The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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Caesar Proceeds to Africa
Conflict at Ruspina
This mutiny operated injuriously on the African campaign,
at least in so far as it considerably delayed the commencement of it.
When Caesar arrived at the port of Lilybaeum destined for the embarkation
the ten legions intended for Africa werefar from being
fully assembled there, and it was the experienced troops
that were farthest behind. Hardly however had six legions,
of which five were newly formed, arrived there and the necessary
war-vessels and transports come forward, when Caesar put to sea with them
(25 Dec. 707 of the uncorrected, about 8 Oct. of the Julian, calendar).
The enemy's fleet, which on account of the prevailing equinoctial gales
was drawn up on the beach at the island Aegimurus in front of the bay
of Carthage, did not oppose the passage; but, the same storms scattered
the fleet of Caesar in all directions, and, when he availed himself
of the opportunity of landing not far from Hadrumetum (Susa),
he could not disembark more than some 3000 men, mostly recruits,
and 150 horsemen. His attempt to capture Hadrumetum strongly occupied
by the enemy miscarried; but Caesar possessed himself of the two seaports
not far distant from each other, Ruspina (Monastir near Susa)
and Little Leptis. Here he entrenched himself; but his position
was so insecure, that he kept his cavalry in the ships and the ships
ready for sea and provided with a supply of water, in order to re-embark
at any moment if he should be attacked by a superior force.
This however was not necessary, for just at the right time the ships
that had been driven out of their course arrived (3 Jan. 708).
On the very following day Caesar, whose army in consequence
of the arrangements made by the Pompeians suffered from want of corn,
undertook with three legions an expedition into the interior
of the country, but was attacked on the march not far from Ruspina
by the corps which Labienus had brought up to dislodge Caesar
from the coast. As Labienus had exclusively cavalry and archers,
and Caesar almost nothing but infantry of the line, the legions
were quickly surrounded and exposed to the missiles of the enemy,
without being able to retaliate or to attack with success. No doubt
the deploying of the entire line relieved once more the flanks,
and spirited charges saved the honour of their arms; but a retreat
was unavoidable, and had Ruspina not been so near, the Moorish javelin
would perhaps have accomplished the same result here
as the Parthian bow at Carrhae.
Caesar's Position at Ruspina
Caesar, whom this day had fully convinced of the difficulty
of the impending war, would not again expose his soldiers untried
and discouraged by the new mode of fighting to any such attack,
but awaited the arrival of his veteran legions. The interval
was employed in providing some sort of compensation against
the crushing superiority of the enemy in the weapons of distant warfare.
The incorporation of the suitable men from the fleet as light horsemen
or archers in the land-army could not be of much avail. The diversions
which Caesar suggested were somewhat more effectual. He succeeded
in bringing into arms against Juba the Gaetulian pastoral tribes
wandering on the southern slope of the great Atlas towards the Sahara;
for the blows of the Marian and Sullan period had reached even to them,
and their indignation against Pompeius, who had at that time made them
subordinate to the Numidian kings,(48) rendered them from the outset
favourably inclined to the heir of the mighty Marius of whose Jugurthine
campaign they had still a lively recollection. The Mauretanian kings,
Bogud in Tingis and Bocchus in Iol, were Juba's natural rivals
and to a certain extent long since in alliance with Caesar.
Further, there still roamed in the border-region between the kingdoms
of Juba and Bocchus the last of the Catilinarians, that Publius Sittius
of Nuceria,(49) who eighteen years before had become converted
from a bankrupt Italian merchant into a Mauretanian leader
of free bands, and since that time had procured for himself
a name and a body of retainers amidst the Libyan quarrels.
Bocchus and Sittius united fell on the Numidian land, and occupied
the important town of Cirta; and their attack, as well as
that of the Gaetulians, compelled king Juba to send a portion
of his troops to his southern and western frontiers.
Caesar's situation, however, continued sufficiently unpleasant.
His army was crowded together within a space of six square miles;
though the fleet conveyed corn, the want of forage was as much felt
by Caesar's cavalry as by those of Pompeius before Dyrrhachium.
