After being ferried across the Hellespont by the small craft
that plied the narrow strait between Thrace and Asia, and ignoring the winter
weather, the men of the 3rd Gallica were pushing down through the valleys of
the province of Asia at a steady eighteen to twenty miles a day. They had been
spoiling for a fight for close to twelve months, chafing to go after the
traitor Quintus Labienus and his Parthian friends and reclaim the East for
Rome, and soon they would come to grips with both.
The legion’s numbers had been reduced by casualties in the
Philippi battles and by sickness, so it was down on its original strength of
six thousand men. There were four thousand to five thousand of them now, in ten
cohorts, or companies, led by six young tribunes. Real power within the legion
was vested in its sixty centurions, midranking officers promoted through the
ranks after years of service. Many of the 3rd Gallica’s centurions had served
in the previous enlistment of the legion, Pompey’s 3rd Legion, and had seen
plenty of bloody battles in Portugal and Spain and piled up a small fortune in
pay, bonuses, and booty before Julius Caesar paid them off in 49 B.C. Now, ten
years later, these centurions were still fit, and ready for a fight. Some were
in their fifties, having previously served Pompey in other units, in other
wars. Others were in their thirties and forties. Most of the rank and file were
in their late twenties or early thirties. The youngest of them had joined the
legion at age seventeen and now were approaching twenty-seven. They were a
colorful mixture: farm boys and fishermen, unemployed workmen and petty
thieves, cobblers, boat builders, tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths; they had
all brought their peacetime skills to the legion, and all had gone through
tough training at the hands of even tougher centurions.
Now they all looked the same, clad in the blood-red woolen
tunic and red cloak worn by all Rome’s legionaries. Every man was equipped with
the familiar Roman helmet that looked like a modern-day jockey’s cap, with the
addition of a plume of yellow horsehair. On the march, it was slung around the
neck. Every man sported a thick leather vest covered by thousands of ringlets
of iron mail that extended to the knees. This mail was weighty, and contributed
to the description of legionaries as “heavy infantry.” Slung over their left
shoulders were their shields—wooden, rectangular, curved, almost as big as a
man, and reinforced with iron. Every shield of the 3rd Gallica carried the
legion’s symbol, the charging bull. The bull was a symbol common to legions
that had served Julius Caesar, and this enlistment of the legion had been
raised by Caesar’s recruiting officers. On their waist hung their “short”
weapons, the twenty-inch gladius, a short sword with a pointed end, in a
scabbard on the right hip, and a puglio, or dagger, on the left. Over their
right shoulders they carried poles from which hung their packs, containing
entrenching tools, personal items, bravery decorations, and rations. Strapped
to each carrying pole were several javelins and two sharp wooden pickets. The
thousands of pickets carried by the men of the legion were used to top the
earthen wall surrounding the marching camp the legion built every night when
they were on the march and were retrieved the next morning when the legion
“upped stakes” and moved on.
Ahead and behind them marched the other legions of Mark
Antony’s eastern army—the 3rd Cyrenaica, the 4th Macedonica, the 5th
Macedonica, the 10th, and the most famous of them all, the 6th Ferrata. Ferrata
means “ironclad”—it was a title the men of the last enlistment of the 6th had
given themselves after winning battle after battle for Julius Caesar. They had conquered
Egypt for him, and defeated the Bosporan army of King Pharnaces at Zela, after
which Caesar was to say that he came, he saw, and he conquered.
Antony’s troops were in good spirits. They were finally
going after the Parthians who had invaded the Roman East and shamed Romans
everywhere. And their general was a man they identified with. Unlike most Roman
generals, who came from aristocratic families, Lieutenant General Publius
Ventidius’s background was as humble as that of the soldiers he led. Now close
to seventy years of age, Ventidius had been born in Asculum Picenum, today’s
Ascoli Piceno in eastern Italy, to a family of commoners. Between 90 and 88
B.C., when he was a young man, the Social War had been waged against Rome by
her allies in Italy, and Ventidius had served in the ranks of forces sent
against Rome by his hometown. Captured by Roman general Pompeius Strabo, father
of Pompey the Great, young Ventidius had been paraded through the streets of
Rome in Strabo’s subsequent Triumph. As it turned out, the war proved
beneficial to Ventidius. Freed in the amnesty following the war’s end,
Ventidius had found himself a Roman citizen, for, among the peace terms, Rome
granted Roman citizenship to the allied states, a move that brought all of
Italy south of the Po River into the Roman fold.
