The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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Caesar and Pompeius Both Recalled
The vote which could no longer be delayed on Curio's proposal
at length took place, and exhibited the defeat of the party
of Pompeius and Cato in all its extent. By 370 votes against 20
the senate resolved that the proconsuls of Spain and Gaul
should both be called upon to resign their offices; and with boundless
joy the good burgesses of Rome heard the glad news of the saving
achievement of Curio. Pompeius was thus recalled by the senate
no less than Caesar, and while Caesar was ready to comply with
the command, Pompeius positively refused obedience. The presiding
consul Gaius Marcellus, cousin of Marcus Marcellus and like the latter
belonging to the Catonian party, addressed a severe lecture
to the servile majority; and it was, no doubt, vexatious
to be thus beaten in their own camp and beaten by means of a phalanx
of poltroons. But where was victory to come from under a leader,
who, instead of shortly and distinctly dictating his orders
to the senators, resorted in his old days a second time
to the instructions of a professor of rhetoric, that with eloquence
polished up afresh he might encounter the youthful vigour
and brilliant talents of Curio?
Declaration of War
The coalition, defeated in the senate, was in the most painful position.
The Catonian section had undertaken to push matters to a rupture
and to carry the senate along with them, and now saw their vessel
stranded after a most vexatious manner on the sandbanks of the indolent
majority. Their leaders had to listen in their conferences
to the bitterest reproaches from Pompeius; he pointed out
emphatically and with entire justice the dangers of the seeming peace;
and, though it depended on himself alone to cut the knot
by rapid action, his allies knew very well that they could never expect
this from him, and that it was for them, as they had promised,
to bring matters to a crisis. After the champions of the constitution
and of senatorial government had already declared the constitutional
rights of the burgesses and of the tribunes of the people
to be meaningless formalities,(22) they now found themselves
driven by necessity to treat the constitutional decision; of the senate
itself in a similar manner and, as the legitimate government
would not let itself be saved with its own consent, to save it
against its will. This was neither new nor accidental; Sulla(23)
and Lucullus(24) had been obliged to carry every energetic
resolution conceived by them in the true interest of the government
with a high hand irrespective of it, just as Cato and his friends
now proposed to do; the machinery of the constitution was in fact
utterly effete, and the senate was now--as the comitia had been
for centuries--nothing but a worn-out wheel slipping constantly
out of its track.
It was rumoured (Oct. 704) that Caesar had moved four legions
from Transalpine into Cisalpine Gaul and stationed them at Placentia.
This transference of troops was of itself within the prerogative
of the governor; Curio moreover palpably showed in the senate
the utter groundlessness of the rumour; and they by a majority
rejected the proposal of the consul Gaius Marcellus to give
Pompeius on the strength of it orders to march against Caesar.
Yet the said consul, in concert with the two consuls elected for 705
who likewise belonged to the Catonian party, proceeded to Pompeius,
and these three men by virtue of their own plenitude of power
requested the general to put himself at the head of the two legions
stationed at Capua, and to call the Italian militia to arms
at his discretion. A more informal authorization for the commencement
of a civil war can hardly be conceived; but people had no longer time
to attend to such secondary matters; Pompeius accepted it.
The military preparations, the levies began; in order personally
to forward them, Pompeius left the capital in December 704.
The Ultimatum of Caesar
Caesar had completely attained the object of devolving
the initiative of civil war on his opponents. He had, while himself
keeping on legal ground, compelled Pompeius to declare war,
and to declare it not as representative of the legitimate authority,
but as general of an openly revolutionary minority of the senate
which overawed the majority. This result was not to be reckoned
of slight importance, although the instinct of the masses could not
and did not deceive itself for a moment as to the fact that the war
concerned other things than questions of formal law. Now, when war
was declared, it was Caesar's interest to strike a blow as soon
as possible. The preparations of his opponents were just beginning
and even the capital was not occupied. In ten or twelve days
an army three times as strong as the troops of Caesar
that were in Upper Italy could be collected at Rome; but still
it was not impossible to surprise the city undefended, or even perhaps
by a rapid winter campaign to seize all Italy, and to shut off
the best resources of his opponents before they could make them available.
