Gaius Crastinus moved among his men, checking their
equipment. He was no longer chief centurion of the 10th. That role had gone to
a younger centurion the previous year, on Crastinus’s retirement. But on his
recall, Caesar had welcomed Crastinus back to his legion with the rank of
first-rank centurion, and for this operation had placed him in charge of 120
volunteers of the 1st Cohort of the 10th Legion, putting them in the front
line. Caesar had once more placed the 10th Legion on his extreme right wing, the
attacking wing. Much would depend on the 10th today.
Crastinus assured his comrades that they had just this one
last battle to face as he moved along the line. He would have noticed a change
of attitude among the men of the 10th since his return to its ranks. A lot of
them had probably complained that Caesar no longer valued the 10th, that he
treated it no better than the new Italian units with their raw, weak-kneed
recruits. He’d broken his promise, and used the Germans as his bodyguard, not
the 10th.
Now aged between thirty-four and thirty-seven, Crastinus had
served Caesar for twelve of his seventeen years with the legions and was
fanatically loyal to his general. He would have been quick to remind his
comrades that Caesar had chosen the 10th to accompany him in the invasion’s
first wave and now given them place of honor on the right wing. But there were
apparently many in the 10th who sympathized with their countrymen in the 7th,
8th, and 9th, who were now eighteen months past their due discharge date and
yet, as they complained, Caesar had not said a word about when they could go
home.
“Remember what Caesar told us at Brindisi before we
embarked,” Crastinus would have been telling his men. “One last campaign, one
last battle.” Caesar himself records Crastinus saying: “After today, Caesar
will regain his position, and we our freedom.”
It was midmorning on August 9, 48 B.C. As Centurion
Crastinus took up his position on the extreme left of his front-line
detachment, he faced across the field of swaying, ripening wheat to the army of
Pompey the Great formed up some 450 yards away. Ever since the two sides had
arrived on the plain of Farsala several weeks earlier, each had felt the other
out, with cavalry skirmishes bringing a handful of fatalities on both sides,
including one of the Allobroges brothers who’d defected to Pompey. More than
once, Caesar had formed up his army in battle order in the wheat field,
encouraging Pompey to come down off his hilltop and enter into a contest. Each
time, Pompey stayed put. And each time, Caesar edged a little closer to the
hills.
Then, early this morning, Caesar had broken camp. According
to Plutarch, he was planning to march to Scotussa. Caesar himself says he’d
decided to keep constantly on the move, seeking supplies for his army and
leading Pompey a merry dance until the ideal opportunity for a battle presented
itself. Even as his legions’ tents were being folded away and packed onto the
baggage train, cavalry scouts came to Caesar to tell him that there was movement
at Pompey’s camp. And as the lead elements of Caesar’s column marched out the
front gate of his camp, more scouts arrived with the news that Pompey’s troops
were beginning to come down from their hill and line up in battle formation—on
the plain, giving up the advantage of higher ground. This was an obvious
invitation to Caesar, and he accepted it.
“Our spirits are ready for battle,” Caesar says he declared.
“We shall not easily find another chance.” He quickly issued orders for his red
ensign to be raised as the signal for battle, and for the army to wheel about
and form up on the plain opposite Pompey’s troops. According to both Appian and
Plutarch, Caesar called out to his men, “The wished-for day has come at last,
when you shall fight with men, not with famine and hunger.”
Summoning his senior officers to a brief conference, he’d
ordered the same dispositions as the last time the army formed up for battle.
Then, turning to General Publius Sulla, who would command the division on the
right wing of the battle line, he told him to call for volunteers from the 10th
to form the front line and lead the charge, knowing the untried legions in the
center would be inspired by the performance of the famous 10th.
Some 120 men had quickly volunteered, among them Centurion
Crastinus, which was why they now stood at the front of the 10th Legion’s
formation on the extreme right of Caesar’s army, the cohorts stretching back in
a total of three battle lines. Beside the 10th, making up the rest of the right
division, stood the men of the 11th and 12th Legions. General Sulla had already
taken up his position on the right with his staff.