The light troops of the enemy remained notwithstanding all the exertions
of Caesar so immeasurably superior to his, that it seemed almost
impossible to carry offensive operations into the interior
even with veterans. If Scipio retired and abandoned the coast towns,
he might perhaps achieve a victory like those which the vizier of Orodes
had won over Crassus and Juba over Curio, and he could at least
endlessly protract the war. The simplest consideration suggested
this plan of campaign; even Cato, although far from a strategist,
counselled its adoption, and offered at the same time to cross
with a corps to Italy and to call the republicans there to arms--
which, amidst the utter confusion in that quarter, might very well
meet with success. But Cato could only advise, not command; Scipio
the commander-in-chief decided that the war should be carried on
in the region of the coast. This was a blunder, not merely inasmuch as
they thereby dropped a plan of war promising a sure result, but also
inasmuch as the region to which they transferred the war was in dangerous
agitation, and a good part of the army which they opposed to Caesar
was likewise in a troublesome temper. The fearfully strict levy,
the carrying off of the supplies, the devastating of the smaller
townships, the feeling in general that they were being sacrificed
for a cause which from the outset was foreign to them
and was already lost, had exasperated the native population against
the Roman republicans fighting out their last struggle of despair
on African soil; and the terrorist proceedings of the latter against
all communities that were but suspected of indifference,(50)
had raised this exasperation to the most fearful hatred.
The African towns declared, wherever they could venture to do so,
for Caesar; among the Gaetulians and the Libyans, who served in numbers
among the light troops and even in the legions, desertion was spreading.
But Scipio with all the obstinacy characteristic of folly persevered
in his plan, marched with all his force from Utica to appear
before the towns of Ruspina and Little Leptis occupied by Caesar,
furnished Hadrumetum to the north and Thapsus to the south
(on the promontory Ras Dimas) with strong garrisons, and in concert
with Juba, who likewise appeared before Ruspina with all his troops
not required by the defence of the frontier, offered battle repeatedly
to the enemy. But Caesar was resolved to wait for his veteran legions.
As these one after another arrived and appeared on the scene
of strife, Scipio and Juba lost the desire to risk a pitched battle,
and Caesar had no means of compelling them to fight owing
to their extraordinary superiority in light cavalry. Nearly two months
passed away in marches and skirmishes in the neighbourhood
of Ruspina and Thapsus, which chiefly had relation to the finding out
of the concealed store-pits (silos) common in the country,
and to the extension of posts. Caesar, compelled by the enemy's
horsemen to keep as much as possible to the heights or even to cover
his flanks by entrenched lines, yet accustomed his soldiers
gradually during this laborious and apparently endless warfare
to the foreign mode of fighting. Friend and foe hardly recognized
the rapid general in the cautious master of fence who trained his men
carefully and not unfrequently in person; and they became almost puzzled
by the masterly skill which displayed itself as conspicuously
in delay as in promptitude of action.
Battle at Thapsus
At last Caesar, after being joined by his last reinforcements,
made a lateral movement towards Thapsus. Scipio had, as we have said,
strongly garrisoned this town, and thereby committed the blunder
of presenting to his opponent an object of attack easy to be seized;
to this first error he soon added the second still less excusable
blunder of now for the rescue of Thapsus giving the battle,
which Caesar had wished and Scipio had hitherto rightly refused,
on ground which placed the decision in the hands of the infantry
of the line. Immediately along the shore, opposite to Caesar's camp,
the legions of Scipio and Juba appeared, the fore ranks ready
for fighting, the hinder ranks occupied in forming an entrenched camp;
at the same time the garrison of Thapsus prepared for a sally.
Caesar's camp-guard sufficed to repulse the latter. His legions,
accustomed to war, already forming a correct estimate of the enemy
from the want of precision in their mode of array and their
ill-closed ranks, compelled--while yet the entrenching was going forward
on that side, and before even the general gave the signal--
a trumpeter to sound for the attack, and advanced along the whole line
headed by Caesar himself, who, when he saw his men advance
without waiting for his orders, galloped forward to lead them
against the enemy. The right wing, in advance of the other divisions,
frightened the line of elephants opposed to it--this was
the last great battle in which these animals were employed--
by throwing bullets and arrows, so that they wheeled round
on their own ranks. The covering force was cut down, the left wing
of the enemy was broken, and the whole line was overthrown.
