While the cavalry clashed, the Roman legions had advanced. The Roman infantry pushed against the Celts and Spaniards in the center of the Carthaginian line. Vastly outnumbered, the Celts and Spaniards in turn retreated backward carefully, changing their position from one of billowing outward to curving inward. As stated in chapter 1, Hannibal’s entire battle plan depended on the infantry line bending without breaking. The Celts and Spaniards had to hold on long enough for his cavalry to neutralize Rome’s horsemen, at which point the Libyan troops on the wings would spring into action. The Celts and Spaniards had to maintain an orderly, fighting retreat while observing fellow-soldiers dying all around them. Hannibal’s casualty figures show just how heavy a burden the center of his line bore: 4,000 of his 5,500 fallen infantrymen were Celts.
The Celts’ famous love of battle might have kept them on the field, but only professional training and seasoned officers could have maintained their order—that, and the presence of Hannibal himself among them, on horseback, and protected by a ring of bodyguards, but close enough to the front that he ran a risk.
Nine out of ten armies would never have been able to execute the maneuver. Most forces would have folded under a blow as hard as the one the Romans struck. Yet Hannibal’s army not only bent without breaking, it then executed a series of countermaneuvers that were as breathtaking as they were devastating.
The Romans advanced so far against the enemy center that they marched alongside the two contingents of Libyans on their flanks. When that happened, and when the signal came that the Carthaginians had demolished the Roman cavalry, the Libyans got their order to spring into battle. They turned inward and marched against the enemy. With the Libyan front pressed against the Roman flank (and with no cavalry to protect that flank), the Romans were at their most vulnerable. On top of that, the Romans were tired; the Libyans were fresh.
Bloody Symphony
Still, what happened next was not preordained. If the Roman flanks had consisted of veteran troops and if they had been well commanded, then at least some units might have been able to turn and punch their way through the Libyans. But the flanks were Rome’s newest and least experienced legions. They probably panicked and fled toward the center, tripping up the more experienced troops there in turn. That best explains why the Roman push against the Carthaginian center ran out of steam, even though the Roman consul Paullus rode there from his place on the right wing, in a vain attempt to rally his men.
For the Libyans what followed was, as Livy says, “slaughter rather than battle.” For the Romans trapped in Hannibal’s vise, it was a foretaste of hell. Every sense was tormented. Sounds included horns and trumpets, war cries in a half dozen languages, the thud of tens of thousands of marching feet, the thunder of hoof beats, the clash of iron, and the screams of the dying. Smells ranged from the slaughterhouse stink of bloody entrails or the more ordinary stench of sweat, vomit, urine, and feces. The scorching heat of a midsummer day in southern Italy, under the weight of arms and armor, touched everyone and left a dry taste in the mouth. The dust churned up by the local south wind blinded some; others had a clear sight of the field so covered with blood and slippery corpses that just standing was difficult.
And then there was Hasdrubal’s cavalry. After coming to the aid of Hanno’s men against the allied cavalry, they left the light cavalry to polish off what was left of the enemy horsemen. Now, in a move of extraordinary generalship, Hasdrubal had his men ride against the rear of the Roman infantry. Hasdrubal’s horsemen charged the Romans again and again from several different directions. It was another blow to the enemy’s morale. Had the Romans been more experienced and better led, they might have fought their way out of here too. But they did not.
With this move, the Carthaginians closed the ring. Between Celt and Spaniard infantrymen in front, Libyans on the wings, and Hasdrubal’s cavalrymen in the rear, the Romans were surrounded. It was a complete envelopment, which makes Cannae a classic of the military art. Many have admired it, most famously the German general Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, who designed a new Cannae on a vast scale to surround the entire French army across hundreds of miles in 1914—but when his plan was tried, it failed.
There were so many Roman dead: about 48,000, if not more, or more than half of the Roman army. Some of them were still alive the next morning, when Carthaginian soldiers roamed the battlefield and slaughtered the wounded. Few battles in human history have produced anything like that amount of carnage.