Caesar’s center was commanded by General Domitius Calvinus,
who had previously led the screening force in eastern Greece. As was the custom,
the weakest troops took the center. In this case the central division was made
up of three of the new legions raised in Italy the previous year, the 25th,
26th, and 29th.
The left wing was commanded by Mark Antony, once again
holding the post of second-in-command of the army. With him stood the
experienced Spanish legions he’d brought over from Brindisi and commanded at
Durrës. The 9th was on the extreme outside, with auxiliaries and slingers
filling the gap between them and the Enipeus River. The 8th was stationed next
to the 9th. Both legions had been so depleted by the flu epidemic and then the
casualties at Durrës that Caesar had ordered them to work together during this
action and operate as one legion. Next to them stood the men of the 7th Legion,
adjacent to the central division. All told, leaving just two cohorts guarding
his camp and the baggage, with his 27th and 28th Legions absent in southern
Greece, now under General Fufius, and eight assorted cohorts garrisoning three
towns on the west coast, he was able to field nine legions in eighty
understrength cohorts, totaling twenty-one thousand foot soldiers.
To counter Pompey’s cavalry massing on his right, Caesar
deployed his own thousand-man cavalry, Germans and Gauls, supported by
auxiliaries, extending from the 10th Legion’s position. His mounted troops and
the auxiliaries had cooperated well in skirmishes against Pompey’s cavalry in
the week or so leading up to the battle, and Caesar was hoping they would do
the same again today to counteract Pompey’s significant superiority in cavalry.
Facing him, at Caesar’s estimation, Pompey had forty
thousand infantry and seven thousand cavalry. As he came down onto the plain
that morning, Pompey left seven cohorts drawn from a number of his least experienced
legions to guard his camp, supported by auxiliaries from Thrace and Thessaly.
General Afranius, who’d escaped from Spain to join Pompey, had come under
severe criticism from Pompey’s other generals for losing seven legions to
Caesar in Spain, despite the fact that he’d managed to bring thirty-five
hundred men of the 4th and the 6th with him to Greece, and he’d been given the
humble job of commanding the defenders of the camp, accompanied by Pompey’s
eldest son, Gnaeus, who was probably in his midtwenties at this point.
Young Gnaeus would have been hugely frustrated at being left
in the comparative safety of the camp, with the second-rate troops and
thousands of noncombatants. He’d proven his bravery and military skill when
he’d commanded the fleet from Egypt that had destroyed Caesar’s shipping along
the Adriatic coast during the winter. But his father was obviously anxious to
protect his son and heir. This act is indicative of the negative mind-set of
Pompey on the day of the battle. Forced to agree to the battle by his impatient
supporters at the meeting two days before, he still had little confidence in
most of his infantry.
According to both Plutarch and Appian, Pompey had been
awakened by a disturbance in his camp in the early hours of that morning: just
before the last change of watch, excited sentries had witnessed a fiery-tailed
meteor race across the sky from the direction of Caesar’s camp and disappear
beyond the hills behind their own. Once awake, Pompey confided to his staff
that he’d been dreaming he was adorning the temple of Venus the Victorious at
Rome. Julius Caesar’s family claimed descent from the goddess Venus, and
Pompey’s supporters were delighted by the dream, seeing it as an omen that
Pompey soon would be celebrating the defeat of Caesar. Pompey wasn’t so sure;
the dream could also be interpreted that he was saluting Caesar as victor.
Unbeknownst to Pompey, the previous evening Caesar had
issued as his army’s watchword, or password, for August 9, “Venus, Bringer of
Victory,” quite unaware that Pompey planned to bring on a battle next day.
A new watchword was issued every day in Roman military
camps. Polybius tells us the watchword was issued for the next twenty-four
hours by the commanding officer just before sunset. The tribune of the watch
then distributed it on wax sheets to his legion’s guard sergeants, who in turn
passed it on to the duty sentries in a strictly regulated process that required
the prompt return of the wax sheets. Anyone trying to enter a Roman camp
without knowing the watchword for the day was in trouble.
