"I'm convinced, I'm convinced!" cried Antony, palms up in surrender.
"It's also necessary to demonstrate to Pompeius what five and a half legions like mine can do," said Caesar as if no one had interrupted. "He's well aware that these are my Gallic veterans, and that they've marched two thousand miles over the course of the last year. Now I'm going to ask them to work their arses off doing however many miles of digging are necessary. Probably, knowing I'm strapped, short of food. Pompeius will have his fleets patrolling endlessly, and I don't see any deterioration in their efficiency since Bibulus died."
"Odd, that."
"Bibulus never did know when enough was enough, Antonius." Caesar sighed. "Though, candidly, I'll miss him. He's the first of my old enemies to go. The Senate won't be the same."
"It'll improve considerably!"
"In terms of ease, yes. But not when it comes to the kind of opposition every man should have to contend with. If there's one thing I fear, Antonius, it's that this wretched war will end in my having no opponents left. Which won't be good for me."
"Sometimes," said Antony, pursing his lips and touching the tip of his nose with them, "I don't understand you, Caesar. Surely you don't hanker for the kind of anguish Bibulus gave you! These days you can do what has to be done. Your solutions are the right ones. Men like Bibulus and Cato made it impossible for you to improve the way Rome works. You're better off without the sort of opposition that watches the skies rather than governs—that has a dual standard—one set of rules for their own conduct, a different set for your conduct. Sorry, I think losing Bibulus is almost as good as losing Cato would be. One down, one to go!"
"Then you have more faith in my integrity than I do at times. Autocracy is insidious. Perhaps there's no man ever born, even me, with the strength to resist it unless opposed," said Caesar soberly. He shrugged. "Still, none of this will bring Bibulus back."
"Pompeius's son might end in being more dangerous with those terrific Egyptian quinqueremes. He's knocked out your naval station at Oricum and burned thirty of my transports in Lissus."
"Pah!" said Caesar contemptuously. "They're nothings. When I return my army to Brundisium, Antonius, it will be in Pompeius's transports. And what's Oricum? I'll live without those warships. What Pompeius doesn't yet understand is that he will never be free of me. Wherever he goes, I'll be there to make his life a misery."
During the relentless rains of May a bizarre race began, both sides digging frantically. Caesar raced to get ahead of Pompey and squeeze his available territory in; Pompey raced to get ahead of Caesar and expand his available territory. Caesar's task was made harder by a constant bombardment of arrows, sling stones and ballista boulders, but Pompey's task was made harder from within: his men detested digging, were reluctant to dig, and did so only out of fear of Labienus, who understood Caesar and the capacity of Caesar's men for hard work under grueling conditions. With more than twice Caesar's manpower, Pompey did manage to keep that precious lead, but never by enough to strike well eastward.
Occasional skirmishes occurred, not usually to Pompey's advantage; his terror of exposing his men to Caesar in sufficient numbers to permit a spontaneous outbreak of hostilities hampered him badly. Nor at first did Pompey fully understand the handicap of being westward in a land where the many little rivers all flowed westward. Caesar occupied their sources, therefore Caesar came to control Pompey's water supply.
One of Pompey's greatest comforts was the knowledge that Caesar lacked a patent supply line. Everything had to come up from western Greece overland; the roads were earthen and mud-bound, the terrain rugged, the easier coastal routes cut off because of those Pompeian fleets.
But then Labienus brought him several slimy grey bricks of a fibrous, gluey substance.
"What are these?" asked Pompey, completely at a loss.
"These are Caesar's staple rations, Pompeius. These are what Caesar and his men are subsisting on. The roots of a local plant, crushed, mixed with milk and baked. They call it 'bread.' "
Eyes wide, Pompey took one of the bricks and worked at a recalcitrant corner until he managed to tear a small piece off. He put it in his mouth, choked, spat it out.
"They don't eat this, Labienus! They couldn't eat this!"
"They can and they do."
"Take it away, take it away!" squealed Pompey, shuddering. "Take it away and burn it! And don't you dare breathe a word about it to any of the men—or my legates! If they knew what Caesar's soldiers are willing to eat in order to fence me in—oh, they'd give up in despair!"
