THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MARC ANTHONY

CHAPTER VIII

The Civil War between Caesar and Pompey,

in which Antony Acted as Caesar’s Chief Lieutenant.

49-48 B.C.

Cesar’s advance into Italy with only a small force was a perilous move, and was intended more to give his enemies a taste of what he was prepared to do than to precipitate a general conflict. He still hoped to be able to negotiate a satisfactory peace; and when, having entered Ariminum (Rimini), just over the border, he was presently approached by two messengers from Pompey who suggested terms of peace, he was in high hopes of a settlement satisfactory to himself. The two men were Roscius Fabatus, who had served under him in Gaul and was now Praetor, and Lucius Caesar, Antony’s cousin, son of his mother’s brother. He received them courteously, and sent them back with his offer to adhere to the terms of Cicero’s proposal, namely that both he and Pompey should disarm, and that Pompey should remain in Spain during the year of Caesar’s Consulship.

While waiting for a reply he marched on down the eastern coast of Italy, taking possession, without bloodshed, of the towns as far south as Asculum (Ascoli), which was more or less opposite Rome; and those Pompeian officers who fell into his hands he treated with the utmost politeness, sending them back to their master with his compliments. When Pompey’s messengers returned, however, with the impossible answer that terms could only be discussed after Caesar had disbanded his army and had recrossed the Rubicon, it was obvious that war could not be avoided.

Caesar therefore dispatched Antony at the head of a force of Gallic cavalry across the mountains to seize Arretium (Arezzo), a town, in Etruria on the main road to Rome; and meanwhile he himself waited to see which way Pompey would move. He was much discouraged, however, when one of his chief officers, Labienus, who had held high command under him in Gaul and had been his intimate friend, now deserted him and fled to Pompey; but he controlled his indignation, and contemptuously sent the renegade’s baggage and money after him. It seemed that even his own officers did not think that he had much chance of success against the supposedly large forces at Pompey’s command; and when dispatches arrived announcing that the faithful Antony had captured Arretium without a fight and was there awaiting his chiefs further instructions Caesar could have had no idea yet what those instructions would be.

Meanwhile, in Rome, however, an astonishing situation had developed. At the news that Antony, the insulted Tribune, was astride the road to the capital, at the head of his invincible Gallic cavalry, everybody in the city thought that Caesar was contemplating a rapid march on Rome, and thereupon the wildest panic occurred. Senators and officials swarmed into Pompey’s house, and, brushing aside the frightened servants, pushed their way into his presence, imploring him to bestir himself and do something. What orders had he given to the troops, they asked? What troops were available, anyway? Where was the vast army which he had declared would arise when he had need of it? Why did he not stamp his foot, as he had boasted, and produce them? Why had he allowed matters to come to this pass when he was wholly unprepared to defend the capital?

Pompey was bewildered, and he needed all his gentlemanly self-control to prevent himself being infected by the prevailing terror. Suddenly he realized that Caesar was a greater man than he, and his heart must have sunk as the abuse hurled at him by these frightened men revealed to him how precarious was that position of supremacy to which he had so long accustomed himself. With all the dignity he could command he told them not to worry, but to rely on him to take the necessary steps for the safety of the State; but he had no more idea what those steps would be than had Caesar how to oppose them. Cicero pushed his way in—a big, ponderous, grey-haired man, haggard with anxiety—and implored him to send ambassadors to Caesar to treat for peace: he was horrified at the turn affairs had taken, just when he had hopes of being allowed to celebrate his public Triumph for his precious expedition against the Cilician brigands. Those fond dreams must now for ever be banished, and in their place must remain for many a day this nightmare of fear that by backing the wrong side he should incur a second exile or even death. Cato, too, came stalking in like a specter of doom, telling the distracted Pompey that war was the only honorable course, and that he must bravely do or die.

After a day or two of indecision, Pompey announced his plan. Rome must be evacuated, and the government removed to Capua, a few miles inland from Naples.

This decision caused a mad panic, and the horror and confusion in the city were heightened by wild stories of terrible portents which had been observed. Somebody said that it had rained blood during the night; somebody else spread the report that the statues of the gods had been seen to sweat; yet another declared that an unearthly flash of lightning had descended upon one of the temples; and, most horrible of all, a stable-hand announced a prodigy—a mule had foaled. People were praying in the streets; but the senators, frantically packing their belongings, forgot to pray or to perform the daily sacrifices to the gods. Soon the Appian Way, the highroad to Capua and the south, was blocked with important fugitives and their slaves and baggage. The women and children were left behind, and at the gates of the city there were indescribable scenes of emotion, men sobbing and women shrieking as they bade goodbye.