The roll call of the dead was a who’s who of the Roman elite. It included eighty senators or men eligible for membership in the Senate; twenty-nine colonels (to give the equivalent rank of the military tribunes); numerous ex-consuls, including one of the consuls of the previous year; and the consul Paullus, one of the two commanding officers of the Roman army. No names of Carthaginian casualties are recorded, but they may have included senior commanders—for, if they were any good, senior officers would have risked their lives to lead their men, as many still do today.
Cannae was a triumph for Hannibal. It demonstrates the many facets of his supremacy in battle: his agility and good judgment, his tactical sophistication and refinement, his timing and rhythm, his mastery of deception, his superiority in infrastructure, his knack of choosing the right officers and of holding them on the proper leash—loose enough to leave them the initiative but tight enough so they followed his plan—and his skill as a morale builder for his entire army. Divine Providence played a role as well. Hannibal conducted the battle like a symphony; as it turned out, not a note was out of tune.
Cannae was Hannibal’s greatest victory. It was also the bloodiest defeat in Roman history. Inexperienced citizen-soldiers had turned out to be no match for hardened professionals led by a brilliant general. Amateur Roman armies had led a tiny city-state to the mastery of Italy and the central Mediterranean. Now, though, the Roman way of war was dead. As the sun went down on August 2, 216 B.C., many might have wondered: Was Rome itself finished?
Not Publius Cornelius Scipio. This young military tribune (colonel) was one of the few Roman soldiers—about 15,000 out of 86,000 men—to survive. Another 19,000 men were captured, which leaves about 4,000 soldiers whose fate is unknown. Like many of the Roman escapees from Cannae, Scipio sought refuge at Canusium—it was nearby, on a defensible hill, and loyal to Rome. There, he rallied the wavering and faint of heart, promising them that Rome would rise again.
Fate would give Scipio the chance to make good on that promise.
PHARSALUS
Ancient Thessaly was known for witches and war. The witches were supposed to have harnessed the power of the moon. The warriors took advantage of the earth. A region in central Greece, Thessaly, features a plain that was made for the clash of armies: wide and flat, with rivers running through it for anchoring one’s flank. A ring of mountains closes the region in, as if to accentuate the drama. It was here that Caesar and Pompey settled their feud.
Days of Decision
The thirty days from early July to early August 48 B.C. (early May to early June by the solar calendar) decided the contest between Pompey and Caesar. Pompey counted on hunger and misery to soften up the enemy to the point where his army could deliver the final blow—if his opponents didn’t collapse on their own. What he didn’t count on was Caesar’s ability to do the impossible.
Having rallied his beaten troops at Dyrrachium, Caesar next marched them rapidly over miserable terrain, including two hundred miles through the Pindus Mountains, and into Thessaly. He then proceeded to secure food for his hungry men in a rough, brutal, and effective manner. The word had got out about Caesar’s defeat at Dyrrachium and most cities, even those allied to Caesar, now feared Pompey too much to open their gates. So Caesar opened them himself.
He chose the small city of Gomphi, strategically located on the main pass into Thessaly from the west. Gomphi was rich and full of supplies. The authorities begged Pompey for help, but he had not reached Thessaly yet, which gave Caesar a free hand. It
took only an afternoon for his army to storm the walls. For once, they had their commander’s permission to plunder, and they did. The soldiers ate and drank themselves silly and took out their frustrations on the population. Twenty of the town’s leading men were found dead in an apothecary shop; they preferred to take poison rather than face Caesar’s men. As soon as the news spread, the people of all the cities of Thessaly opened their gates, except Larissa, which had a substantial Pompeian garrison to protect it. At a stroke, Caesar’s policy of terror boosted his army’s morale and provided allies and supplies.
Caesar’s drunken and bloated men would have made a prime target for Pompey but he was about a week behind them. Unlike Caesar and his forced march through hell, Pompey made a stately progress to Thessaly, eastward along the via Egnatia and then south by a relatively easy route to the city of Larissa. Pompey took his time, but demonstrating self-confidence might have seemed more important to him than rushing to deny a few days of rest to a badly bloodied enemy.