"Don't worry, I'll burn the stuff and say nothing. And if you're wondering how I got them, Caesar sent them to me with his compliments. No matter what the odds, he's always cocky."
By the end of May the grazing situation within Pompey's territory was becoming critical; he summoned transports and shipped several thousand of his animals to good pasture north of Dyrrachium. The little city lay on the tip of a small peninsula which almost kissed the mainland half a mile east of the port; a bridge carried the Via Egnatia across the narrow gap. The inhabitants of Dyrrachium saw the arrival of these animals with dismay. Precious grazing land, needed for themselves, was no longer theirs. Only fear of Labienus stilled their tongues and prevented retaliation.
Through the month of June the race continued unabated, while Pompey's horses and mules still penned within his lines grew ever thinner, weaker, more prone to succumb to the diseases a wet and muddy land made inevitable. By the end of June they were dying in such numbers that Pompey, still digging frantically, had not the manpower to dispose of the carcasses properly. The stench of rotting flesh permeated everywhere.
Lentulus Crus was the first to complain. "Pompeius, you cannot expect us to live in this—this disgusting miasma!"
"I can't keep anything down for the smell," said Lentulus Spinther, handkerchief to his nose.
Pompey smiled seraphically. "Then I suggest that you pack your trunks and go back to Rome," he said.
Unfortunately for Pompey, the two Lentuli preferred to go on complaining.
For Pompey, a minor matter; Caesar was busy damming all the little rivers and cutting off his water supply.
When Pompey's lines attained a length of fifteen miles—and Caesar's seventeen miles—he was fenced in, could go no further. Pompey's predicament was desperate.
With Labienus's assistance, he persuaded a group of the inhabitants of Dyrrachium to go to Caesar and offer to let him take the city. The weather was not much improved by the arrival of spring; Caesar's men were flagging on that diet of "bread." Yes, Caesar thought, it's worth a try to get at Pompeius's supplies.
On the eighth day of Quinctilis he attacked Dyrrachium. While he was so engaged, Pompey struck, launching a three-pronged assault against the forts in the center of Caesar's line. The two forts which took the brunt of the attack were manned by four cohorts belonging to the Tenth Legion, under the command of Lucius Minucius Basilus and Gaius Volcatius Tullus; so well engineered were the defenses that they held off five of Pompey's legions until Publius Sulla managed to relieve them from Caesar's main camp. Publius Sulla then proceeded to prevent the five Pompeian legions from returning behind their own lines. Stranded in the No Man's Land between the two sets of circumvallations, they huddled and took what was thrown at them for five days. By the time Pompey managed to retrieve them, they had lost two thousand men.
A minor victory for Caesar, smarting at being tricked. He paraded the four cohorts of the Tenth before his army and loaded their standards with yet more decorations. When shown the shield of the centurion Cassius Scaeva, bristling like a sea urchin with one hundred and twenty arrows, Caesar gave Scaeva two hundred thousand sesterces and promoted him to primipilus.
Dyrrachium did not fare so well. Caesar sent sufficient troops to build a wall around it—then drove Pompey's grazing horses and mules within the narrow corridor between the city and the fields its people could no longer reach. Having no other alternative, Dyrrachium was forced to commence
eating Pompey's supplies. The city also sent the mules and horses back to Pompey.
On the thirteenth day of Quinctilis, Caesar turned fifty-two. Two days after that, Pompey finally admitted to himself that he had to break out or perish from a combination of no water and rotting carcasses. But how to do it, how? Cudgel his brain as he might, Pompey couldn't devise a scheme to break out that did not also entail giving battle.
Chance offered him the answer in the persons of two officers from Caesar's squadron of Aeduan cavalry, whom Caesar used mainly to gallop from one end of his circumvallation to the other with notes, messages, dispatches. The two officers had been embezzling their squadron's funds. Though not Roman, the Aedui followed Roman methods of military accounting, and had a savings fund, a burial fund and a pay fund. The difference lay in the fact that they managed these financial affairs themselves through two officers elected for the purpose; Roman legions had proper clerical staffs to do the same sort of thing, and audited as regularly as ruthlessly. Thus the two managers of the squadron's finances had been peculating since their departure from Gaul. Chance found them out. And chance brought them fleeing for refuge to Pompey.