Cicero was one of the first to depart, leaving his unloved wife, Terentia, to mind his great mansion in Rome. Pompey, not knowing what to do with him, had told him to go down into Campania, the province in which Capua was situated, and to act as best he could as a sort of semi-official governor of that district; but before he left he received news that his son-in-law, Dolabella, the new husband of his daughter Tullia, had declared for Caesar. The unfortunate orator was stunned at the evacuation, and at Pompey’s collapse, and, in private, he poured out his abuse alike upon him and upon Caesar, the one as incompetent, the other as mad. Then, thinking that it would be best to go into retreat and try to keep out of harm’s way, he settled himself at a villa of his near Formiae (Mola), half way between Rome and Naples, and in utter dejection awaited what fate would bring him, sending messages to Pompey saying that he was discharging his duties faithfully in Campania, but at the same time writing to Caesar to say that he was neutral and was living quietly on his estate.

Presently, however, he received a reply from Caesar, suggesting that he should return to the capital as a non-belligerent; and at this he wrote frantically to his friend Atticus, begging for his advice. Would it show me a brave man, he asked, “if I were to remain in Rome where I have filled the highest office in the State, have achieved immortal deeds, and have been crowned with honors, but now would be but an empty name, and would moreover incur some danger, and the stigma of disgrace if Pompey should be victorious? Or shall I follow Pompey in his ignominious flight?—and, if so, whither? But if I do this, what a raid Caesar, if the victor, will make on my possessions when I am out of the way—fiercer than on those of other people, because he will think perhaps that such attacks on me will be popular with the masses”, who had never forgotten or forgiven Cicero’s action against the Catilinarian conspirators. Antony always had that grudge against him, and it was Antony who was now leading the supposed descent on Rome.

Meanwhile Cato had been sent to Sicily to keep that island quiet, and Pompey had gone to Luceria (Lucera) on the eastern side of Italy, opposite Naples, where the bulk of his forces was concentrated. Eighty miles to the north of this place was the fortress-town of Corfinium (Popoli); and here Pompey had placed a strong body of troops under the command of the aristocratic Domitius Ahenobarbus, husband of Cato’s sister, Porcia, who had been selected by the Senate before the debacle to succeed Caesar as governor of Gaul. But by the middle of February, Caesar had decided not to march on empty Rome, had recalled Antony from Arretium, and, having made up his mind to come to grips with Pompey at once, had invested Corfinium as the first step in his new plan.

After a siege of a few days Domitius surrendered, giving his parole to Caesar, who thereupon allowed him to go unmolested back to Pompey, while all his troops went over to the conqueror and were enrolled in his ever increasing army. Several senators and young aristocrats were captured in the town, but all were allowed to depart with their baggage and their money, for, said Caesar, “I am quite indifferent to the fact that those whom I release are said to go away to make war on me again: my only wish is that I should act like myself and they like what they are”.

This extraordinary clemency won the gratitude of thousands, and its effect was more valuable to Caesar than many victories. He published abroad the announcement that he would never imitate the harshness of Sulla at the overthrow of his, Cesar’s, great uncle, Marius, but was determined to be generous and merciful, since, he declared, he was always hoping for a reconciliation with Pompey. “What a man!” wrote Cicero on hearing of this leniency. “How keen, how careful, how well-prepared! I declare that if he puts no one to death and robs no one of his goods, he will soon become the idol of those who most dreaded him”. “The country-towns”, he added in a later letter, “are beginning to hold Caesar for a god, and there is no pretense about their feelings as there was when they made their vows for Pompey”.

At the fall of Corfinium Pompey retired from Luceria southwards to Brindisi, which city Caesar reached in the second week in March, giving out that he was still anxious for an interview and a reconciliation with his rival; but in the following week Pompey, who retained command of the seas, skillfully evacuated the town by night and shipped his army and the many senators who were with him across the Adriatic to Greece, and when day dawned Caesar found the enemy gone, the first phase of the Civil War being thus brought to a bloodless but unsatisfactory end. Pompey’s flight to Greece may be described as a strategic retreat “according to plan”. He had hoped at first to be able to hold southern Italy, but, failing to do this, he was clearly wise in making his new base in Epirus, across the sea; for his reputation in eastern Europe, Asia Minor, and Syria was enormous, and the fact that he had with him the two Consuls and most of the senators, would make his cause seem to the native rulers and subservient peoples of these lands to be worthy of aid. Cicero, in fact, was greatly troubled on this account, and pictured Pompey “leaving no sea or land unransacked, arousing the passions of barbarian kings, and bringing whole nations of armed savages into Italy in immense armies”. Moreover, having absolute command of the seas, Pompey assumed that he would be able freely to dispatch messengers, or make the journey himself, by way of Sicily, and North Africa to Spain, where his two generals, Afranius and Petreius, were in command of large armies.