In battle, especially at times of civil war like this, with
both sides similarly equipped, as well as in night fights, a watchword was
often the only way to identify men from your own side. There are several
instances of watchwords being hurriedly changed just before a battle in case
deserters had passed on the latest watchword to the enemy overnight.
Watchwords could be a single word or a phrase. In imperial
times, the emperor always issued the watchword to the Praetorian Guard if he
was at Rome or to the army if he was in camp with them. Claudius frequently
gave lines from epic poems. Nero famously issued “The Best of Mothers” in honor
of the mother he later murdered. Dio and Seutonius say Caligula teased a
particularly macho Praetorian tribune who came to dread the days when it fell
to him to ask the emperor for the watchword; Caligula would call him a girl and
give him watchwords such as “Love” and “Venus”— goddess of love. Dio also says
that the night before Emperor Marcus Aurelius died in A.D. 180 he gave as the
next day’s watchword “Go to the Rising Sun, I Am Already Setting.”
On August 8, 48 B.C., Pompey the Great, knowing the new day
would bring the battle he’d been avoiding for a year and a half, had issued
“Hercules, the Unconquered” as his watchword for August 9. Like mighty
Hercules, Pompey had never been defeated in battle, and he was hoping it would
stay that way.
Now that the day had arrived, despite his misgivings, Pompey
made his troop dispositions with care. Marshaled by their centurions, the men
of his elite 1st Legion confidently took up their assigned positions as the
first heavy infantry unit on his left wing. Like Napoleon’s Imperial Guard
1,860 years later, the men of the 1st considered themselves the crème de la
crème of their general’s army. Yet, as Pompey knew, despite the 1st’s proud
record, most of the men of this enlistment of the legion had never been
involved in a major engagement.
Beside the 1st stood Caesar’s former 15th Legion. The men of
the 15th had six years’ experience behind them, four of those fighting for
Caesar in Gaul, and were probably Pompey’s best troops in terms of experience.
Since being given to Pompey by the Senate two years back, the legion had served
him without question. Caesar now refused to call it the 15th. Instead, being
rather petty, he would refer to it as the 3rd—because, it seems, the 15th came
from the same recruiting ground in Cisalpine Gaul as the 3rd, which was one of
Pompey’s legions that Caesar had captured in Spain and disbanded. But, deep in
his heart, Pompey must have wondered whether, when it came to the crunch, the
15th could be trusted, whether the legion’s old association with Caesar would
impact on its reliability in the heat of battle.
Next to the 15th stood two of the newly recruited legions
that Pompey had brought out of Italy the previous year, made up mostly of youths
in their late teens. This left-hand division of four legions came under the
command of General Domitius Ahenobarbus. This was the same General Domitius who
had lost Corfinium and Marseilles, but Pompey was a great respecter of rank,
and Domitius outranked just about everyone else in his party, so he’d been
given this command despite his past failings.
Pompey’s father-in-law, Scipio, held the middle of the line
with his two Italian legions, raised five years earlier, survivors of Carrhae
who had subsequently been stationed in Syria, plus the third of the new legions
made up of untried Italian recruits which had escaped from Brindisi with the
1st and the 15th.
Commanding the division on Pompey’s right wing, General
Lucius Lentulus, a consul the previous year, had long been a violent opponent
of Caesar and was a dependable commander. Pompey had stationed auxiliaries and
600 slingers all the way to the Enipeus River. The riverbanks dropped down
sharply to the Enipeus, like small cliffs, and couldn’t be scaled by either
infantry or cavalry, so Pompey knew that he couldn’t be outflanked on his
right, allowing him the luxury of leaving this wing without cavalry cover. The
veteran soldiers of the seven Spanish cohorts of the 4th Legion and the 6th
Legion that had escaped from Spain to join Pompey now held his right wing,
behind their own eagles but working together, facing their countrymen of Mark
Antony’s 8th and 9th across the wheat field, units that had been similarly
combined because of their lack of numbers.
