B005GG0JPO EBOK

by Strauss, Barry

  After Utica, Cato belonged to the ages, a martyr for republican liberty. No wonder a Roman poet would write of Pompey and Caesar, a century later:

  Each for his cause can vouch a judge supreme;

  The victor, heaven: the vanquished, Cato, thee.

  “Aren’t You Ashamed to Hand Me Over to These Little Boys?”

  After cleaning things up in North Africa and after making the by-now-standard fund-raising rounds, Caesar returned to Rome. It was a period of empowerment, reform, and celebration.

  Caesar was elected dictator for ten years and censor for three, giving him power over all public officials, including senators. A wealth of public honors also flowed his way.

  As early as 49 B.C., Caesar began a wave of reforms in Roman government and society that now continued to roll forward. Government, the economy, citizenship, religion, public buildings, veterans’ affairs—all were affected. By far the longest-lasting reform was of the Roman calendar. Caesar gave Rome the solar calendar of 365 days plus leap year that is still in use today by most of the world (with a few adjustments in the 1700s). The new calendar started on January 1, 45 B.C.

  And then came celebration. A triumph was a spectacular victory march through the city of Rome of a general and his army, culminating in a sacrifice to Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill and a public feast. The Senate gave Caesar permission to celebrate four triumphs in a row—something unheard of. He could not celebrate victory in the civil war, since it was improper to cheer over the death of Roman citizens. So he celebrated his victories over the Gauls—a war that seemed long ago—over the Alexandrians, over Pharnaces, and over King Juba of Numidia (glossing over Juba’s Roman allies from Scipio to Cato). For four days in summer 46 B.C., victory parades filled the streets of Rome, followed by six more days of gladiatorial games, feasting, and the dedication of new public buildings. Caesar’s soldiers received huge cash bonuses; citizen heads of families got small payments as well.

  But celebration was premature, for there was trouble in the West. After conquering Spain in 49 B.C., Caesar made the mistake of appointing a governor who promptly squeezed the locals for money until the Spaniards responded by forcing him out of office, and then welcoming the remains of the Senate’s army. The army was led by Pompey’s sons, Cnaeus and Sextus, and by Caesar’s former second-in-command, Labienus. Spain was the Pompeians’ last hope.

  Caesar could not leave such a rich and dangerous base in his enemies’ hands. So in late 46 B.C., he set out on one more military expedition. His exhausted men were less than enthusiastic. As usual, Caesar made haste, leaving Rome in November and reaching Spain just a month later. The war took place in southern Spain, in the Roman province of Baetica (modern Andalusia).

  Caesar had eight legions, including the veterans of the Fifth and Tenth Legions, and eight thousand cavalrymen. The enemy had thirteen legions as well as a large number of cavalrymen and light-armed auxiliaries. Most of the Pompeian forces were of dubious quality, though, so their commanders did not want to risk a battle. That made Caesar’s job simple—to force them to fight.

  Caesar attacked enemy town after town. At first, the usual supply problems held him back, but after a few weeks he began to make headway. Caesar began to attract enemy supporters and soldiers like a magnet. In order to hold his army together, Cnaeus Pompey had no choice but to fight.

  The decisive battle took place outside the hilltown of Munda (near Seville) on March 17, 45 B.C. The Pompeians held the town, while Caesar and his men were camped below it, on the far side of a wide plain. When his scouts reported that the enemy was finally preparing to fight, Caesar flew the battle flag. He arranged his troops with the Tenth Legion on his right and the Third and Fifth Legions on the left, reinforced by the cavalry and the auxiliaries.

  Although Caesar was hoping that the enemy would leave the high ground to fight on the plain, the Pompeians refused to give up their advantage. But then they saw Caesar’s men hesitate, so they marched down the hill and the fight was on.

  The battle of Munda was no second Thapsus, where Caesar’s enemies turned and ran practically at the first sight of blood. Munda was harder fought than Pharsalus, where Pompey’s legionaries had held their ground as long as they could. In fact, the enemy at Munda put up the stiffest resistance of any foe that Caesar had ever faced.