Caesar’s position, indeed, was hardly as satisfactory; for he was bottled up in Italy without a fleet, with Greece and the east on one side and Spain on the other, both in Pompey’s favor, and Gaul, to the north and west of him, ready to revolt. The first thing to do, obviously, was to seize Rome, after which he would have to secure Sicily and Sardinia, if he could find the ships in which to transport a few troops thither, and, then, leaving a force to guard Italy and another to protect the Dalmatian coast against invasion by land, he would have to march into Spain, relying on a victory there to keep Gaul quiet. It was a stupendous task; but only when it was accomplished could he hope to be in a position to invade Greece and fight it out with Pompey.

He was worried and anxious, therefore, as he turned towards the capital; and he was not much relieved when he heard stories of the bad omens which had manifested themselves on Pompey’s landing in Greece—how spiders had been found upon some of the military standards, how a snake had glided across Pompey's foot­steps, and so forth. He was too intelligent to pay much attention to such portents; but Antony was probably heartened by them, as, of course, were the troops.

On his journey to the metropolis by the Appian Way, Caesar paid a call upon Cicero at Formiae, and invited him once more to come to Rome so as to give tacit support to his cause; but the unfortunate man was still in a quandary, not knowing which side would win in the end, and the interview gave him the fright of his life, because he dared neither offend Pompey by going to Rome nor Caesar by refusing to do so. Caesar, however, was extremely considerate, and, realizing Cicero’s predicament, offered him time to think the matter over, which led the orator to feel that he had won a diplomatic victory and caused him to write that evening: “I fancy Caesar is not much in love with me, but no matter: I am in love with myself”. He did not think much of Caesar's staff, the members of which seemed to him to be very much like a gang of desperadoes, and the Herculean Antony, travel-stained, and clanking fearsome y in his military armor, must have been peculiarly upsetting to his nerves. 

When Caesar reached Rome he camped outside the gates, while Antony rode into the city at the head of a troop of his awe-inspiring Gallic cavalry, receiving, no doubt, a vociferous welcome from the mob. It was now the end of March, and not much more than two months had elapsed since the Senate had driven Antony away like a dog; yet, today, here he was, riding through the streets as a conqueror, and the Senate was in exile. He was still Tribune of the People, and the crowd hailed him as their rightful representative; and when he gave orders that all senators and members of the government who had remained in Rome were to come to him, the excited rabble dashed off in all directions to round them up. They were a mere handful, but Antony marched them out through the gates to Caesar’s tent with great gusto, and there Caesar addressed them as though he were speaking to the full Senate and government, declaring that it was his object to avoid bloodshed and that he wished to open negotiations with Pompey and his misguided followers.

He then entered the city, which he had not seen for nine long years, while Antony rode at his side, pointing out to him the new buildings erected in his absence, these including the great theatre in the Campus Martius, built six years ago by Pompey at his own expense to hold forty thousand spectators. Some sort of provisional government was then set up, and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, Praetor for that year, who had remained at his post, was made acting-Consul. Lepidus was a patrician, but had been brought up in the democrat party, his father having been that Lepidus who in 77 BC, just after the death of Sulla, had led the premature and unsuccessful rebellion against the conservatives, as already recorded; and he had married the daughter of Servilia, Caesar’s mistress, thus linking himself with the Caesarian party. Curio, meanwhile, was sent off to deal with Cato in Sicily; Dolabella was dispatched with Antony’s younger brother Caius to Illyria, at the top of the Adriatic, to prevent Pompey marching northwards towards Italy by that route; and another officer, Quintus Valerius, was sent to obtain the surrender of Sardinia.

To Antony, however, fell the plum of Caesar’s nominations: he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of all the forces in Italy—which appointment, together with his in Tribuneship, would, during Caesar’s coming absence in Spain, place him in absolute control of Rome and the whole country. That he should have been chosen for this work shows clearly enough the high regard Caesar entertained for his abilities; and though Antony’s human weaknesses in after life, and the simplicity of his nature, tend to make us think of him as a man of no very high attainments of mind or character, we must not forget—as every historian seems to do—that at this great crisis the amazingly sagacious Caesar chose him out of all his officers for this most responsible and dangerous position.

