“I see Antonius’s strategy,” Cassius said after a moment’s thought. “He intends to keep us out of Macedonia, so he’s sent eight legions to do that. Not by giving battle, by preventing our going forward. I don’t believe Antonius wants a battle, it’s not in his best interests, and eight legions aren’t enough, he knows that. Who’s in command of this advance force?”
“A Decidius Saxa and a Gaius Norbanus. They’re very well situated and they’ll be hard to dislodge,” said Rhascupolis.
The Liberator fleets were ordered to occupy the port of Neapolis as well as Thasos Island, thus ensuring the rapid transfer of supplies to the Liberator army when it arrived.
“As arrive we must,” said Cassius in council with his legates, admirals and a silent Brutus, down in the dumps again for some inexplicable reason. “Murcus and Ahenobarbus have the Adriatic closed and Brundisium under blockade, so it will be Patiscus, Parmensis and Turullius in charge of maritime operations around Neapolis. Is there any danger of a Triumviral fleet coming up?”
“Absolutely none,” Turullius said emphatically. “Their only fleet—a very big one, but not big enough—enabled them to break most of their army out of Brundisium, but then Ahenobarbus returned, which forced their fleet to retire to Tarentum. Their army will get nothing but grief in the Aegean, rest assured.”
“Which confirms my hypothesis that Antonius won’t bring the bulk of his army east of Thessalonica,” said Cassius.
“Why are you so sure that the Triumvirs don’t want a battle?” Brutus asked Cassius in private later.
“For the same reason we don’t want one,” Cassius said, voice carefully patient. “It’s not in their best interests.”
“I fail to see why, Cassius.”
“Then take my word for it. Go to bed, Brutus. Tomorrow we march west.”
Many square miles of salt marsh and a range of tall, jagged hills compelled the Via Egnatia to dive ten miles inland on the plain of the Ganga River, above which stood the old town of Philippi on its rocky mesa. In the massif of nearby Mount Pangaeus, Philip, father of Alexander the Great, had funded his wars to unite Greece and Macedonia; Pangaeus had been extremely rich in gold, long since mined out. That Philippi itself still survived was due to a fertile, if flood prone, hinterland, though its population had dwindled to fewer than a thousand souls when the Liberators and the Triumvirs met there two and a half years after Caesar’s death.
Saxa had put himself and four legions in the Corpilan Pass, the more easterly of the two, while Norbanus occupied the Sapaean Pass with his four legions.
Riding out with Cassius, Rhascupolis and the legates to see just how Saxa had dug himself in, Brutus noticed that Saxa had no view of the sea, whereas Norbanus in the more westerly Sapaean Pass had two watchtowers well able to spot any maritime activity.
“Why,” said Brutus timidly to Cassius, “don’t we lure Saxa out of the Corpilan Pass by loading one of our legions aboard transports and making them cluster along the landward rails so that it looks as if half our army is sailing to Neapolis to march up the road and outflank him?”
Thunderstruck at this unexpected evidence of military acumen, Cassius blinked. “Well, if either of them is in Caesar’s class as a commander it won’t work, because sitting between them isn’t prising either of them out, but if they’re not in Caesar’s class, it just might panic them. We’ll try it. Congratulations, Brutus.”
When a huge fleet stuffed with soldiers hove in sight of Norbanus’s watchtowers and cruised toward Neapolis, Norbanus sent a frantic message to Saxa imploring him to withdraw in a hurry. Saxa did as he was told.
The Liberators marched through the Corpilan Pass, which meant they had direct contact with Neapolis, but there ground to a halt. United in the Sapaean Pass, Saxa and Norbanus had fortified their position so formidably that they could not be dislodged.
“In Caesar’s class they’re not, but they know we can’t land our forces west of them before Amphipolis. We’re still stuck,” said Cassius.
“Can’t we just bypass them and land at Amphipolis?” asked Brutus, rather emboldened by his last bright idea.
“What, and put ourselves in the middle of a pincer? Antonius would move east of Thessalonica in a mighty hurry if he knew he had eight legions to fall on our rear,” Cassius said, his tones long-suffering.
“Oh.”