  Pompey’s men knew it was the end of the line. For many of them, surrender meant enslavement or execution. They had violated the terms of Caesar’s pardon for the war of 49 B.C. and then they had made matters worse by revolting against Caesar’s handpicked governor of Spain. On the other side, Caesar’s soldiers were fired up by the presence of their commander and bolstered by experience. Besides, they wanted to get the civil war over with once and for all.

  For a while, the outcome of the battle was in doubt. Unwilling to leave things to others, Caesar and Cnaeus Pompey themselves entered the fight.

  The hardest fighting took place on the two flanks. Caesar’s Tenth Legion, reliable as ever, began to push back the enemy’s left. In order to shore up his men, Cnaeus Pompey began moving a legion on his right over to support the left. Caesar’s cavalry responded by attacking the enemy’s now weakened right flank.

  Still, the Pompeians held on until a move by Labienus provoked an unexpected panic. Labienus ordered five cohorts—about four thousand men—to shift their position in order to protect their camp from another unit of Caesar’s cavalry. To get there, Labienus’s men had to cross the battlefield. Veteran soldiers would have understood their move, but to Pompey’s inexperienced men, it looked like the beginning of a retreat. The bulk of his army turned and fled.

  The result was a rout. Caesar’s forces began to slaughter the enemy. When it was all over they killed 33,000 Pompeians, including three thousand Roman knights (very wealthy men)—or so they claimed. Caesar admitted to one thousand dead and five hundred wounded, which are huge casualty figures for him, and signs of how hard the fighting was. Labienus was one of the dead. Caesar gave his old second-in-command a proper funeral.

  Various anecdotes circulated afterward about Caesar’s low point during the battle. One source had him running to rally his men, who were being pushed back by the enemy. “Aren’t you ashamed to hand me over to these little boys?” Caesar supposedly said. Ironic and mocking, it was a far cry from Alexander in his feathered helmet but it stirred the troops all the same.

  Caesar is said to have remarked to his friends as he left the battlefield that, at Munda, for the first time ever, his life had been at risk. (Not true, as his life had been at risk before, at Dyrrachium and Alexandria, for example.) Finally, there is the report that Caesar even considered suicide at one moment during the battle, when he thought that all was lost. Perhaps.

  At Munda, Caesar’s men seemed old and tired but they were more experienced than the enemy and that’s what counted in the end. So did Caesar’s superiority in cavalry. And last but not least, there was Caesar himself, indefatigable under pressure. The consummate politician, he thought on his feet and said what needed to be said to move his men.

  Caesar’s campaigns in North Africa and Spain were much sloppier than anything Alexander or Hannibal ever carried out. Unlike them, he was no fancy dancer. The way he parried the cavalry charge at Pharsalus was clever, but Caesar’s battle tactics offer nothing to compare with Alexander’s combined-arms synergy or Hannibal’s guile.

  Caesar’s logistics were haphazard. It is hard to imagine Alexander, the meticulous planner who crossed the Hydaspes River, tolerating Caesar’s disorganized landings on the North African coast. Nor would Hannibal, the master manipulator of Cannae, have stood for the insubordination at Thapsus. And yet, Caesar got the job done, and, neither Alexander nor Hannibal would have had anything to teach him about projecting a winning image to his men.

  The battle finished, the town of Munda prepared for a siege. After Caesar’s men surrounded it with a ghastly “palisade” of corpses and severed heads on pikes, Munda surrendered. Cnaeus Pompey fled but his
enemies caught up with him a few days later. His head too was severed and brought to Caesar.

  After settling affairs and raising money, Caesar returned to Rome, which he reached in June 45 B.C. With the end of the Spanish campaign, the civil war was over. Now came the hard part—pacifying the political class of Rome.

  ESSENCE OF DECISION

  Success at closing the net requires four things: strategy, agility, new infrastructure, and morale management.