The sagacious and energetic Curio, who after resigning his tribunate
(10 Dec. 704) had immediately gone to Caesar at Ravenna,
vividly represented the state of things to his master;
and it hardly needed such a representation to convince Caesar
that longer delay now could only be injurious. But, as he with the view
of not giving his antagonists occasion to complain had hitherto
brought no troops to Ravenna itself, he could for the present do nothing
but despatch orders to his whole force to set out with all haste;
and he had to wait till at least the one legion stationed in Upper Italy
reached Ravenna. Meanwhile he sent an ultimatum to Rome,
which, if useful for nothing else, by its extreme submissiveness
still farther compromised his opponents in public opinion,
and perhaps even, as he seemed himself to hesitate, induced them
to prosecute more remissly their preparations against him.
In this ultimatum Caesar dropped all the counter-demands
which he formerly made on Pompeius, and offered on his own part
both to resign the governorship of Transalpine Gaul, and to dismiss
eight of the ten legions belonging to him, at the term fixed
by the senate; he declared himself content, if the senate would leave him
either the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyria with one,
or that of Cisalpine Gaul alone with two, legions, not, forsooth,
up to his investiture with the consulship, but till after the close
of the consular elections for 706. He thus consented to those proposals
of accommodation, with which at the beginning of the discussions
the senatorial party and even Pompeius himself had declared
that they would be satisfied, and showed himself ready to remain
in a private position from his election to the consulate down to
his entering on office. Whether Caesar was in earnest with these
astonishing concessions and had confidence that he should be able
to carry through his game against Pompeius even after granting
so much, or whether he reckoned that those on the other side
had already gone too far to find in these proposals of compromise
more than a proof that Caesar regarded his cause itself as lost,
can no longer be with certainty determined. The probability is,
that Caesar committed the fault of playing a too bold game, far worse
rather than the fault of promising something which he was not minded
to perform; and that, if strangely enough his proposals had been
accepted, he would have made good his word.
Last Debate in the Senate
Curio undertook once more to represent his master in the lion's den.
In three days he made the journey from Ravenna to Rome.
When the new consuls Lucius Lentulus and Gaius Marcellus the younger(25)
assembled the senate for the first time on 1 Jan. 705, he delivered
in a full meeting the letter addressed by the general to the senate.
The tribunes of the people, Marcus Antonius well known
in the chronicle of scandal of the city as the intimate friend
of Curio and his accomplice in all his follies, but at the same time
known from the Egyptian and Gallic campaigns as a brilliant cavalry
officer, and Quintus Cassius, Pompeius' former quaestor,--the two,
who were now in Curio's stead managing the cause of Caesar in Rome--
insisted on the immediate reading of the despatch. The grave
and clear words in which Caesar set forth the imminence of civil war,
the general wish for peace, the arrogance of Pompeius, and his own
yielding disposition, with all the irresistible force of truth;
the proposals for a compromise, of a moderation which doubtless
surprised his own partisans; the distinct declaration that this was
the last time that he should offer his hand for peace--
made the deepest impression. In spite of the dread inspired
by the numerous soldiers of Pompeius who flocked into the capital,
the sentiment of the majority was not doubtful; the consuls could not
venture to let it find expression. Respecting the proposal renewed
by Caesar that both generals might be enjoined to resign their commands
simultaneously, respecting all the projects of accommodation
suggested by his letter, and respecting the proposal made
by Marcus Coelius Rufus and Marcus Calidius that Pompeius
should be urged immediately to depart for Spain, the consuls refused--
as they in the capacity of presiding officers were entitled to do--
to let a vote take place. Even the proposal of one of their
most decided partisans who was simply not so blind to the military
position of affairs as his party, Marcus Marcellus--to defer
the determination till the Italian levy en masse could be under arms
and could protect the senate--was not allowed to be brought to a vote.
Pompeius caused it to be declared through his usual organ,
Quintus Scipio, that he was resolved to take up the cause of the senate
now or never, and that he would let it drop if they longer delayed.
The consul Lentulus said in plain terms that even the decree
of the senate was no longer of consequence, and that, if it
should persevere in its servility, he would act of himself
and with his powerful friends take the farther steps necessary.