“Um, if I may speak, Gaius Cassius, there’s a goat track along the heights above the Sapaean Pass,” said Rhascupolis.
A remark that no one paid any attention to for three days, both commanders having forgotten their school history lessons on Thermopylae, where the stand of Leonidas and his Spartans had finally been thwarted by a goat track called Anopaea. Then Brutus remembered it because Cato the Censor had done the same thing in the same gorge, outflanked the defenders.
“It is a literal goat track,” Rhascupolis explained, “so to accommodate troops it will have to be widened. That can be done, but only if the excavators are very quiet and carry water with them. Believe me, there is no water until the goat track ends at a stream.”
“How long would the work take?” asked Cassius, failing to take account of the fact that Thracian noblemen were not experts on manual labor.
“Three days,” said Rhascupolis, making a wild guess. “I’ll go with the road makers myself to prove that I’m not lying.”
Cassius gave the job to young Lucius Bibulus, who set off with a party of seasoned sappers, each of whom took three days’ water with him. The work was extremely dangerous, for it had to be done right above Saxa and Norbanus in the bottom of the ravine—nor, once he commenced, did Lucius Bibulus think of turning back. This was his chance to shine! At the end of three days the water ran out, but no stream manifested itself. Parched and frightened, the men needed to be coaxed and wheedled into carrying on when the fourth day dawned, but young Lucius Bibulus was too like his dead father to coax and wheedle. Instead, he ordered his work force to continue on pain of a flogging, whereupon they mutinied and began to stone the hapless Rhascupolis. Only a faint sound of trickling water brought them to their senses; the sappers raced to drink, then finished the road and returned to the Liberator camp.
“Why didn’t you just send back for more water?” Cassius asked, stunned by Lucius Bibulus’s stupidity.
“You said there was a stream” came the answer.
“Remind me in future to put you somewhere that’s suited to your mentality!” snarled Cassius. “Oh, the gods preserve me from noble blockheads!”
Since neither Brutus nor Cassius wanted a battle, their army marched over the new high road making as much noise as possible, with the result that Saxa and Norbanus pulled out in good order and retired to Amphipolis, a large timber seaport fifty miles west of Philippi. There, well ensconced—but cursing Prince Rhascus, who hadn’t told them of the goat track—they sent word to Mark Antony, rapidly approaching.
Thus by the end of September, Brutus and Cassius owned both passes, and could advance on to the Ganga River plain to make a spacious camp. No fear of floods this year.
“It’s a good position here at Philippi,” said Cassius. “We hold the Aegean and the Adriatic—Sicily and the waters around it belong to our friend and ally Sextus Pompeius—there’s widespread drought—and the Triumvirs won’t find food anywhere. We’ll settle here for a while, wait for Antonius to realize he’s beaten and retreat back to Italy, then we’ll invade. By then his troops will be so hungry—and all of Italy so fed up with Triumviral rule—that we’ll have a bloodless victory.”
They proceeded to make a properly fortified camp, but in two separate halves. Cassius took the hill to the south side of the Via Egnatia for his camp, his exposed flank protected by miles of salt marsh, beyond which lay the sea. Brutus occupied the twin hill on the north side of the Via Egnatia, his exposed flank protected by cliffs and impassable defiles. They shared a main gate on the Via Egnatia itself, but once through that common entrance, two separate camps with separate fortifications existed;
free access between them was impossible anywhere, which meant that troops couldn’t be shuttled between north and south of the road.
The distance between the summit of Cassius’s hill and the summit of Brutus’s hill was almost exactly one mile, so between these two rises they built a heavily fortified wall on the west side. This wall didn’t travel in a straight line; it bent backward in the middle where it crossed the road at the main gate, giving it the shape of a great curved bow. Within that wall, each camp had its own inner lines of fortification, which then traveled down either side of the Via Egnatia to the commencement of the Sapaean Pass.
“Our army is just too big to put into one camp,” Cassius explained to his and Brutus’s legates in council. “Two separate camps mean that if the enemy should penetrate one, it can’t get inside the other. That gives us time to rally. The side road to Neapolis makes it easy for us to bring up supplies, and Patiscus is in charge of making sure we get those supplies. Yes, when all is said and done, in the highly unlikely event that we should be attacked, our dispositions will answer very well.”