  A victor’s biggest mistake after winning a great battle is to expect success to fall into his lap. On the contrary, since necessity is the mother of invention, the vanquished are likely to be more ingenious than ever, and perhaps even more dangerous. The victor has to judge his next move correctly. He must choose the right strategy. Is it the moment to negotiate or to press home his advantage? If he does attack, what’s the right target—the enemy’s capital, his army, or his leadership? Assuming that he chooses correctly and attacks successfully, he then needs to decide how he will know when the war is won. Does he require unconditional surrender or will he be willing to allow the defeated enemy to negotiate terms? And if his attack fails and the enemy bounces back, should he consider cutting his losses and pulling out?

  To carry out his strategy requires agility. Winning a pitched battle is not the same as carrying out pursuit, taking a city by siege, countering raids and ambushes, or winning over civilian populations.

  And it will do no good to plan the next move correctly unless a commander has the resources to carry it out. All three of our commanders needed more money and manpower after their great battlefield victories.

  Finally, they had to overcome the frustrations of a long war and maintain support both in their armies and in their political base.

  Our commanders faced these challenges with varying success. Note, at the outset, that the quality of the enemies they faced varied greatly. Alexander faced a very able foe in Spitamenes and no mean ones in Bessus and Porus, but none of them could match his resources. Very few people in the Persian empire felt a deep loyalty to the government; not many men were willing to die for Darius or Bessus.

  Caesar faced a great tactician in Labienus, but luckily Labienus never held supreme command. But Caesar did have to face the determination of a Cato, the wiliness of a Juba, and the spirit of Pompey’s sons. His enemies were awash in money as well. Yet Caesar was fighting a civil war. He was no foreign invader and he pardoned his enemies. Most people found it easy to switch from Pompey’s side to his once the wind began blowing Caesar’s way.

  In Rome, Hannibal faced the greatest republic in the ancient world. Rome came up with and implemented a brilliant counterstrategy to Hannibal—the Fabian strategy. Yes, there were bumps on the road to implementation, but in the end, Rome deployed the strategy forcefully. Support for Rome’s government ran very deep among its citizenry. Rome’s central-Italian allies were nearly as loyal and patriotic. They hated Hannibal and would never surrender without a fight. The longer the war lasted the greater the chance that Rome’s generals would learn from the master and adopt successful battlefield techniques. All the while, they had plenty of money and manpower. Truly, Hannibal had the most difficult enemy to beat.

  How well did the three captains each close the net after winning on the battlefield? Caesar followed the best strategy. He correctly concluded that his first target after winning at Pharsalus was the escaped enemy commander Pompey. After Pompey’s murder, Caesar turned to his pressing financial need, even though it gave the enemy’s army breathing space in North Africa. Likewise, he dealt with a dangerous attack in the East by Pharnaces and a politico-military meltdown in Rome before finally engaging the enemy.

  Hannibal chose the worst strategy. His first and biggest mistake was not attacking Rome after Cannae. His second mistake was letting the war drag on after it had become apparent that his plan had failed. Hannibal counted on winning a critical mass of its allies away from Rome. He did not.

  Those allies whom Hannibal did persuade turned out to be a burden. He had wanted a strategic lever but instead he got a chain. Hannibal’s plan to break Rome’s alliance system was his biggest strategic miscalculation. His masterstroke at Cannae had opened a sudden window of opportunity, but he had to jump through it.

  Had he been in Hannibal’s shoes after Cannae, Caesar would have marched on Rome, since he never had much use for the rulebook. He believed in pushing fortune, not waiting at its knees. So what if he lacked manpower and supplies? As in Epirus or North Africa, Caesar would have planned on improvising. He knew how much the combination of audacity and diplomacy could wring out of a hostile population and he would squeeze everything he could out of the environs of Rome. Then again, Caesar could carry out sieges. Hannibal could not.

  Hannibal’s post-Cannae Italian strategy was flawed as well, relying too much on cunning and too little on force. And yet, he had no choice, starved as he was of men and money. Carthage certainly made an error in not reinforcing Hannibal and focusing on the war in Italy instead of squandering its resources over too many different military theaters. If he knew Carthaginian politics better, Hannibal might have been able to get what he wanted from the Carthaginian Senate, but he hadn’t been in Carthage since he was nine years old.