They told him exactly how Caesar's forces were disposed—then told him exactly where Caesar's great weakness was situated.
Pompey attacked at dawn on the seventeenth day of Quinctilis. Caesar's great weakness was situated at the far southern end of his lines, where they turned west and ran to the sea. Here he was still in the process of finishing a second wall outside his main wall; this outer wall was undefended, and from the seaward side neither wall could be held securely.
The Ninth garrisoned the area for Caesar; all six of Pompey's Roman legions began a frontal assault while Pompey's slingers, archers and some light Cappadocian infantry sneaked around behind the undefended wall, entered and surprised the Ninth from the rear. A small force Lentulus Marcellinus brought up from the nearest fort couldn't help; the Ninth was routed.
Things changed when Caesar and Antony arrived with enough reinforcements, but Pompey had used his time well. He pulled five of the six legions into a new camp on the far side of Caesar's walls and sent the sixth to occupy a disused little camp nearby. Caesar retaliated by sending thirty-three cohorts to dislodge the single legion, but was unable to follow through because of an entangling fortification in his path. Sensing victory, Pompey sent all the cavalry he was able to mount against Caesar himself. Who withdrew with such incredible speed that Pompey ended in grasping at air rather than at opportunity. He sat back, pleased, to recover his wind instead of ordering his cavalry to pursue the vanished Caesar.
"What a fool the man is!" growled Caesar to Antony when he had his whole army safely within the ramparts of his main camp. "If he'd kept his cavalry on our tails, he'd have won this war here and now. But he didn't, Antonius. Caesar's luck consists in fighting a fool."
"Do we hold?" asked Antony.
"Oh, no. Dyrrachium has outworn its usefulness. We strike camp and steal away in the night."
Pompey's blindness was complete. Returning jubilant to Petra, he failed to see from his superior height that Caesar was readying his army to march.
In the morning the silent line of fortifications and the lack of smoke from Caesar's camp told the tale: Caesar was gone.
Pompey bestirred himself sufficiently to order some cavalry south to the Genusus to prevent Caesar's crossing, but they failed to reach the river first. Overconfident at yesterday's success, they forded it only to run into an arm of Caesar's forces no one had really encountered before—his German horse troopers. Who, assisted by a few cohorts of infantry, drove the Pompeian cavalry off with heavy losses.
Not far up the Via Egnatia they met up with Pompey, who had decided to follow. That night the two armies camped on opposite banks of the Genusus.
At noon the next day Caesar moved out southward. Pompey did not. Oblivious to the urgency of Pompey's need to keep up with Caesar, some of Pompey's soldiers had defied orders and returned to Petra to collect various items out of their gear. Always anxious to have the numbers, Pompey elected to wait for them. He never did catch up. Like a wraith from the Underworld, Caesar simply disappeared off the face of the earth, somewhere to the south of Apollonia.
By the twenty-second day of Quinctilis, Pompey and his army had returned to Petra, there to celebrate a great victory, send the news of it hurrying across the Adriatic to Italia and Rome. No more Caesar! A beaten man, Caesar was in headlong retreat. And if anyone wondered whether a Caesar in headlong retreat with all save a thousand of his men intact was truly a beaten man, he kept his wondering to himself.
The troops celebrated too, but no one had a happier day than Titus Labienus, who paraded the several hundred members of the Ninth captured during the battle. In front of Pompey, Cato, Cicero, the Lentuli Spinther and Crus, Faustus Sulla, Marcus Favonius and many others, Labienus demonstrated the absoluteness of his ferocity. The men of the Ninth were first derided, insulted, slapped about; after which Labienus settled down to business with the red-hot irons, the tiny knives, the pincers, the barbed lash. Only after every man was blinded, deprived of his tongue and genitals and flogged to jelly did Labienus finally behead them.
Pompey watched helplessly, so appalled and sickened that he seemed not to comprehend that it was within his power to order Labienus to desist. He did nothing, he said nothing, neither then nor afterward as he wandered about Petra in a daze.
"That man," said Cato, hunting him down, "is a monster! Why did you let him do such things, Pompeius? What's the matter with you? Here we've just defeated Caesar, yet you stand there demonstrating the fact that you can't control your own legates!"