We would like to know what Pompey was thinking during this crucial period, but the general never told his own story. Caesar and his allies dominate the written record. As often in ancient history, we have to read between the lines and apply common sense to reach a satisfactory account. Here is my reconstruction of the battle.
As Caesar pulled out of Dyrrachium, Pompey consulted his colleagues. Afranius, one of the generals who had lost Spain, proposed going westward: to use their command of the sea to reconquer Italy, to employ that as a base to take Gaul and retake Spain, and then finally to go after Caesar. Pompey turned down this advice. He rightly recognized that his strategic goal was not territory but Caesar’s army. Politically, Pompey’s base was in the east, and if he shifted his forces westward, some of his eastern supporters might withdraw their men and cut off their supply of money.
Pompey also considered the reinforcements that had arrived in Greece. While at Dyrrachium, he had asked the governor of Syria, Metellus Scipio, to bring two veteran legions to Greece, and they were already there. They had tangled with the forces that Caesar sent eastward from Dyrrachium to meet them: two legions under Lucius Domitius Calvinus, which defeated Scipio in one skirmish, and one legion under Lucius Cassius Longinus, which Scipio defeated in another. Of course, Pompey could have evacuated Scipio’s legions by sea, but that would have cost Pompey prestige and, again, conceded the east to Caesar.
Besides, Pompey believed it was possible to defeat Caesar’s army in Greece. He still hoped to avoid a pitched battle because Caesar’s soldiers were “disciplined and desperate men.” So Pompey made “the most prudent calculation to protract the war and wear out the enemy by hunger from day to day.” But unlike before, he was now willing to think the unthinkable.
The sources tend to blame Pompey’s advisers and his own weakness for listening to them. Hotheaded and ignorant of war, they thought Caesar was finished, if only Pompey would give the final push. Some had lost their fortunes and were eager to get their hands on the property of Caesar’s supporters. Many distrusted Pompey and his ego: he was “more reserved, not better” than other tyrants and would-be tyrants, as Tacitus put it. Caesar’s lieutenants fought for Caesar; Pompey’s fought for senatorial government. There was talk of getting rid of Pompey once they had finished off Caesar.
Also, they accused Pompey of dragging the war on longer than necessary. Domitius Ahenobarbus, the man who lost Corfinium a year before, sneered that Pompey was a second Agamemnon, referring to the pompous supreme commander in Homer whose power lasted only as long as the war against Troy. Another senator, Marcus Favonius, complained that, thanks to Pompey’s sluggishness, they would never get back to Italy in time for this year’s figs. Some of Pompey’s eastern allies joined the chorus and demanded a pitched battle.
At last, Pompey gave in, like a ship’s captain surrendering the rudder in a strong storm—as Lucan later put it. Pompey agreed to fight a pitched battle. The question is, was it out of weakness of character or was it a considered decision? If the latter, was his reasoning military or political? The sources offer various motives. One writer says that Pompey saw the danger of battle, but his men forced him into it. A second disagrees, and concludes the problem was Pompey’s need to please as well as his thirst for glory. Another author says simply that some god misled Pompey.
It is hard to believe that the man who stood up to Caesar at Dyrrachium caved in to Favonius and his figs now that the army was in Thessaly. More likely, Pompey changed his mind, half out of hope and half out of fear. In his assessment, Cicero says that Pompey had finally begun to have confidence in his troops after their recent success; he forgot that they were merely an inexperienced and hastily collected assortment of men. But Cicero wrote in hindsight, two years later.
At the time, Pompey might have felt that it was now or never. By giving Caesar breathing space in Thessaly, Pompey had made a mistake. Caesar’s army was, obviously, not starving, but they had to keep moving to find new supplies. With the harvest about to come in, they would soon be able to feed themselves for months, and then, they could unleash ruin. Pompey knew that as long as Caesar was alive, he was dangerous and unpredictable.