No one present contradicted. What was preying on every mind at the council was the news that Mark Antony had reached Amphipolis with eight more legions and thousands of cavalry. Not only that, but Octavian was at Thessalonica and not stopping either, despite reports that he was so ill his conveyance was a litter.
Cassius gave the best of everything to Brutus. The best of the cavalry, the best legions of old Caesarean veterans, the best artillery. He didn’t know how else to shore up this hesitant, timid, unmartial partner in the great enterprise. For Brutus was those things, no matter how many occasional tactical inspirations he might have. Sardis had shown Cassius that Brutus cared more for abstractions than he did for the practical necessities war brought in its train. It wasn’t quite cowardice on Brutus’s part, it was more that war and battles appalled him, that he couldn’t flog up interest in military matters. When he should have been poring over maps and visiting his men to jolly them along, he was huddled with his three tame philosophers debating something or other, or else writing one of those chilling letters to a dead wife. Yet if he were taxed with his moods and chronic depression, he denied suffering them! Or else he started up about Cicero’s murder, and how he had to bring the Triumvirs to justice, no matter how unsuited for the task he was. He had a kind of blind faith in rightness as he saw rightness, nor could he credit that evil men like Antonius and Octavianus stood a chance of winning. His stand was for the restoration of the old Republic and the liberties of free Roman noblemen, causes that couldn’t possibly lose. Himself very different, Cassius shrugged his shoulders and simply did what he could to protect Brutus from his weaknesses. Let Brutus have the best of everything, and offer to Vediovis, god of doubts and disappointments, that they would be enough.
Brutus never even noticed what Cassius had done.
Antony arrived on the Ganga River plain on the last day of September and pitched camp a scant mile from the western, bow-shaped wall of the Liberators.
He was acutely aware how bad his position was. He had no burnable fuel and the nights were freezingly cold, the baggage train’s better food was lagging behind by some days, and the wells he dug in search of more potable water turned out to be as foul and brackish as the river. The Liberators, he deduced, must have access to good springs in that rocky chain of hills behind them, so he sent parties to explore Mount Pangaeus, where he managed to find fresh water—then had to transport it to his camp until his engineers, using troops as laborers, built a makeshift aqueduct.
However, he proceeded to do what any competent Roman general would: protect and fortify his position with walls, breastworks, towers and ditches, then manned them with artillery. Unlike Brutus and Cassius, he built one camp for his and Octavian’s foot soldiers, and tacked a smaller camp on either side of it for that fraction of his cavalry whose horses would drink the brackish water. Then he put his two worst legions in the seaward small camp, where his own quarters were located, and left sufficient room in the other small camp for two of Octavian’s legions when they arrived. They would act as reserves.
After studying the lie of the land, he decided that any battle hereabouts was going to be an infantry one, so secretly, at dead of night, he sent all but three thousand willing drinkers among his cavalry back to Amphipolis. In locating Octavian’s personal headquarters as a mirror image of his own in the other small camp, it did not occur to him that Octavian’s illness was affected by the proximity of horses; it simply filled him with fury that the legions thought no worse of the little coward for his girly complaint—indeed, they seemed to think that he was interceding with Mars on their behalf!
Still in a litter, Octavian drew up with his five legions early in October, and the baggage train a day later. When he saw where Antony had put him, he rolled his eyes despairingly at Agrippa, but had too much sense to protest to Antony.
“He wouldn’t understand anyway, his own health is too rude. We’ll pitch my tent on the outer palisades at the very back, where I might get a sea wind across those marshes and—I hope, I hope!—blow the dust from trampling hooves away from me.”
“It will help,” Agrippa agreed, amazed that Caesar had gotten this far. The will inside him, he thought, is truly more than mortal. He refuses to quit, let alone die—if only because, should he do either, Antonius would be the chief beneficiary.
“If the wind changes or the dust increases, Caesar,” Agrippa added, “you can slip through that little gate there and make your way into the marshes themselves for relief.”