Beside these Spanish cohorts stood the Gemina Legion, the
“twin,” so called by Pompey after he’d made up a single legion from two raised
in Italy by Cicero in 51 B.C., and taken by him to Cilicia when he was governor
there for a year, then left behind on garrison duty after he returned to Rome
in 50 B.C. The remaining cohorts of those two original legions were still
stationed in Cilicia. Between the Gemina Legion and Scipio’s troops, the
seventy-five hundred men of the 24th and 28th, the former Italian legions of
Gaius Antony that had come over to Pompey with Centurion Puleio and performed
well at Durrës, formed up behind two eagles. Caesar, stung by their defection,
would never refer to these two legions by name, simply calling them “some of
Gaius Antony’s old troops.”
Pompey had called up another two thousand men, retired
veterans who’d settled in Macedonia and on the island of Crete, originally
thinking of forming them into a separate legion; but they were no longer young
men and were out of practice, so he split them into cohorts and spread them
among his other units.
On paper, Pompey had 12 legions made up of 110 cohorts.
Caesar would have only considered several of these any threat—the 1st, 15th,
the Spanish cohorts of the 4th and 6th, perhaps the Gemina, and probably the
two battle-hardened Italian legions Scipio had brought from Syria. Pompey had
even less faith in these units than his opponent, and was pinning his hopes of
victory solely on his cavalry. He had told his supporters that the cavalry would
bring them victory before the infantry could even come to grips. This was
wishful thinking. Pompey dreaded the prospect of pitting his infantry against
Caesar’s, as he was certain his were not up to the task. So now all seven
thousand of his cavalry formed up on his left wing, ready to undertake the
tactical strike he had planned for them.
As Pompey and his staff prepared to take their position on
the left, behind the 1st and 15th Legions, he and General Labienus parted
company. Labienus rode to where his massed cavalry waited on Pompey’s far left
wing. He would not have been surprised to see the 10th Legion allocated to
Caesar’s right, facing him. He may have even thought that Caesar was becoming
predictable. But he would not have taken the 10th lightly. The 10th Legion was
by now universally considered, in the words of Plutarch, the stoutest of
Caesar’s legions. Labienus had personally led the 10th in Gaul, and he knew
what the Spanish legion was made of. Who could forget the day Labienus had sent
the 10th splashing back across the Sambre to save Caesar from the Nervii?
Overcome the 10th, he knew, and the rest of Caesar’s legions would be likely to
buckle. In fact, Plutarch tells us that Pompey’s cavalry were given the
explicit task of cutting off the 10th Legion from the rest of Caesar’s army and
destroying it.
Behind General Labienus spread his massive mounted force.
The twenty-seven hundred long-haired German and Gallic cavalrymen Labienus had
brought over to Pompey from Caesar’s army formed the core of his cavalry. Five
hundred Italian troopers had been brought up to Greece by sea by Gnaeus Pompey
from where they’d been stationed in Egypt as a part of the bodyguard of young
King Ptolemy XIII and his sister Cleopatra. King Deiotarus of Galatia had brought
Pompey six hundred cavalry. The remaining cavalrymen had been supplied by
various rulers from throughout the East, and both their quality and their
loyalty were questionable. The main responsibility for the success of the
operation lay with Labienus’s own men.
As had become his usual practice, Caesar had decided to
station himself on his right wing, usually the hottest place in any battle, the
place where victory and defeat were most decided. As he was moving to his
position, he saw Pompey’s cavalry spreading directly opposite, saw Pompey
himself on that wing, with six hundred slingers and three thousand auxiliary
archers from eastern states forming up behind him. Colonel Pollio and other
staff officers would have warned their commander that Pompey was aiming to outflank
him on the right, but Caesar had already seen the danger for himself. He
immediately devised a counter.
“Have one cohort taken from each of the legions in the third
line,” he instructed. “Form them into a fourth line, behind the Tenth, where
they are to await the order to charge the enemy’s cavalry.” He passed on a
particular tactic he wanted this fourth line to employ, then added that the
day’s victory would depend on their valor.
