Augustus

Brutus and the freedom fighters were extremely reluctant to commence hostilities; they issued manifestos in which they declared that, “for the sake of ensuring harmony in the Republic, they were even willing to live in permanent exile, they would furnish no grounds for civil war.” But Octavian’s second march on Rome, the Triumvirate, and, finally, the proscription persuaded them that peace was no longer an option.

At present, the joint power of Antony and Octavian was too great for Brutus. So he turned away and marched eastward to join forces with Cassius, to recruit more men, and to raise money for the legions’ wages. Cassius also wanted to secure their rear by eliminating potential enemies, such as the island of Rhodes with its powerful fleet.

After draining the east of its human and financial resources, the freedom fighters finally felt ready to march against the triumvirs.

Thrace, a largely ungoverned territory to the east of Greece and Macedonia, stretched up to the river Danube and along to the town of Byzantium and the Hellespont. In today’s topography it covered northeastern Greece, southern Bulgaria, and European Turkey. It was hot, mountainous, and heavily forested.

The territory’s inhabitants were fierce and warlike tribes who formed separate little kingdoms. Greek colonists founded city-states on the coastline, exploited the area’s deposits of gold and silver, and recruited Thracian soldiers, but, by and large, they left the Thracians to themselves in their uncultivated hinterland.

These were the lands over which the Romans established a shaky and uneven dominance from the second century onward and made into a province in 46 B.C. Through it they drove the Via Egnatia, the great highway that led from the Adriatic Sea to Byzantium and the provinces of Asia Minor. At the road’s eastern end stood the town of Philippi, named after Philip of Macedon, who had rebuilt it as a strongpoint against the Thracian tribes. Well supplied with springs, it occupied a precipitous ridge, which Philip ringed with walls. Not far west of Philippi was the Hill of Dionysus, with a gold mine called the Refuges. Just over a mile beyond this, and a couple of miles from the town, two hills flanked the road on either side.

Wooded high ground fell away down to the northern edge of the town, while to the south a marsh stretched eight miles or so to the coast. The Via Egnatia skirted the marsh and continued across a mountain pass called the Symbolon, or Junction, to the small port of Neapolis, a rocky headland with a spacious harbor. A few miles out to sea lay the island of Thasos.

Here was the place where the two largest Roman armies that had ever faced each other in battle were to meet. The triumvirs controlled forty-three legions (more than two hundred thousand men if they were up to strength). However, strong forces had to be stationed in the west, especially in northern Italy and Gaul, to prevent unrest. Octavian and Antony deployed twenty-one or twenty-two legions (perhaps a hundred thousand men) and thirteen thousand cavalry for their encounter with Brutus and Cassius. In principle, the two sides were fairly evenly matched, for the freedom fighters led an army of nineteen legions (say, about seventy thousand men) and twenty thousand foreign cavalry including some Parthian mounted archers; but the opposing generals were all aware of the potentially significant fact that many of these men had served under Julius Caesar and probably remembered him with affection.

Militarily, Antony, who had served with Caesar during the Gallic Wars, was by far the ablest soldier of the Triumvirate and, we may assume, was in charge of planning the campaign. His first task was to prevent Brutus and Cassius from taking over Greece and bringing their fleet into the Adriatic before he had had a chance to transport his forces there and establish himself. So he sent across the Adriatic Sea an advance guard, which marched down the Via Egnatia past Philippi and through the Symbolon, until it reached two further passes that provided the only known routes to Asia. But this force was quickly outflanked and compelled to retire.

Brutus and Cassius moved on to Philippi and were delighted by what they found there. The two hills in front of the town on either side of the road, flanked by woods on their right and the marsh on their left, made a very strong defensive position. Here they would stand and wait for the triumvirs.

The two generals built a fortified camp on each hill, connected by a palisade. Their strategy was to deny Antony a set-piece battle. He would have to maintain long supply lines across Greece, and transport from Italy would be halted, or at least harried, by the republican navy, which would blockade the seaways. It would not be long before he and Octavian were short of food. Eventually they would simply have to retreat—but where to, if the escape route by sea to Italy was barred?