Both sides had nineteen legions at Philippi and could marshal about a hundred thousand foot, but the Liberators had over twenty thousand horse, while Antony had reduced his thirteen thousand to a mere three.
“Things have changed since Caesar’s time in Gaul,” he said to Octavian over a shared dinner. “He thought himself superbly well off if he had two thousand horse to pitch against half of Gaul and a few levies of Sugambri to boot. I don’t think he ever fielded more than one horseman to the enemy’s three or four.”
“I know you’re milling your troopers around as if you still had thousands upon thousands of them, Antonius, but you don’t,” said Octavian, forcing down a piece of bread. “Yet our opponents have a vast cavalry camp up the valley, so Agrippa tells me. Why is that? Something to do with Caesar?”
“I can’t find forage,” said Antony, wiping his chin, “so I’m betting that what cavalry I have will be enough. Just like Caesar. It’s going to be a foot-slogger battle.”
“Do you think they’ll fight?”
“They don’t want to, that I know. But eventually they’ll have to, because we’re not going away until they do.”
Antony’s abrupt arrival had shattered Brutus and Cassius, positive that he would skulk at Amphipolis until he realized that he was doing himself no good in Thrace. Yet here he was, it seemed spoiling for a battle.
“He won’t get one,” said Cassius, frowning at the salt marshes.
The very next day he started work on his exposed salt marsh flank, bent on extending his fortifications right out into their middle, thus rendering it impossible for the Triumvirs to get around behind his lines. At the same time the gate across the Via Egnatia began to put forth ditches, extra walls and palisades; previously Cassius had thought that the Ganga River, flowing right in front of their two hills, would provide sufficient protection, but every day its level visibly dropped in this cold, rainless autumn of a cold, rainless year. Men could not only cross it, they could now fight in it. Therefore, more defenses, more fortifications.
“Why are they so busy?” Brutus asked Cassius as they stood atop Cassius’s hill, his hand pointing to the Triumviral camp.
“Because they’re preparing for a major engagement.”
“Oh!” gasped Brutus, and gulped.
“They won’t get one,” said Cassius, tones reassuring.
“Is that why you’ve extended your defenses into the swamp?”
“I wonder what they’re thinking about all this in Philippi town when they look down on us?”
Cassius blinked. “Does what Philippi town thinks matter?”
“I suppose not,” said Brutus, sighing. “I just wondered.”
October dragged on, saw nothing beyond a few minor skirmishes between foraging parties. Every day the Triumvirs stood waiting for battle, every day the Liberators ignored them.
To Cassius it seemed that this daily brandishing of arms was all the Triumvirs were doing, but he was wrong. Antony had decided to outflank Cassius in the marshes, and had put more than a third of the whole army to laboring in them. The noncombatants and baggage train attendants were clad in armor and made to imitate soldiers at the brandishing of arms ritual, while the soldiers toiled. To them, the work was a signal that battle was in the offing, and any soldier worth his salt looked forward to battle. Their mood and their attitude were sanguine, for they knew that they were well generaled and that most men lived through a fight. Not only did they have the great Marcus Antonius, they also had Caesar Divi Filius, who was their sacrificial victim as well as their darling.
Antony began to cut a negotiable channel through the marshes alongside Cassius’s extended flank, his plan to come around behind and block the road to Neapolis as well as attack Cassius’s underbelly. Every day for ten days he pretended to call his men to assemble for battle, while more than a third of them sweated in the marshes, hidden from Cassius by swamp grass and reeds. They labored to build a firm roadway, even driving piles to throw stout bridges across bottomless fens—and all in utter silence. As they progressed they equipped the road with salients ready to receive fortifications that would turn them into redoubts complete to towers and breastworks.
But Cassius saw none of it, heard none of it.
On the twenty-third day of October, Cassius turned forty-two; Brutus was four and a half months younger than he. By rights he ought to have been consul this year; instead, he was at Philippi out-waiting a determined enemy. Just how determined, he learned at dawn on this birth anniversary; Antony abandoned secrecy and sent a column of shock troops to occupy all the salients, use the materials put there to turn them into redoubts.
The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra Page 92