The defeat was the more destructive, as the new camp of the beaten army
was not yet ready, and the old one was at a considerable distance;
both were successively captured almost without resistance. The mass
of the defeated army threw away their arms and sued for quarter;
but Caesar's soldiers were no longer the same who had readily refrained
from battle before Ilerda and honourably spared the defenceless
at Pharsalus. The habit of civil war and the rancour left behind
by the mutiny asserted their power in a terrible manner
on the battlefield of Thapsus. If the hydra with which they fought
always put forth new energies, if the army was hurried from Italy
to Spain, from Spain to Macedonia, from Macedonia to Africa, and if
the repose ever more eagerly longed for never came, the soldier sought,
and not wholly without cause, the reason of this state of things
in the unseasonable clemency of Caesar. He had sworn to retrieve
the general's neglect, and remained deaf to the entreaties
of his disarmed fellow-citizens as well as to the commands of Caesar
and the superior officers. The fifty thousand corpses that covered
the battle-field of Thapsus, among whom were several Caesarian officers
known as secret opponents of the new monarchy, and therefore
cut down on this occasion by their own men, showed how the soldier
procures for himself repose. The victorious army on the other hand
numbered no more than fifty dead (6 April 708).
Cato in Utica
His Death
There was as little a continuance of the struggle in Africa
after the battle of Thapsus, as there had been a year and a half before
in the east after the defeat of Pharsalus. Cato as commandant
of Utica convoked the senate, set forth how the means of defence stood,
and submitted it to the decision of those assembled whether
they would yield or defend themselves to the last man--
only adjuring them to resolve and to act not each one for himself,
but all in unison. The more courageous view found several supporters;
it was proposed to manumit on behalf of the state the slaves
capable of arms, which however Cato rejected as an illegal encroachment
on private property, and suggested in its stead a patriotic appeal
to the slave-owners. But soon this fit of resolution in an assembly
consisting in great part of African merchants passed off, and they agreed
to capitulate. Thereupon when Faustus Sulla, son of the regent,
and Lucius Afranius arrived in Utica with a strong division
of cavalry from the field of battle, Cato still made an attempt
to hold the town through them; but he indignantly rejected their demand
to let them first of all put to death the untrustworthy citizens of Utica
en masse, and chose to let the last stronghold of the republicans fall
into the hands of the monarch without resistance rather than to profane
the last moments of the republic by such a massacre. After he had--
partly by his authority, partly by liberal largesses--checked so far
as he could the fury of the soldiery against the unfortunate Uticans;
after he had with touching solicitude furnished to those who preferred
not to trust themselves to Caesar's mercy the means for flight,
and to those who wished to remain the opportunity of capitulating
under the most tolerable conditions, so far as his ability reached;
and after having thoroughly satisfied himself that he could render
to no one any farther aid, he held himself released from his command,
retired to his bedchamber, and plunged his sword into his breast.
The Leaders of the Republicans Put to Death
Of the other fugitive leaders only a few escaped. The cavalry
that fled from Thapsus encountered the bands of Sittius,
and were cut down or captured by them; their leaders Afranius and Faustus
were delivered up to Caesar, and, when the latter did not order
their immediate execution, they were slain in a tumult by his veterans.
The commander-in-chief Metellus Scipio with the fleet of the defeated
party fell into the power of the cruisers of Sittius and,
when they were about to lay hands on him, stabbed himself. King Juba,
not unprepared for such an issue, had in that case resolved to die
in a way which seemed to him befitting a king, and had caused
an enormous funeral pile to be prepared in the market-place
of his city Zama, which was intended to consume along with his body
all his treasures and the dead bodies of the whole citizens of Zama.
But the inhabitants of the town showed no desire to let themselves
be employed by way of decoration for the funeral rites
of the African Sardanapalus; and they closed the gates against
the king when fleeing from the battle-field he appeared, accompanied
by Marcus Petreius, before their city. The king--one of those natures
that become savage amidst a life of dazzling and insolent enjoyment,
and prepare for themselves even out of death an intoxicating feast--
resorted with his companion to one of his country houses,
caused a copious banquet to be served up, and at the close
of the feast challenged Petreius to fight him to death in single combat.
It was the conqueror of Catilina that received his death at the hand
of the king; the latter thereupon caused himself to be stabbed
by one of his slaves. The few men of eminence that escaped,
such as Labienus and Sextus Pompeius, followed the elder brother
of the latter to Spain and sought, like Sertorius formerly,
a last refuge of robbers and pirates in the waters and the mountains
of that still half-independent land.
Regulation of Africa
Without resistance Caesar regulated the affairs of Africa.
As Curio had already proposed, the kingdom of Massinissa was broken up.