  Alexander showed excellent strategic judgment after Gaugamela in his pursuit first of Darius and then Bessus, but his actions afterward are questionable. Maybe he was right to spill all the blood that he did to defeat Spitamenes, but he might have been better off writing off Sogdiana and saving his resources. India was a magnificent obsession that could have led to an empire like no other—if Alexander could keep it. But that was a highly dubious prospect.

  When it comes to agility, Alexander is the standout. He succeeded in the greatest variety of terrains, from the desert to the Himalayas. He excelled equally at pitched battle, at countering desert raiders, at laying siege to rugged fortresses, and at mountain fighting. War elephants were a shock to western soldiers but he turned them into nothing more than a minor inconvenience. After failing the test against the Persian fleet under Memnon, Alexander turned things around and built a navy.

  Hannibal was the least agile of the three commanders because of his failure at siegecraft. Nothing else did as much damage to his war effort in Italy. Caesar was agile enough to handle a great variety of terrains, but he didn’t take on so many different ways of war as convincingly as Alexander. True, Caesar engaged in urban combat in Alexandria but he almost lost. And he brushed off the elephants at Thapsus, but it is doubtful that the enemy knew how to handle them.

  When it came to getting more money, Alexander was the most successful, but he had the easiest target. Had he wintered in Babylon, the Persians might have put up a fight at Persepolis or, worse yet, brought their treasures to safety. But speed and a good, hard push gave Alexander all the money he would ever need.

  Caesar had to work harder to fund himself, but he succeeded. Between his limited manpower and nonexistent siege capability, Hannibal was hamstrung in his efforts to get all the money he needed from Italy, and the Carthaginian Senate did little to make things better for him.

  None of the three generals had a perfect solution to his manpower needs. Alexander did the best job of raising new troops but they left him sitting on a volcano. Nobody knew whether he could maintain the loyalty of a largely non-Macedonian army, and no one was sure that they could match the fighting skill of the phalanx.

  Caesar found new recruits but the deciding factor in pitched battle was having veterans. He managed to hold on to enough of them, but only barely.

  Hannibal never filled his manpower needs. Without reinforcements, he was doomed to failure. He lacked the political support at home that Caesar and Alexander each could count on.

  But Hannibal did excel in one area: maintaining his army’s capability and morale. Alexander and Caesar each suffered multiple mutinies and near mutinies. In fifteen years in Italy, Hannibal faced not one. No one held the loyalty of his men as well as Hannibal did.
They were still willing to die for him even when they left Italy for Africa, where they had to fight to keep Carthage safe rather than to line their own purses with the loot of Italy. Small wonder that, in spite of the outcome of his war, Hannibal remains one of the most admired generals in history.

  6

  KNOWING WHEN TO STOP

  IN SUMMER 324 B.C., IN the city of Opis (near today’s Baghdad), Alexander invited the cream of his army and his government to an enormous banquet. The sources, unsure of the numbers, record a rumor that nine thousand people were in attendance.

  It was a great show—prizewinning political theater—that much is certain. The purpose was to celebrate victory. Not the successful return of Alexander and his army from India the winter before but a more dubious success. Just a few days earlier, Alexander had put down a mutiny. The trouble came after he announced plans to send most of his Macedonian veterans home to Macedon. They were ten thousand men, a large group. He would replace them with new recruits from Macedon and Persia. Old and injured, the veterans were also fierce conservatives and hated Alexander’s pro-Persian policies, however limited those policies were. So they rose in protest.

  Unlike in India, Alexander refused to budge. He wanted a new army and he wanted it loyal to him because he had plans for new wars. Alexander had the ringleaders of the mutiny executed and offered top military commands to Iranian officers. Within a few days, the Macedonians realized that Alexander was serious about having his own way, so they apologized, and it was all over.

  Having won, Alexander was magnanimous. He gave the leading Macedonians the best seats at the banquet, where they surrounded him in a circle. The senior Persians sat in a ring around them, surrounded in turn by a circle of high-ranking representatives of the other peoples of the empire.