The exact number of men taken out of the third line for this
special reserve is debatable. The implication, from Caesar himself, is that
nine understrength cohorts were involved, one from each of his legions.
Plutarch says there were six cohorts, and both he and Appian say they totaled
3,000 men; but in their day six full-strength cohorts numbered close to 3,000
men—2,880, to be precise—and none of Caesar’s units was anywhere near
approaching full strength. It’s probable that about 2,000 men were actually
involved. From what Appian says, it’s likely that these men were ordered to lie
down to conceal their presence, in the same way the Duke of Wellington would,
at the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, order his Foot Guards to lie down behind a
ridge and await his signal to rise to the charge, a tactic that turned the
battle against Napoleon’s advancing Old Guard.
Now, as Centurion Crastinus stood with his men of the 10th
Legion in the front line, a familiar voice away to his right called him by
name.
“What hopes for victory, Gaius Crastinus? What grounds for
encouragement?”
This incident is recorded by several different classical
sources, including Caesar himself. The centurion’s head whipped around, to see
Caesar riding along the front line toward him accompanied by his staff
officers. “Victory will be yours, Caesar,” said Crastinus. According to
Plutarch, he reached out his right hand toward his general in a form of salute,
adding, “You will conquer gloriously today.”
Caesar would have smiled in response to the centurion’s
confident prediction and wished the men under Crastinus’s command good luck,
then spurred his horse on. In his memoirs he relates how several times he
stopped along the front line to give a short speech, moving on to repeat the
same sentiment several times, making separate reference to the glorious record
in his service of the individual legions in front of him, then adding, “My
soldiers, I call on you, every man, to witness the earnestness with which I
have sought peace up till now.” He went on to list the missions of various
peace envoys and his failed attempts to negotiate a settlement with Pompey,
then said, “It has never been my wish to expose my troops to bloodshed, nor to
deprive the state of this army or of that which stands across the field from us
today. But I have been given no choice.”
Then he issued his battle orders. The first two lines were
to charge on his signal. The third line was to wait for his flag to drop a
second time. Men of the front line were to let fly with their javelins as soon
as the enemy was within range, then quickly draw their swords and close with
the other side. Each time he gave his speech, it was met by a roar from the
legionaries within earshot.
Across the wheat field, Pompey the Great was doing the same,
pumping up his troops as he rode along their front line, with a speech he
likewise would repeat several times. At their council of war two days earlier
he’d told his officers that the battle they had all urged on him was at hand
and it was up to them to bring the victory they so eagerly sought. According to
Appian, he now told his troops, “We fight for freedom and for homeland, backed
by the constitution, our glorious reputation, and so many men of senatorial and
equestrian rank, against one man who would pirate supreme power.” He urged them
to picture their success at Durrës as they advanced to the battle they had been
demanding, with high hopes for a final victory. And here, too, the roar of
thousands of soldiers rent the air of the summer’s morning in response to their
general’s harangue.
As he returned to his position on the right wing, Caesar
passed Centurion Crastinus once again. “General,” Crastinus called out as he
went by, “today I shall earn your gratitude, either dead or alive.”
Caesar acknowledged him with a wave and cantered on. In
Caesar’s mind was probably the morning’s sacrifice to the gods, prior to
ordering his army to march, prior to Pompey inviting him to do battle, when the
priest conducting the ceremony had informed him that the entrails of the first
sacrificial goat indicated that within three days he would come to a decisive
action. A little later, the augur had added that if Caesar thought himself well
off now, he should expect worse, while if unhappy, he could hope for better.
With the departure to the rear of his commander in chief,
Crastinus would have fixed his gaze on the soldiers immediately opposite—men of
the 1st Legion, men from Cisalpine Gaul. He would have been glad of that, glad
the 10th wasn’t facing the 4th or the 6th. He would not have enjoyed killing
fellow Spaniards. But he’d killed plenty of Gauls in his time. He could kill
these fellows quite happily, even if they were Roman citizens.