The most eastern portion or region of Sitifis was united with the kingdom
of Bocchus king of East Mauretania,(51) and the faithful king Bogud
of Tingis was rewarded with considerable gifts. Cirta (Constantine)
and the surrounding district, hitherto possessed under the supremacy
of Juba by the prince Massinissa and his son Arabion, were conferred
on the condottiere Publius Sittius that he might settle
his half-Roman bands there;(52) but at the same time this district,
as well as by far the largest and most fertile portion
of the late Numidian kingdom, were united as "New Africa"
with the older province of Africa, and the defence of the country
along the coast against the roving tribes of the desert,
which the republic had entrusted to a client-king, was imposed
by the new ruler on the empire itself.
The Victory of Monarchy
The struggle, which Pompeius and the republicans had undertaken
against the monarchy of Caesar, thus terminated, after having lasted
for four years, in the complete victory of the new monarch.
No doubt the monarchy was not established for the first time
on the battle-fields of Pharsalus and Thapsus; it might already
be dated from the moment when Pompeius and Caesar in league
had established their joint rule and overthrown the previous
aristocratic constitution. Yet it was only those baptisms of blood
of the ninth August 706 and the sixth April 708 that set aside
the conjoint rule so opposed to the nature of absolute dominion,
and conferred fixed status and formal recognition on the new monarchy.
Risings of pretenders and republican conspiracies might ensue and provoke
new commotions, perhaps even new revolutions and restorations;
but the continuity of the free republic that had been uninterrupted
for five hundred years was broken through, and monarchy was established
throughout the range of the wide Roman empire by the legitimacy
of accomplished fact.
The End of the Republic
The constitutional struggle was at an end; and that it was so,
was proclaimed by Marcus Cato when he fell on his sword at Utica.
For many years he had been the foremost man in the struggle
of the legitimate republic against its oppressors; he had continued it,
long after he had ceased to cherish any hope of victory.
But now the struggle itself had become impossible; the republic
which Marcus Brutus had founded was dead and never to be revived;
what were the republicans now to do on the earth? The treasure
was carried off, the sentinels were thereby relieved; who could
blame them if they departed? There was more nobility, and above all
more judgment, in the death of Cato than there had been in his life.
Cato was anything but a great man; but with all that short-sightedness,
that perversity, that dry prolixity, and those spurious phrases
which have stamped him, for his own and for all time,
as the ideal of unreflecting republicanism and the favourite of all
who make it their hobby, he was yet the only man who honourably
and courageously championed in the last struggle the great system
doomed to destruction. Just because the shrewdest lie feels itself
inwardly annihilated before the simple truth, and because
all the dignity and glory of human nature ultimately depend
not on shrewdness but on honesty, Cato has played a greater part
in history than many men far superior to him in intellect.
It only heightens the deep and tragic significance of his death
that he was himself a fool; in truth it is just because Don Quixote
is a fool that he is a tragic figure. It is an affecting fact,
that on that world-stage, on which so many great and wise men
had moved and acted, the fool was destined to give the epilogue.
He too died not in vain. It was a fearfully striking protest
of the republic against the monarchy, that the last republican went
as the first monarch came--a protest which tore asunder like gossamer
all that so-called constitutional character with which Caesar
invested his monarchy, and exposed in all its hypocritical falsehood
the shibboleth of the reconciliation of all parties, under the aegis
of which despotism grew up. The unrelenting warfare which the ghost
of the legitimate republic waged for centuries, from Cassius
and Brutus down to Thrasea and Tacitus, nay, even far later,
against the Caesarian monarchy--a warfare of plots and of literature--
was the legacy which the dying Cato bequeathed to his enemies.
This republican opposition derived from Cato its whole attitude--
stately, transcendental in its rhetoric, pretentiously rigid,
hopeless, and faithful to death; and accordingly it began
even immediately after his death to revere as a saint the man
who in his lifetime was not unfrequently its laughing-stock
and its scandal. But the greatest of these marks of respect
was the involuntary homage which Caesar rendered to him, when he made
an exception to the contemptuous clemency with which he was wont
to treat his opponents, Pompeians as well as republicans,
in the case of Cato alone, and pursued him even beyond the grave
with that energetic hatred which practical statesmen are wont to feel
towards antagonists opposing them from a region of ideas
which they regard as equally dangerous and impracticable.