For a number of years Ventidius made a tidy living selling
mules to the Roman army—later, his detractors would call him “the muleteer.” He
sided with Julius Caesar during the civil war, and in 44 B.C. Caesar appointed
him a praetor, a judge with the equivalent military rank of a major general,
for the coming year. Immediately after Caesar’s murder, Ventidius had supported
Anthony, putting together a force of three legions for him in Italy. That
support had never wavered, and had earned him a consulship at Antony’s behest
and his current military appointment.
Now Ventidius was scouting well ahead of the main column,
heading south with the cavalry and auxiliary light infantry as he looked for
Quintus Labienus. The exact numbers in General Ventidius’s advance force are
unknown, but three years later Mark Antony would have six thousand auxiliary
cavalry from Gaul and Spain under his command in the East. A good part of that
force was almost certainly here with Ventidius now as he drove down through
Asia. These troopers had been riding for Rome for years. Recruited by Caesar,
they were not Roman citizens. They served under tribal obligation to Rome, and
for pay. Some had fought for both Caesar and Pompey during the civil war, some
had even ridden with Quintus Labienus’s father. All had fought at Philippi and
were experienced horsemen and fighters. The noncitizen auxiliaries of the light
infantry, who included archers and slingers, were locals from Greece, Crete,
Cyprus, Asia, and Syria numbering two thousand or three thousand.
As the advance force forged ahead, the men of the 3rd
Gallica and the five other legions were coming along behind with the baggage
train. This was made up of thousands of pack mules—a minimum of one for every
ten legionaries, and hundreds of wagons carrying the army’s heavy equipment,
from tents to artillery, ammunition, grinding stones, and carpentry tools as
well as water clocks and the officers’ furniture and silver dining plate.
The target of their operation, young Quintus Labienus, was
in Cilicia. When the winter of 40-39 B.C. arrived, the youthful conqueror had
pulled out of the siege of Stratonicea and taken up residence in Cilicia,
intending to remain there until the spring. As his troops likewise went into
winter camp at their various garrisons and hung up sword and shield until the
next spring, his Parthian allies had withdrawn into Syria.
The sudden news that General Ventidius and a Roman flying
column were pushing into Cilicia shocked Labienus to the core. The last he had
heard, Ventidius had been in Italy, embroiled in the turmoil involving Antony,
Octavian, and Sextus Pompey. With only his own local troops to rely on,
Labienus packed up and left, withdrawing ahead of Ventidius, summoning his men
from their various garrisons throughout the region, and sending messengers
galloping into Syria to bring Parthian cavalry to his support.
As Labienus camped at Mount Amanus and waited for Parthian
reinforcements from east of the Taurus Mountains, Ventidius arrived with his
advance force and made camp nearby on high, sloping ground. Now Ventidius also
waited—for the arrival of the 3rd Gallica and his other legions. There, in the
hills, the two forces passed several nervous days, eyeing each other from their
camps.
When the six Roman legions came marching up the valley and
linked with their general, their troops began unloading their equipment at the
campsite marked out beside Ventidius’s advance camp. A legion camp was dug by
its legionaries, who carried entrenching tools for the job. No slaves or
auxiliaries were permitted to be involved. An advance surveying party led by a
tribune had found the best location for the camp, and set out marker flags
indicating the grid pattern streets of the camp and exactly where every line of
tents was to be erected when the legions arrived. On General Ventidius’s
orders, to make it difficult for Parthian heavy cavalry to get to them, this
Mount Amanus campsite was on high ground, surrounded by angling slopes.
The legionaries were soon hard at work constructing their
camp, some digging, some working with timber. “No matter where this is done,”
wrote 2nd century B.C. Greek historian Polybius, who documented Roman legion
habits, “one simple formula for a camp is employed.” The square or rectangular
camp was surrounded by a trench dug by the legionaries; it was typically ten
feet deep and three feet across. The earth from the trench was used to create a
ten-foot wall inside the trench, and on top of this were planted the pointed stakes
carried by every man. The legions’ artillery—light, arrow-throwing catapults
and heavier, stone-throwing “engines”—was mounted on the walls. There was a
gate in each of the four walls. The main gate, the “decuman gate,” faced away
from the enemy. Wooden guard towers rose beside each wooden gate. One cohort
from each of the six legions was assigned to guard duty, and at sunset every
night a password for the next twenty-four hours was issued by the army
commander. In the night, the watch changed precisely every three hours at the
sound of a trumpet call.