Thus overawed, the majority decreed what was commanded--
that Caesar should at a definite and not distant day give up
Transalpine Gaul to Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, and Cisalpine Gaul
to Marcus Servilius Nonianus, and should dismiss his army,
failing which he should be esteemed a traitor. When the tribunes
of Caesar's party made use of their right of veto against this resolution,
not only were they, as they at least asserted, threatened
in the senate-house itself by the swords of Pompeian soldiers,
and forced, in order to save their lives, to flee in slaves'
clothing from the capital; but the now sufficiently overawed senate
treated their formally quite constitutional interference
as an attempt at revolution, declared the country in danger,
and in the usual forms called the whole burgesses to take up arms,
and all magistrates faithful to the constitution to place themselves
at the head of the armed (7 Jan. 705).
Caesar Marches into Italy
Now it was enough. When Caesar was informed by the tribunes
who had fled to his camp entreating protection as to the reception
which his proposals had met with in the capital, he called together
the soldiers of the thirteenth legion, which had meanwhile arrived
from its cantonments near Tergeste (Trieste) at Ravenna,
and unfolded before them the state of things. It was not merely
the man of genius versed in the knowledge and skilled in the control
of men's hearts, whose brilliant eloquence shone forth and glowed
in this agitating crisis of his own and the world's destiny;
nor merely the generous commander-in-chief and the victorious general,
addressing soldiers, who had been called by himself to arms
and for eight years had followed his banners with daily-increasing
enthusiasm. There spoke, above all, the energetic and consistent
statesman, who had now for nine-and-twenty years defended
the cause of freedom in good and evil times; who had braved for it
the daggers of assassins and the executioners of the aristocracy,
the swords of the Germans and the waves of the unknown ocean,
without ever yielding or wavering; who had torn to pieces
the Sullan constitution, had overthrown the rule of the senate,
and had furnished the defenceless and unarmed democracy with protection
and with arms by means of the struggle beyond the Alps. And he spoke,
not to the Clodian public whose republican enthusiasm had been
long burnt down to ashes and dross, but to the young men from the towns
and villages of Northern Italy, who still felt freshly and purely
the mighty influence of the thought of civic freedom; who were still
capable of fighting and of dying for ideals; who had themselves
received for their country in a revolutionary way from Caesar
the burgess-rights which the government refused to them;
whom Caesar's fall would leave once more at the mercy of the -fasces-,
and who already possessed practical proofs(26) of the inexorable use
which the oligarchy proposed to make of these against the Transpadanes.
Such were the listeners before whom such an orator set forth the facts--
the thanks for the conquest of Gaul which the nobility were preparing
for the general and his army; the contemptuous setting aside
of the comitia; the overawing of the senate; the sacred duty
of protecting with armed hand the tribunate of the people wrested
five hundred years ago by their fathers arms in hand from the nobility,
and of keeping the ancient oath which these had taken for themselves
as for their children's children that they would man by man stand firm
even to death for the tribunes of the people.(27) And then, when he--
the leader and general of the popular party--summoned the soldiers
of the people, now that conciliatory means had been exhausted
and concession had reached its utmost limits, to follow him in the last,
the inevitable, the decisive struggle against the equally hated
and despised, equally perfidious and incapable, and in fact ludicrously
incorrigible aristocracy--there was not an officer or a soldier
who could hold back. The order was given for departure; at the head
of his vanguard Caesar crossed the narrow brook which separated
his province from Italy, and which the constitution forbade
the proconsul of Gaul to pass. When after nine years' absence
he trod once more the soil of his native land, he trod at the same time
the path of revolution. "The die was cast."
Chapter X
Brundisium, Ilerda, Pharsalus, and Thapsus
The Resources on Either Side
Arms were thus to decide which of the two men who had hitherto
jointly ruled Rome was now to be its first sole ruler. Let us see
what were the comparative resources at the disposal of Caesar
and Pompeius for the waging of the impending war.
Caesar's Absolute Power within His Party
Caesar's power rested primarily on the wholly unlimited authority
which he enjoyed within his party. If the ideas of democracy
and of monarchy met together in it, this was not the result
of a coalition which had been accidentally entered into and might be
accidentally dissolved; on the contrary it was involved
in the very essence of a democracy without a representative constitution,
that democracy and monarchy should find in Caesar at once their highest
and ultimate expression. In political as in military matters
throughout the first and the final decision lay with Caesar.