Chapter XI
The Old Republic and the New Monarchy
Character of Caesar
The new monarch of Rome, the first ruler over the whole domain
of Romano-Hellenic civilization, Gaius Julius Caesar, was in his
fifty-sixth year (born 12 July 652?) when the battle at Thapsus,
the last link in a long chain of momentous victories, placed
the decision as to the future of the world in his hands. Few men
have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Caesar--
the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced
by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the path
that he marked out for it until its sun went down. Sprung from one
of the oldest noble families of Latium--which traced back its lineage
to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and in fact
to the Venus-Aphrodite common to both nations--he spent the years
of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch
were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as
the bitterness of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed,
had practised literature and made verses in his idle hours,
had prosecuted love-intrigues of every sort, and got himself
initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles
pertaining to the toilette-wisdom of the day, as well as
into the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying.
But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even
these dissipated and flighty courses; Caesar retained both
his bodily vigour and his elasticity of mind and of heart unimpaired.
In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers,
and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible rapidity
of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining time
were performed by night--a thorough contrast to the procession-like
slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place to another--
was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least
among the causes of his success. The mind was like the body.
His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself in the precision
and practicability of all his arrangements, even where he gave orders
without having seen with his own eyes. His memory was matchless,
and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simultaneously
with equal self-possession. Although a gentleman, a man of genius,
and a monarch, he had still a heart. So long as he lived,
he cherished the purest veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia
(his father having died early); to his wives and above all
to his daughter Julia he devoted an honourable affection,
which was not without reflex influence even on political affairs.
With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high
and of humbler rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity,
with each after his kind. As he himself never abandoned
any of his partisans after the pusillanimous and unfeeling manner
of Pompeius, but adhered to his friends--and that not merely
from calculation--through good and bad times without wavering,
several of these, such as Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Matius, gave,
even after his death, noble testimonies of their attachment to him.
If in a nature so harmoniously organized any one aspect of it
may be singled out as characteristic, it is this--that he stood aloof
from all ideology and everything fanciful. As a matter of course,
Caesar was a man of passion, for without passion there is no genius;
but his passion was never stronger than he could control.
He had had his season of youth, and song, love, and wine had taken
lively possession of his spirit; but with him they did not penetrate
to the inmost core of his nature. Literature occupied him long
and earnestly; but, while Alexander could not sleep for thinking
of the Homeric Achilles, Caesar in his sleepless hours mused
on the inflections of the Latin nouns and verbs. He made verses,
as everybody then did, but they were weak; on the other hand
he was interested in subjects of astronomy and natural science.
While wine was and continued to be with Alexander the destroyer of care,
the temperate Roman, after the revels of his youth were over,
avoided it entirely. Around him, as around all those
whom the full lustre of woman's love has dazzled in youth,
fainter gleams of it continued imperishably to linger;
even in later years he had love-adventures and successes with women,
and he retained a certain foppishness in his outward appearance,
or, to speak more correctly, the pleasing consciousness
of his own manly beauty. He carefully covered the baldness,
which he keenly felt, with the laurel chaplet that he wore in public
in his later years, and he would doubtless have surrendered
some of his victories, if he could thereby have brought back
his youthful locks. But, however much even when monarch
he enjoyed the society of women, he only amused himself
with them, and allowed them no manner of influence over him;
even his much-censured relation to queen Cleopatra was only contrived
to mask a weak point in his political position.(1) Caesar was thoroughly
a realist and a man of sense; and whatever he undertook
and achieved was pervaded and guided by the cool sobriety
which constitutes the most marked peculiarity of his genius.
To this he owed the power of living energetically in the present,
undisturbed either by recollection or by expectation; to this
he owed the capacity of acting at any moment with collected vigour,
and of applying his whole genius even to the smallest
and most incidental enterprise; to this he owed the many-sided power
with which he grasped and mastered whatever understanding can comprehend
and will can compel; to this he owed the self-possessed ease
with which he arranged his periods as well as projected his campaigns;
to this he owed the "marvellous serenity" which remained
steadily with him through good and evil days; to this he owed
the complete independence, which admitted of no control by favourite
or by mistress, or even by friend. It resulted, moreover,
from this clearness of judgment that Caesar never formed to himself
illusions regarding the power of fate and the ability of man;
in his case the friendly veil was lifted up, which conceals from man
the inadequacy of his working. Prudently as he laid his plans
and considered all possibilities, the feeling was never absent
from his breast that in all things fortune, that is to say accident,
must bestow success; and with this may be connected the circumstance
that he so often played a desperate game with destiny, and in particular
again and again hazarded his person with daring indifference.
As indeed occasionally men of predominant sagacity betake themselves
to a pure game of hazard, so there was in Caesar's rationalism a point
at which it came in some measure into contact with mysticism.