"Aaargh!" cried Pompey, eyes full of tears. "What do you want of me, Cato? What do you expect of me, Cato? I'm not a genuine commander-in-chief, I'm a puppet everyone thinks himself entitled to jerk this way and that! Control Labienus? I didn't see you stepping forward to try! How do you control an earthquake, Cato? How do you control a volcano, Cato? How do you control a man who terrified the life out of Germans?"
"I cannot continue," said Cato, sticking to his principles, "to support the efforts of an army commanded by the likes of Titus Labienus! If you won't banish him from our ranks, Pompeius, then I refuse to serve with you!"
"Good! That's one fewer nuisance I'll have to suffer! Go away!" He thought of something, yelled after Cato's retreating back: "You cretin, Cato! Don't you understand? None of you can fight! None of you can general troops! But Labienus can!"
He returned to his house to find Lentulus Crus waiting for him. Oh, abominable man!
"What a shambles," said Lentulus Crus, sniffing disdainfully. "My dear Pompeius, must you keep animals like Labienus around? Can you do nothing right? What are you doing, claiming a great victory over Caesar when you've done nothing to eliminate the man? He has escaped! Why are you still here?"
"I wish I could escape," said Pompey through his teeth. "Unless you have something constructive to offer, Crus, I suggest you go back to your hypocaust-heated house and pack up all your gold plate and ruby quizzing glasses! We're marching."
And on the twenty-fourth day of Quinctilis, Pompey did just that. In Dyrrachium he left behind fifteen cohorts of wounded men under the command of Cato.
"If you don't mind, Magnus, I'll stay here too," said Cicero apprehensively. "I'm afraid I'm not much use in a war, but I can perhaps be of some use in Dyrrachium. Oh, I do wish my brother Quintus would join you! He's a handy man in a war."
"Yes, stay," said Pompey tiredly. "You won't be in any danger, Cicero. Caesar is going to Greece."
"How do you know that? What if he settles at Oricum and elects to prevent your returning to Italia?"
"Not he! He's a leech, Cicero. A burr."
"Afranius is very keen for you to abandon this eastern campaign, steal a march on Caesar and return to Italia now."
"I know, I know! And then hasten west to recover the Spains. A lovely dream, Cicero, nothing more. It's suicide for our cause to
leave Caesar unopposed in Greece or Macedonia. I'd lose all my eastern levies and all my support from the client kings." Pompey patted Cicero on the shoulder. "Don't worry about me, please. I know what to do. Prudence dictates that I keep on waging Fabian war against Caesar, never engage him, but the others won't have it. I see that now very clearly. Even marching at the pace he does, Caesar has a long way to go. He'll be days behind me. I'll have the time I need to replace my horses and mules—I've bought them from the Dacians and Dardani; they'll be waiting in Heracleia. Not up to much, I imagine, but better than none." Pompey smiled. "Scipio ought to be in Larissa with the Syrian legions by now."
Cicero did not make any comment. He had had a letter from Dolabella urging him to return to Italia, and most of him wanted desperately to go. At least by remaining in Dyrrachium he was no more than the width of the Adriatic from his beloved homeland.
"I envy you, Cicero" was Pompey's parting shot. "The sun might come out here occasionally from now on, and the air's soft. All you'll have to suffer is Cato. Who informs me that he's going to send Favonius with me to keep me 'pure.' His word, not mine. That leaves me with curs like Labienus, voluptuaries like Lentulus Crus, critics like Lentulus Spinther, and a wife and son to worry about. With just a morsel of Caesar's luck, I might survive."
Cicero stopped, looked back. "A wife and son?"
"Yes. Cornelia Metella has decided that Rome is too far away from tata and me. With Sextus egging her on. He's mad keen to be my contubernalis. They're joining me in Thessalonica."
"Thessalonica? Do you plan to go that far?"
"No. I've already sent word there and told her to take Sextus to Mitylene. They'll be safe enough on Lesbos." Pompey's hands went out, a curiously pathetic gesture. "Do try to understand, Cicero! I can't go west! If I do, I abandon my own father-in-law and two good legions to Caesar's famous clemency. He will control the East and my wife and son will pass into his custody. The outcome must take place somewhere in Thessaly."
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