However high the honour in which he held any serviceable instrument,
it remained an instrument still; Caesar stood, in his own party
without confederates, surrounded only by military-political
adjutants, who as a rule had risen from the army and as soldiers
were trained never to ask the reason and purpose of any thing,
but unconditionally to obey. On this account especially,
at the decisive moment when the civil war began, of all the officers
and soldiers of Caesar one alone refused him obedience;
and the circumstance that that one was precisely the foremost
of them all, serves simply to confirm this view of the relation
of Caesar to his adherents.
Labienus
Titus Labienus had shared with Caesar all the troubles of the dark times
of Catilina(1) as well as all the lustre of the Gallic career of victory,
had regularly held independent command, and frequently led half the army;
as he was the oldest, ablest, and most faithful of Caesar's adjutants,
he was beyond question also highest in position and highest in honour.
As late as in 704 Caesar had entrusted to him the supreme command
in Cisalpine Gaul, in order partly to put this confidential post
into safe hands, partly to forward the views of Labienus in his canvass
for the consulship. But from this very position Labienus entered
into communication with the opposite party, resorted at the beginning
of hostilities in 705 to the headquarters of Pompeius instead of those
of Caesar, and fought through the whole civil strife with unparalleled
bitterness against his old friend and master in war. We are not
sufficiently informed either as to the character of Labienus
or as to the special circumstances of his changing sides;
but in the main his case certainly presents nothing but a further proof
of the fact, that a military chief can reckon far more surely
on his captains than on his marshals. To all appearance Labienus
was one of those persons who combine with military efficiency
utter incapacity as statesmen, and who in consequence, if they
unhappily choose or are compelled to take part in politics, are exposed
to those strange paroxysms of giddiness, of which the history
of Napoleon's marshals supplies so many tragi-comic examples.
He may probably have held himself entitled to rank alongside of Caesar
as the second chief of the democracy; and the rejection of this claim
of his may have sent him over to the camp of his opponents.
His case rendered for the first time apparent the whole gravity
of the evil, that Caesar's treatment of his officers as adjutants
without independence admitted of the rise of no men fitted to undertake
a separate command in his camp, while at the same time he stood
urgently in need of such men amidst the diffusion--which might easily
be foreseen--of the impending struggle through all the provinces
of the wide empire. But this disadvantage was far outweighed
by that unity in the supreme leadership, which was the primary condition
of all success, and a condition only to be preserved at such a cost.
Caesar's Army
This unity of leadership acquired its full power through the efficiency
of its instruments. Here the army comes, first of all, into view.
It still numbered nine legions of infantry or at the most
50,000 men, all of whom however had faced the enemy and two-thirds
had served in all the campaigns against the Celts. The cavalry
consisted of German and Noric mercenaries, whose usefulness
and trustworthiness had been proved in the war against Vercingetorix.
The eight years' warfare, full of varied vicissitudes,
against the Celtic nation--which was brave, although in a military
point of view decidedly inferior to the Italian--had given Caesar
the opportunity of organizing his army as he alone knew
how to organize it. The whole efficiency of the soldier
presupposes physical vigour; in Caesar's levies more regard was had
to the strength and activity of the recruits than to their means
or their morals. But the serviceableness of an army, like that
of any other machine, depends above all on the ease and quickness
of its movements; the soldiers of Caesar attained a perfection
rarely reached and probably never surpassed in their readiness
for immediate departure at any time, and in the rapidity
of their marching. Courage, of course, was valued above everything;
Caesar practised with unrivalled mastery the art of stimulating
martial emulation and the esprit de corps, so that the pre-eminence
accorded to particular soldiers and divisions appeared even to those
who were postponed as the necessary hierarchy of valour.
He weaned his men from fear by not unfrequently--where it could be done
without serious danger--keeping his soldiers in ignorance
of an approaching conflict, and allowing them to encounter
the enemy unexpectedly. But obedience was on a parity with valour.
The soldier was required to do what he was bidden, without asking
the reason or the object; many an aimless fatigue was imposed on him
solely as a training in the difficult art of blind obedience.