In accepting the post Antony must have known that he staked his life; for if Caesar were to be defeated in Spain and his cause overthrown, all the force of the Pompeian storm would fall directly upon his, Antony’s, head. But his faith in Caesar never wavered and it was with a light heart that he faced his difficult duties when, during the first week in April, his chief set out for Spain to attack Pompey’s lieutenants, Afranius and Petreius, in that country. It was all very well for Caesar to say, with a confident smile, that he was marching out against an army without a general and that he would soon come back to fight a general without an army: the hazard was far greater than that, and well Antony must have known it.

His first business was to help Lepidus to enlarge the diminutive Senate into a sound working body, and to fill the various offices left vacant by the flight of the government. The law made by Sulla that the descendants of the men proscribed by him could not hold office, was still in force, in spite of the various attempts of the democrats to abolish it; but Antony, at Caesar’s order, now caused it to be removed from the statutes, and thereby was able to make numerous appointments from the democratic ranks. Rome, indeed, was soon entirely in the hands of the democracy, and Caesar’s cause came to be definitely the cause of the People, while Pompey’s party became as definitely a conservative or republican movement, since the old nobility and the traditionalists had embraced it whole-heartedly and its members had gone with Pompey to Greece.

The political situation, in fact, was now thoroughly clarified, and the civil war had assumed the character of a straight political fight between the ideals of the People and those of the republicans, Caesar and Antony, his right-hand man, being the two arch-demagogues, and Pompey being the leader of the coalition of old-fashioned conservatives and conservative-minded democrats. This being so, some of the senators who had vacillated and had remained in the capital, now slipped away to Greece in spite of Antony’s efforts to detain them; and soon there was hardly a man of politically aristocratic sympathies left in Rome, though the city was full of men of socially aristocratic standing who by being democrats were in the fashionable movement of the time. Pompey might claim to be the representative of the old order; but smart, up-to-date society, as personified in the younger generation of intellectual and elegant men of fashion, looked to Caesar as its leader.

Thus, Rome retained its gaieties and its emancipated and rather loose social life, even though it was the headquarters of a democracy with the rabble in tow. Now Anthony was decidedly a man about town, a leading light in the fast society of the metropolis; and though Caesar placed his trust in him more completely than he did in any other living soul, he was not consistently a hard worker, and was as much concerned with giving himself what he considered a good time as he was with advancing his career. Politics, as such, did not deeply interest him, but he enjoyed power, was elated by the excitement and turmoil of public life, and was always happy when he was serving Caesar, whose trust and affection he repaid with a blind devotion. Here in Rome he was temporarily under no restraint, and after so many years of campaigning, he threw himself into all the fatalistic fun of the town in such a spirit of youth that the pride of his mother, Julia, in him must have been tempered by not a little anxiety.

His mistress Fadia, by whom he had had two or three children when he was a young man, was now dead or in retirement, and there was talk of him making a match of it with his cousin Antonia, the daughter of his exiled uncle, Caius Antonius; but meanwhile he amused himself with various women, and, when he was not busy with his public duties, led the wild life which was then common amongst the members of Rome's fashionable set, and which now derived a new zest from the uncertainty of the future. To be bacchanalian at such a time had all the mordant thrill of a game of dice with Death.

There was a Greek actress named Cytheris who was at this time Antony’s mistress, and he gave some offence to respectable people by gallantly calling her Volumnia, a name almost sacred to the Romans because it was that of the wife of Coriolanus, the woman who, in 489 BC, saved Rome from her husband’s vengeance. Antony took her about with him on the various political journeys he had to make to towns in the neighborhood of the capital, and caused a good deal of outraged comment by introducing her to the local notables who received him.

He was, in fact, very proud of being her lover, for the stage and its celebrities thrilled him—newly come as he was from the camp—as greatly as it thrilled men ten years younger than himself who lived in Rome; and his was not the nature to conceal his feelings. It has often been said that Antony never grew up, but remained, as Renan puts it, “a colossal child, capable of conquering a world, incapable of resisting a pleasure”; yet at this period of his life, at any rate, that criticism does not quite meet the case: his boyish attitude towards Rome’s gaieties was due, rather, to his having been out of reach of them during the years in which young men were generally having their fill of them and becoming blasé.

