an enormous enemy army at Cannae, Hannibal’s men were ready.
Caesar’s army probably wins the prize for deprivation. Between January 49 and August 48 they covered more territory than even Hannibal’s men. They had no victories in pitched battle to buoy them, and they suffered heavy casualties in the siege of Dyrrachium. They were rarely permitted to loot and were often late in being paid. Within a month of enduring death, hunger, and exhaustion, they turned everything around and won a smashing victory.
Each of the three winning armies was part band of brothers, part gangland family. They fought for honor and loot. Principles were optional. Alexander claimed to be waging a war of revenge and a preventive war, but neither claim was convincing; he wanted to conquer an empire. Caesar declared that he was fighting for freedom and status, but the future dictator’s defense of popular power rings hollow, and his preoccupation with rank attracts few supporters today. Hannibal’s claim of self-defense against Roman aggression is more persuasive but it is hard to separate it from his lust for conquest.
It is easier today to sympathize with the defenders. The Persians and the Romans were each defending an empire, but it included their homeland. Pompey was as selfish as Caesar but his supporters truly believed in liberty, at least as narrowly defined: the freedom of the few to guide Rome toward the public good, as they saw it.
Each battle saw such a one-sided outcome that it begs the question of what the loser was thinking by ever agreeing to a pitched battle in the first place. In hindsight, Darius, Paullus and Varro, and Pompey each accepted a fight that he should have avoided. A Fabian strategy of
refusing battle might have worked as well for them as it had for its namesake. The strategy might have played out quite differently in each battle.
Instead of leading Alexander to Darius, the Persians might have contested his crossing of the Euphrates and the Tigris. They could have burned crops and emptied granaries. With their horsemen and archers tailor-made for raids, they could have harassed Macedonian foraging parties. Meanwhile, they could have forced Alexander to fight for every city he wanted instead of allowing him to negotiate surrenders. In short, if the Persians had used the Fabian strategy, they would have made Mesopotamia a desert. If Alexander still managed to cross it, they could have blocked the Zagros Mountain passes into Iran. They could have removed the treasures of Susa and Persepolis and brought them eastward for safekeeping.
If the Persians had made conditions harsh enough, the Macedonians might have had enough. They might have forced Alexander to accept Darius’s offer of the western provinces and turn back.
The Romans who faced Hannibal had to do only what they did before Cannae: not fight in Italy. They should have remained on the defensive while harassing Hannibal and denying him supplies. At the same time, they should have pressed their Spanish offensive. Eventually, they would have forced him to leave Italy and defend Spain. That would not have ended the war, but by sparing Rome the defeat of Cannae, it would have kept Rome’s allies from defecting and increased Rome’s resources for the struggle ahead.
In Pompey’s case, things might have gone differently if he had refused battle. At the time of Pharsalus, he had launched a naval offensive in the west. One fleet had attacked Sicily, another was blockading Caesar’s remaining troops in Brundisium. If successful, as they probably would have been, they would have cut off Italy from its food supply and kicked the props out from under Caesar’s supporters in Italy. Spain was already showing signs of unrest against Caesar’s governor, and these would have grown with Pompey’s success.
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