In the afternoon, while the legions worked on their camp, a
large force of Parthian cavalry arrived from the east and set up a camp
separate from Quintus Labienus’s camp. The identity of the Parthian commander
here is unknown, but it wasn’t Prince Pacorus; he was still back in Syria.
Likewise, the number of Parthian cavalrymen in this force is not known, but
according to Roman historian Cassius Dio, they held the Roman troops in
contempt because of their own vast number. We know that Pacorus had left just
two hundred of his cavalrymen stationed at Jerusalem, which, being twenty-five
hundred feet above sea level, was frequently snow-covered in winter. The vast
majority of the men in the Parthian occupying army were down in Syria over this
winter, enjoying the milder climate beside the Jordan River. Allowing for some
men remaining with Pacorus in Syria, the size of the force that joined Labienus
would have numbered five thousand to eight thousand cavalrymen.
Far from quaking at the sight, the men of the 3rd Gallica,
sweating as they dug their trenches and erected the tents and other facilities
of the camp, would have smiled to themselves. This was what they had been
waiting for, a chance to come to grips with the Parthians, the old enemy who
had humiliated Rome at Carrhae fourteen years before. These were not the
wastelands of Mesopotamia, where Crassus and twenty thousand of his men had
died and ten thousand had been taken prisoner. This was mountain country, a different
battleground altogether, terrain where legionaries were at no disadvantage.
Knowing what the next day was likely to bring, they would have gone to their
beds that night keyed up and expectant. Some, lying on bedrolls on the hard
ground in their ten-man tents, would not have slept a wink as they thought
about the difficulties entailed in taking on the Parthian cavalry the next day.
But the Romans had a saying “Nothing is difficult to the brave and the
faithful,” and many more legionaries, believing in their own courage and
ability and in their general, would have snored all night.
Well before dawn the next day, the general’s trumpeter had
sounded reveille, and the call was swiftly repeated by all the trumpeters of
all the cohorts of the legions. “Assembly” was sounded soon after, summoning
the legionaries. They had slept in their equipment, and only had to take a sip
of water and pull on helmets and take up shields and javelins from the weapons
stacks outside their tent doors before they formed up at attention in their
units on the parade square. “At ease,” sounded the trumpets. General Ventidius
climbed the few steps onto the camp’s raised tribunal, built from layers of
turf, in front of his assembled legions. His adjutant, the nuntius—literally the
“announcer”—took his place to the general’s right.
“Hail, General!” bellowed thousands of legionaries. Many men
also applauded.
There, in the light of flickering lamps, Ventidius informed
his troops that today they would go against the Parthians, as they had
expected, and today they would be victorious and make the enemy from the East
pay for the humiliation at Carrhae. The legions roared their approval. In Daily
Orders announced by the general’s adjutant, the legions learned precisely where
they were to go in Ventidius’s battle formation, and of the tactics Ventidius
planned for the day, of the signals they should expect, and when.
As the sun rose over the mountains, the legions silently
marched from camp behind their standards, and drew up in the ordained battle
order on uneven but open ground outside the camp walls. Following Julius
Caesar’s practice, their battle formation would have involved three lines, with
every legion’s ten cohorts or companies split through the line, with four
cohorts in the first line and three in each of the two lines behind, with a gap
between each line. Each century within each cohort lined up with ten men to the
front, and its centurion on the extreme left of the very first rank. The
remaining members of the century lined up directly behind each man in front. If
the cohort was at full strength, the century was ten men deep. The eagle-bearer
of the 3rd Gallica, proudly carrying aloft the silver eagle standard of the
legion, retired to the open space between the first and second lines, where he
was joined by the boy trumpeters of the first-line cohorts. Every soldier in
the ranks who had earned a bravery decoration during his career was probably
wearing it—Caesar had liked his men to wear their decorations into battle, to
inspire them and to awe the enemy.