When he had thus to go out of Rome he used to take his mother with him, assigning her a carriage or litter and its escort not any more splendid, as Plutarch tells us, than that given to Cytheris, a circumstance which led Cicero in after years to pretend that the elder lady, utterly neglected, was forced to follow the mistress of her profligate son as though the hussy had been her daughter-in-law. But the fact that he did take his mother about with him suggests, on the contrary, that he was a very affectionate son whose goings-on were indulgently smiled at by the broad-minded Julia, accustomed as she had been all her life to the lax morals of the fashionable world. It is conceivable that she was very fond of Cytheris.

Plutarch says that on these outings “he took with him golden cups and dishes fitter for the ornaments of a state procession than for wayside picnics, and had pavilions set up and sumptuous repasts laid out on the banks of rivers or in the woods”, music being provided by a company “of singing-girls who, in the towns, were billeted in the houses of serious fathers and mothers of families”; while Cicero adds that in his entourage were carnages full of his jolly companions and the caterers in charge of the festive arrangements.

In Rome Antony enthusiastically patronized the theatres, and went to a great many parties; but, with characteristic indifference to social propriety, he was as often the guest of mere men on the stage as of the leaders of the social world, two 0of his great friends being Sergius, the actor, and Hippias, the comedian. At these entertainments he sometimes drank more than was good for him, and “spent the next day in sleeping or walking off his debauches”. But at last a shocking misadventure befell him. He had been out one night at the wedding-party of Hippias, and early next morning had to address a meeting. He was feeling deadly sick when he stepped up onto the platform, and he had hardly uttered a sentence before he was overcome with nausea in the sight of his entire audience, one of his friends snatching away his gown only just in time to prevent it being ruined.

After this disgusting incident it is to be supposed that he mended his ways somewhat, for he knew that Caesar, while having a sympathetic understanding of the libertine, could not tolerate a drunkard; and it was not long before his mother persuaded him to marry his cousin Antonia and to make some effort to settle down. If one may judge by the fact that after a while he became very jealous of her men-friends, it may be supposed that, as sometimes happens, he found himself in love with the wife chosen for him: and, at any rate, a year or so later, she had become the mother of a little Antonia, and was being angrily accused by Antony of flirting with Dolabella, who was married to Cicero’s daughter, Tullia—all of which suggests that he was an exemplary husband.

But whatever was the nature of his private affairs at this time, he was active enough in the interests of Caesar in his public life, and incurred without flinching the personal, if distant, hostility of Pompey, Cato, and all the other prominent men residing out of Italy. He was the first man in Rome, and the Pompeian spies reported, all he did, exaggerating his public deeds and his private misdeeds until the conservative senators and officials, fretting at their exile, must have writhed in their impotence.

But as spring passed into summer the news from Caesar became increasingly bad. His route to Spain had obliged him to pass by Massilia (Marseilles), but here the scoundrelly Domitius Ahenobarbus, whom he had released on parole after his surrender at Corfinium, had established himself with a powerful army, and for weeks held up Caesar’s advance, while the Pompeian forces in Spain were able to prepare themselves for battle. It is true that in Sicily Curio had found no difficulty in driving Cato out of the island and forcing him to cross the sea in flight to Pompey; but this small success was poor compensation for the thwarting of Caesar’s plans, and such an atmosphere of gloom and apprehension descended upon Rome that even Antony’s efforts to be gay were decidedly macabre.

Cicero, of course, was one of the first to sense this feeling of nervousness, and he began to congratulate himself upon having maintained his outward neutrality; yet, as Pompey’s chances of ultimate victory brightened, he was filled with dread lest his continued residence in Italy might put him in bad odor with the exiles in Epirus. “The one thing which tortures me now”, he had already written some weeks before this, “is that I did not follow Pompey into Greece. When I saw him in January he was a panic-stricken man, and the ugly appearance of his night without caring what happened to me put a stop to my affection for him; but now that affection is coming again to the surface, and I cannot endure our separation. For whole days and nights, like a caged bird, I gaze at the sea and long to fly away”.