Meanwhile, his own army was not likely to improve. It had just gained two veteran legions under Metellus Scipio. That and the wind at its back after Dyrrachium had made it strong—for now. With the commanders pulling in opposite directions, Pompey probably wondered how long its present strength would last. He could comfort himself with what the defector Titus Labienus, Caesar’s former lieutenant, maintained: that Caesar’s army was no longer the fierce force that had conquered Gaul. Military and political logic alike now said to Pompey that fighting a pitched battle was the best of several bad alternatives. Pompey’s judgment was intelligent, reasonable, and wrong.
Indeed, it’s difficult to convince a proud, well-fed, and well-supplied army not to fight. Memnon tried and failed to make the case before the Granicus; Fabius met the same fate before Cannae; now it was Pompey’s turn.
And so, in the end, Pompey allowed himself the luxury of hope. The classical writers on war would have bristled. “Hope is a pacifier to danger,” wrote Thucydides. War, as he knew, rewards realism and punishes dreams. The dark 3:00 A.M. of the soul looked Pompey and Caesar in the face. Caesar stared back; Pompey flinched.
The Crisis of the Chiefs
Pharsalus lies in the heart of Thessaly, at the southern edge of the central Thessalian plain, astride both east-west and north-south roads. The mountains sit just south of the town, while the river Enipeus flows north of it, and the foothills of other mountains rise north of that: the valley is about five miles wide at Pharsalus, while it narrows to the east and opens up to the west. It was in the vicinity of Pharsalus that Pompey and Caesar met in pitched battle. The battle probably took place north of the river: between the Enipeus and the hills lying between the modern village of Krini and Mount Dogandzis. The date was August 9, 48 B.C., by the Roman calendar; June 6, 48 B.C., by today’s solar calendar. It was a hot, steamy, summer day.
To understand the battle, first turn the calendar back a few pages to each army’s separate arrival in the area. Caesar got there first. About seven days after Gomphi, Caesar made his camp outside Pharsalus in the fertile plain. It was flat and open farm country, where his men could easily harvest the grain that was about to ripen. Perhaps he placed his headquarters on a low hillock with a good view of the countryside. He was near the road that went north to Larissa, Pompey’s headquarters in Thessaly, and just north of the crossing of the Enipeus River. This strategic spot gave Caesar control of the terrain: not only Pharsalus and the southern half of the plain but also the way south to Boeotia and its rich farm country. It was an apt place to wait for Pompey. He arrived a few days later and camped in the foothills several miles to the north.
For several days, Caesar tried to tempt Pompey down from the hills to fight on the plain. Caesar lined up his men for battle on the low ground, while Pompey lined up his men in the foothills. Pom
pey refused to descend, perhaps because he was hoping that Caesar’s men were hungry and desperate enough to attack an enemy on the high ground. When they declined, Pompey finally sent his men down to the plain to fight on August 9.
It was early morning. Caesar had given up on fighting a battle here. He decided to move his camp to a hill town ten miles to the northeast, where he expected to find more food. The men were already taking down their tents when suddenly, scouts reported the enemy’s deployment. Caesar made a quick decision and addressed his men: they would have to change plans and prepare for battle. One source reports that Caesar told his soldiers that they would finally be able to fight other men instead of having to fight want and hunger. Caesar himself states his words as “Let us be ready in our hearts for a fight. We won’t easily find a chance like this again.” He ordered a purple tunic to be hung from the commander’s tent, the Roman sign for battle, and at the sight his men supposedly shouted for joy. They were no ordinary army—they were Caesar’s men. Rarely in history has one man’s leadership tied his soldiers more closely to him.
It was the moment Caesar had been waiting for. It was the supreme battle. It was, as the poet Lucan puts it, discrimina ducum: “the crisis of the chiefs.”
The two armies lined up on roughly a north-south axis, bounded by the foothills to the north and by marshy ground around the Enipeus to the south. The battle lines stretched for about two and a half miles. The Caesarians were in the east, the Pompeians in the west. Caesar deployed about twenty-two thousand heavy infantrymen from eight legions and one thousand cavalrymen. There were also light-armed troops from northern Greece.
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