Dictator

Afranius drew his sword and declared in a trembling voice that no man would ever call him a coward, not even Cato. There might have been serious bloodshed if the two had not been jostled away from one another.

Cicero said to me later that of all the clever strokes that Caesar pulled, perhaps the most brilliant was his policy of clemency. It was, in a curious way, akin to sending home the garrison of Uxellodunum with their hands cut off. These proud men were humbled, neutered; they crept back to their astonished comrades as living emblems of Caesar’s power. And by their very presence they lowered morale across the entire army, for how could Pompey persuade his soldiers to fight to the death when they knew that if it came to it they could lay down their arms and return to their families?

Pompey called a council of war to discuss the crisis, consisting of the leaders of the army and of the Senate. Cicero, who was still officially the governor of Cilicia, naturally attended, and was accompanied to the temple by his lictors. He tried to take Quintus in with him but he was barred at the door by Pompey’s aide-de-camp, and much to his fury and embarrassment Quintus had to stay outside with me. Among those I watched going in were Afranius, whose conduct in Spain Pompey staunchly defended; Domitius Ahenobarbus, who had managed to escape from Massilia when Caesar besieged it and now saw traitors wherever he looked; Titus Labienus, an old ally of Pompey’s who had served as Caesar’s second in command in Gaul but had refused to follow his chief across the Rubicon; Marcus Bibulus, Caesar’s former consular colleague, now admiral of the Senate’s huge fleet of five hundred warships; Cato, who had been promised command of the fleet until Pompey decided it would not be wise to give so fractious a colleague so much power; and Marcus Junius Brutus, who was only thirty-six and Cato’s nephew, but whose arrival was said to have given more joy to Pompey than anyone else’s, because Pompey had killed Brutus’s father back in Sulla’s time and there had been a blood feud ever since.

Pompey, according to Cicero, exuded confidence. He had lost weight, had put himself on an exercise regime, and looked a full decade younger than he had in Italy. He dismissed the loss of Spain as inconsequential, a sideshow. ‘Listen to me, gentlemen; listen to what I have always said: this war will be won at sea.’ According to Pompey’s spies in Brundisium, Caesar had less than half the number of ships that the Senate possessed. It was purely a question of mathematics: Caesar did not have sufficient troop transports to break out of Italy in anything like the strength he would need to confront Pompey’s legions; therefore he was trapped. ‘We have him where we want him, and when we are ready we shall take him. From now on, this war will be fought on my terms and according to my timetable.’

It must have been about three months after this, in the middle of the night, that we were roused by a furious hammering on the door. We gathered bleary-eyed in the tablinum, where the lictors were waiting with an officer from Pompey’s headquarters. Caesar’s forces had landed four days earlier on the coast of Illyricum, near Dyrrachium; Pompey had ordered the entire army to begin moving out at dawn to confront them. It would be a march of three hundred miles.

Cicero said, ‘Is Caesar with his army?’

‘So we believe.’

Quintus said, ‘But I thought he was in Spain.’

‘Indeed he was in Spain,’ replied Cicero drily, ‘but apparently now he’s here. How strange: I seem to remember being categorically assured that such a thing was impossible because he didn’t have sufficient ships.’

At daybreak we went up to the Egnatian Gate to see if we could discover any more. The ground was vibrating with the weight of the military traffic on the road – a vast column was passing through the town, forty thousand men in all. I was told it stretched for thirty miles, although of course we could only see a fraction of it – the legionaries on foot carrying their heavy packs, the cavalrymen with their javelins glinting, the forest of standards and eagles all bearing the thrilling legend ‘SPQR’ (‘The Senate and People of Rome’), trumpeters and cornet players, archers, slingers, artillerymen, slaves, cooks, scribes, doctors, carts full of baggage, pack mules laden with tents and tools and food and weapons, horses and oxen dragging crossbows and ballistae.