Caesar himself had written to him sternly advising him to remain neutral, and, after the check at Marseilles, Antony also wrote the following carefully worded and diplomatically friendly letter to him:

“But that I have a strong affection for you—much greater, indeed, than you suppose—I should not have been seriously alarmed at the rumor of your proposed flight which has been circulated, particularly as I took it to be a false one; but my liking for you is far too great to allow me to pretend that even the report, however false, is not to me a matter of much concern. That you will really go across seas I cannot believe when I think of the deep regard you have for Dolabella and his admirable wife, your daughter Tullia, and of the equal regard in which you yourself are held by us all, to whom, upon my word and honor, your name and position are seemingly dearer than they are to yourself. Nevertheless, I did not think myself at liberty as a friend to be indifferent to the remarks even of unscrupulous people; and I have been the more anxious to act because I hold that the part I have to play has been made more difficult by a coolness between us, originating, indeed, more in suspicion on my part than in any injury on yours. For I beg you will thoroughly assure yourself of this, that there is no one for whom my feeling of friendliness is greater than for yourself, with the exception of my dear friend Caesar, and that among Caesar’s most honored friends a place is reserved for you. Therefore, my dear Cicero, I entreat you to keep your future action entirely open. Reject the false honor of this man, Pompey, who did you a great wrong in allowing you to be exiled that he might afterwards lay you under an obligation. Do not, on the other hand, fly from one who, even if he shall lose his love for you—and that need never be the case—will none the less make it his study that you shall be secure and rich in honors”.

By the second week in June, however, the reports of Caesar’s difficulties at Marseilles had led a few more senators to slink away to Greece, and when a false rumor was spread that Pompey was marching north and would take Caesar in the rear, Cicero at last made up his mind to bolt. He wrote to his wife saying that he was confident of Pompey’s coming victory, and that he was therefore going to him in the full expectation of “returning with kindred spirits on some future day to the defence of the Republic”. That night he sailed for Greece.

His departure must have been a great blow to Antony, for it caused the uneasiness of the Caesarians to be increased, and Caesar, no doubt, had told him to do his best to prevent the orator's flight. Plutarch tells us, also, that at this time Antony was none too popular, and that although he was greatly beloved by the troops, in whose exercises and labors he personally joined, he was accused of being too lazy and impatient to listen to the complaints of civilians who petitioned him, and had got himself a bad name all round by making love to other men’s wives. Yet it is admitted by the same writer that Caesar had no fault to find with him, and that his bravery, energy, and military skill were never in question, which suggests that the attacks made upon him were malicious rather than true. Nevertheless, there seems to have been a certain amount of actual disaffection in Rome during these trying days of anxiety, and when, in July, news arrived that Caesar had left the siege of Marseilles to his subordinates, had marched against Pompey’s legions in Spain, and had been defeated by them, there was something like a panic in the city.

In August, however, the whole situation changed. Dispatches were received announcing that Caesar, after his first reverses, had outmaneuvered and trapped the enemy in Spain, and that the entire Pompeian army there had surrendered, while at Marseilles a victory had been won which made the speedy fall of that city certain. Thereupon, in September, the acting-Consul, Lepidus, with the help of Antony, passed a law through the Senate and the Comitia investing Caesar with the powers of Dictator; and this move was all the more popular because of the reports of Caesar’s continued leniency, for he had allowed all the conquered troops an absolutely free choice of action—they could enter his service, retire into civilian life, or even make their way to Pompey, as they wished. It all seemed too wonderful to be true. The victory was miraculous; Caesar was god-like. Everybody was cock-a-hoop, and Antony no doubt celebrated the glad tidings by getting drunk.

News of two reverses elsewhere, however, somewhat cooled the popular enthusiasm, and to Antony brought much personal sorrow. After turning Cato out of Sicily, the dashing Curio—that “slip of a girl” as Cicero, it will be remembered, had once called him—had collected enough ships to transport two legions to North Africa where Atticus Varus was in command of a considerable Pompeian army; and having disembarked at Utica, near the ruins of Carthage, he quickly gamed a victory over that general, and men proceeded to attack King Juba of Numidia, who was supporting Pompey. Misled by false reports, Curio found himself with a small force outnumbered and surrounded by the enemy in desert country in the heat of summer; and there, as Appian records it, “it perished, fighting bravely together with all his men”, his head being afterwards cut off and carried to Juba. On hearing the news the officers in command of the ships at Utica weighed anchor and sailed away, whereat the remaining soldiers of Curio’s army, who were in reserve there, seized upon all the shipping in the harbor in order to make their escape, and in the confusion many of them were drowned, while the others, unable to get away, surrendered and were slaughtered by Juba in cold blood. 