Ventidius seems to have assigned his auxiliary light
infantry the task of guarding his camp. Having heard how General Saxa had so
disastrously thrown his cavalry at the Parthians in Syria the previous year,
Ventidius ordered his cavalry commander, Brigadier General Quintus Pompaedius
Silo, to hold his cavalry on the wings of the infantry battle lines and let
their infantry blunt the enemy attack.
In the Parthian camp, the cavalry mounted as the sun began
to rise. The Parthians employed two types of cavalry—heavy and light. Their
heavy cavalrymen, called cataphracts by the Greeks, were bearded noblemen. They
wore armor that covered their entire bodies. On arms and legs it was made up of
overlapping leather segments wrapped around the limb. On the torso it consisted
of a sleeveless jacket onto which were sewn pieces of metal. In some cases
these were chain mail vests not dissimilar to those worn by Rome’s legionaries.
Some noblemen could afford even more elaborate armor, with their jackets
covered with overlapping “fish scales” of bronze and iron. On their heads they
wore a pointy-topped metal helmet that usually trailed a streamer or two. The
cataphract’s principal weapon was the kontos, a lance some nine feet long. On
his belt he wore a sheathed sword, or an ax, and many cataphracts also carried
a small bow in a quiver slung over the back. Not only was the rider armored,
his horse also was covered in a coat of leather onto which was sewn fish scale
bronze or iron armor. The horse armor, which extended almost to the ground,
covered most of the animal’s head; only the ears, nose, and mouth were exposed.
Even the horse’s eyes had small iron grids over them for protection. Not
surprisingly, the cataphract’s horse had to be large and strong to carry both
its own armor and its armored rider.
Numerically, horse-archers made up the largest component of
the Parthian cavalry army. At the Battle of Carrhae there had been eight horse
archers to each heavy cavalryman, and the balance was much the same here at
Mount Amanus. Parthian horse archer ranks were made up of the servants of
nobles and also of slaves. They wore no armor, just highly embroidered jackets
and baggy leggings, a cloth cap, and solid leather boots. Each was armed with
two short swords, with one strapped to each leg, and a bow made from a
composite of bone and wood. Hanging on his horse’s left side was an ornate
quiver filled with arrows about three feet long. His horse, which carried no
protection, was small and fast.
The Parthian cavalry formed in loose formation outside their
camp, with horse archers to the front and cataphracts in the rear. Horses, made
restless by riders who were by turns nervous and excited, pawed the ground,
neighed, and had to be reassured and calmed. Seeing that Quintus Labienus’s
troops were slow to come out of their camp to join them, and seeing General
Ventidius’s legions formed on the hilltop and waiting for them, the Parthians
did not bother to wait to join forces with Labienus’s infantry. Although the
Parthians did possess militia foot soldiers back home, the cavalry were
accustomed to operating without infantry support. Besides, they had little
respect for Labienus’s infantry, being both Romans and turncoats. Instead, the
Parthians moved out and rode to the base of the hill where, above, Ventidius’s
Romans stood silently in their ranks. The morning breeze wafted the Roman
helmet crests and ruffled the purple cloth consular standard of their general.
Skirting around to the side of the hill that offered the easiest
access, to the southwest, the exuberant Parthians urged each other to great
deeds this day and prepared to charge. In the Parthians’ rear, mounted drummers
began to pound out an ominous beat. Despite all the Hollywood movies showing
Roman armies and parade participants marching to beating drums, apart from
small hand-held drums used by women in religious festivals the Romans never
employed drums for military or ceremonial purposes. The Parthians, on the other
hand, were famed for their war drums. Up on the hill, the men of the 3rd
Gallica heard the booming enemy drums, and their heart rate increased a little.
Around the campfires outside every tent the night before they had boasted of
how they would revenge Crassus and his legions. The moment of truth was drawing
nearer by the minute.
We don’t know the positions of individual legions in
Ventidius’s battle formation. He probably gave the famous 6th Ferrata the
honored right wing. Honored it may have been, but it was also the most
dangerous location—legionaries held their shields on their left side, exposing
their right, and many a general attacked the opposition’s right wing as a
consequence. The 3rd Gallica was either on the left wing or was one of the four
legions in the middle of the line.