The discipline was strict but not harassing; it was exercised
with unrelenting vigour when the soldier was in presence of the enemy;
at other times, especially after victory, the reins were relaxed,
and if an otherwise efficient soldier was then pleased to indulge
in perfumery or to deck himself with elegant arms and the like,
or even if he allowed himself to be guilty of outrages
or irregularities of a very questionable kind, provided only
his military duties were not immediately affected, the foolery
and the crime were allowed to pass, and the general lent a deaf ear
to the complaints of the provincials on such points. Mutiny
on the other hand was never pardoned, either in the instigators,
or even in the guilty corps itself.
But the true soldier ought to be not merely capable, brave,
and obedient, he ought to be all this willingly and spontaneously;
and it is the privilege of gifted natures alone to induce the animated
machine which they govern to a joyful service by means of example
and of hope, and especially by the consciousness of being turned
to befitting use. As the officer, who would demand valour
from his troops, must himself have looked danger in the face with them,
Caesar had even when general found opportunity of drawing his sword
and had then used it like the best; in activity, moreover,
and fatigue he was constantly far more exacting from himself
than from his soldiers. Caesar took care that victory, which primarily
no doubt brings gain to the general, should be associated also
with personal hopes in the minds of the soldiers. We have already
mentioned that he knew how to render his soldiers enthusiastic
for the cause of the democracy, so far as the times which had become
prosaic still admitted of enthusiasm, and that the political equalization
of the Transpadane country--the native land of most of his soldiers--
with Italy proper was set forth as one of the objects of the struggle.(2)
Of course material recompenses were at the same time not wanting--
as well special rewards for distinguished feats of arms as general
rewards for every efficient soldier; the officers had their portions,
the soldiers received presents, and the most lavish gifts were placed
in prospect for the triumph.
Above all things Caesar as a true commander understood
how to awaken in every single component element, large or small,
of the mighty machine the consciousness of its befitting application.
The ordinary man is destined for service, and he has no objection
to be an instrument, if he feels that a master guides him. Everywhere
and at all times the eagle eye of the general rested on the whole army,
rewarding and punishing with impartial justice, and directing
the action of each towards the course conducive to the good of all:
so that there was no experimenting or trifling with the sweat and blood
of the humblest, but for that very reason, where it was necessary,
unconditional devotion even to death was required. Without allowing
each individual to see into the whole springs of action,
Caesar yet allowed each to catch such glimpses of the political
and military connection of things as to secure that he should
be recognized--and it may be idealized--by the soldiers
as a statesman and a general. He treated his soldiers throughout,
not as his equals, but as men who are entitled to demand and were able
to endure the truth, and who had to put faith in the promises
and the assurances of their general, without thinking of deception
or listening to rumours; as comrades through long years in warfare
and victory, among whom there was hardly any one that was not known
to him by name and that in the course of so many campaigns
had not formed more or less of a personal relation to the general;
as good companions, with whom he talked and dealt confidentially
and with the cheerful elasticity peculiar to him; as clients,
to requite whose services, and to avenge whose wrongs and death,
constituted in his view a sacred duty. Perhaps there never was an army
which was so perfectly what an army ought to be--a machine able
for its ends and willing for its ends, in the hand of a master,
who transfers to it his own elasticity. Caesar's soldiers were,
and felt themselves, a match for a tenfold superior force;
in connection with which it should not be overlooked, that under
the Roman tactics--calculated altogether for hand-to-hand conflict
and especially for combat with the sword--the practised Roman soldier
was superior to the novice in a far higher degree than is now the case
under the circumstances of modern times.(3) But still more
than by the superiority of valour the adversaries of Caesar
felt themselves humbled by the unchangeable and touching fidelity
with which his soldiers clung to their general. It is perhaps
without a parallel in history, that when the general summoned
his soldiers to follow him into the civil war, with the single exception
already mentioned of Labienus, no Roman officer and no Roman soldier
deserted him. The hopes of his opponents as to an extensive
desertion were thwarted as ignominiously as the former attempts
to break up his army like that of Lucullus.(4) Labienus himself
appeared in the camp of Pompeius with a band doubtless of Celtic
and German horsemen but without a single legionary. Indeed
the soldiers, as if they would show that the war was quite as much
their matter as that of their general, settled among themselves
that they would give credit for the pay, which Caesar had promised
to double for them at the outbreak of the civil war, to their commander
up to its termination, and would meanwhile support their poorer comrades
from the general means; besides, every subaltern officer
equipped and paid a trooper out of his own purse.