Curio, it will be remembered, had been Antony’s earliest friend, and more than friend, and in the ensuing years they had stood side by side in many a dangerous situation. His death, therefore, was a sad blow to him, from which he had hardly recovered when news arrived that Dolabella had been defeated by Pompey’s general in Illyria, and that Antony’s younger brother, Caius, had been taken prisoner. The return of the victorious Caesar to Rome from Spain, however, consoled him; and in the excitement of the rash of events which ensued he had no time to mourn his friend or to worry about his brother.

In November Caesar arrived back like a whirlwind, recklessly determined to waste no time in getting to grips with Pompey himself. He gave orders to his army to march straight down to Brindisi, where, it was understood, a great mobilization would take place during the winter in preparation for the invasion of Greece in the spring. Actually, however, his secret intention was to undertake that invasion immediately; but had he told his soldiers, weary after their campaign in Spain and their march back to Italy, that they were now going to be shipped across the perilous seas and flung against Pompey’s fortified headquarters, they would probably have mutinied. Caesar’s decision, however, was no more than was to be expected of him, for his rapidity of action was usually phenomenal; and, indeed, there was a certain impetuosity about him which sometimes landed him in extremely awkward situations. Time after time, good luck rather than good generalship extricated him from positions into which audacity and not forethought had led him; and in observing the wild risks he took the historian cannot fail to ask himself on occasion if he were really a great general

Pompey, however, erred as much on the side of anxious indecision as Caesar did on that of rash confidence; and, strange to say, neither of them looked far ahead, the difference between them being that Caesar could make up his mind in a flash and could concentrate with astonishing intensity upon his immediate object, while Pompey, as he grew older, found an increasing difficulty in forming a decision of any kind. Caesar was a man of immense brain­power, indefatigable energy, and the highest courage; but just as, in his private amours, “the marvel is that he did not end in some dark corner with a dagger between his ribs”, so in his military career it is startling to see how often he thrust that wonderful cranium of his into the lion’s mouth and escaped, unscathed, by sheer good fortune.

It has already been remarked that he liked to gather about him men of audacious courage, such as Clodius and Curio had been; and it was just that quality in Antony, combined with his undying loyalty, which he loved. Antony, though transparent and somewhat of an actor to boot, was in many ways a man after his own heart—cultured, up-to-date in his tendencies, democratic in principle, aristocratic in taste, heedless of conventions, a hater of hypocrisy; but it was his dash and gallantry which endeared him to his chief, and now in this desperate adventure which had been decided upon it was to Antony that Caesar turned, confiding in him his audacious plan to transport the army piecemeal to Greece in the ships he had built and the merchantmen he had commandeered, in the teeth of Pompey’s watching fleet.

Only eleven days did Caesar remain in Rome; but during that brief space he had himself elected Consul for the coming year, 48 BC, with one of his officers as a nominal colleague; he abdicated his Dictatorship in place of this more regular office; he set the government in order; and he reorganized its finances. Incidentally he recalled from banishment Gabinius, Antony’s former commander-in-chief in Syria and Egypt, and various other exiles, with the notable exceptions of Milo and Antony’s uncle, Caius Antonius, both of whom were too closely allied to the aristocratic party to be pardoned with popular approval. Then, with Antony at his side, he set out for Brindisi, and, having arrived, broke the news to those troops which were already there that he was going to take them across to Greece at once. The ships he had collected could carry no more than about fifteen thousand men, that is to say five out of the twelve legions which were at his disposal, and a small body of cavalry; but he declared that this would be quite a big enough army to start with, and that the ships could then be sent back to fetch the rest, many of whom had not yet reached Brindisi.

In the first week in January 48 BC he set sail, and Antony, who was left behind to bring the second lot over, watched his departure, one may suppose, with feelings of the greatest anxiety, knowing that if the enemy’s fleet were encountered Caesar and his men would be lost, and that though it were eluded he would find himself isolated on the shores of Greece, and outnumbered by Pompey by at least five to one. In three or four days, however, the ships returned bringing the news that Caesar had landed safely near Oricum (Ericho), and was pushing north to Dyrrachium (Durazzo), Pompey’s base of supplies, which there was great hope of taking by surprise, for Pompey and his main army were an equal distance from the place. It was a fifty-mile race between the two armies.

Antony’s business, of course, was to embark another fifteen thousand men, and take them across to Caesar’s aid; but before he could do so, Bibulus, Caesar’s old enemy and joint-Consul ten years earlier, who was now Pompey’s admiral, dispatched a powerful fleet across the sea and blockaded Antony’s ships in Brindisi harbor. Then developed a situation which was trying in the extreme to the nerves of all concerned. Antony, and with him now Gabinius, were unable to put to sea, knowing that Bibulus would send them to the bottom; and they therefore kicked their heels in Brindisi, waiting for the opportunity which never seemed to come. Caesar, on his part, just failed to reach Durazzo before Pompey, and, in bitter disappointment, was obliged to dig himself in, a few miles to the south, taking possession of a certain amount of country behind him from which he could obtain supplies, but having no ships, and being open to a combined attack by land, and sea.

As the weeks went by and Antony did not come, Caesar became more and more desperate. Food was running short, and his men were complaining: there was sickness, too, in his camp. He could not understand what was delaying Antony, and began to wonder whether he was playing him false. At last in desperation he ventured upon one of those wildly daring exploits with which his life abounds. Disguising himself in mean clothes, he boarded a small cargo-boat which, apparently, had a permit to make the crossing to Italy; for, though he risked shipwreck and capture, he felt that his only hope was to find out what was wrong at Brindisi and to bring the rest of his army over to Greece himself. But the attempt was a failure: a storm drove the vessel back to the shore in a sinking condition, Caesar was recognized, and when, wet and cold, he at last struggled back to his headquarters, everybody was indignant with him for taking such an absurd risk. His anxiety to know what had happened to Antony, however, was his excuse: for the first time he mistrusted him.

Meanwhile, in Pompey’s camp all was at sixes and sevens—a fact which alone saved the little Caesarian army from annihilation. Though he placed his reliance chiefly on his Roman legions, of which he had eleven as against Caesar’s five, together with a strong force of cavalry, he had under his command formidable bodies of the famous Cretan archers, Thracian slingers, and Pontic javelin-throwers, while auxiliaries had been sent to him from Arabia, Armenia, Athens, Bithynia, Boeotia, Cappadocia, Cilicia, Macedonia, Ionia, Palestine, Pamphylia, Sparta, Syria, and many other countries. His sea-power consisted of six hundred men-of-war in perfect fighting trim, and swarms of armed transports and merchantmen; while a fleet of sixty warships—then awaiting orders at Corfu—had been sent to him by Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy, who had succeeded the bibulous Auletes as joint sovereigns of Egypt.

Quarrelsome foreign potentates an generals were tumbling over one another in the camp, and the place was swarming with Roman senators, government officials, military commanders, naval officers, and the like. Cato was there, urging Pompey to stake all on a big battle with Caesar. Cicero was there, very dejected and miserable, having been snubbed by Pompey and told he was not wanted by Cato, who said he ought to have remained neutral: indeed Plutarch writes that Cicero “was sorry he had ever come, and showed it by depreciating Pompey’s resources, finding fault in an underhand way with all he did, and continually indulging in jests and sarcastic remarks at the expense of his colleagues, but going about the camp with a gloomy and melancholy face himself”. Amongst the many other men of note who worried Pompey with their contradictory advice mention must be made of Marcus Brutus who now for the first time plays a part in the events which are being related in these pages. Everybody had expected that he would join the opposite side, for Caesar was supposed to be his father and had certainly been his mother's lover for years; and when, instead, he arrived at the headquarters in Greece, Pompey had been so surprised and pleased that he had thrown his arms around him and had kissed him. Now, however, Brutus was suffering from the prevailing but unaccountable depression, and, being a very studious young man, spent all his days sitting in his tent, writing an epitome of Polybius, the great Greek historian, apparently to deaden the pricks of his conscience which told him that he ought to have been with Caesar.

It is impossible to understand why Pompey did not attack the harassed Caesar, and the only explanation is that he doubted the fidelity of his Roman legions and placed no reliance on the fighting qualities of his foreign troops. Caesar, of course, expected a battle at any moment, and could no more comprehend than we can why his rival held his hand. It seems, however, that Pompey was no longer a great man: his genius had bloomed too soon, and from a light-hearted, brilliant, and charming heyday he had passed to a depressed and hesitant decline by gradual stages which had hardly been observed by his supporters until too late. He was a haughty, silent, melancholy man at this time: it may perhaps be said that he had never been the same since the death of his adored wife, Julia, Caesar’s daughter; and his present wife, Cornelia, who was awaiting events in Lesbos, was nothing to him except, as she seemed to suppose, a bringer of ill-luck.

But if Pompey was depressed, Caesar was frantic. He knew now that Antony was blockaded in Brindisi, and somehow he managed to get a message across to him advising him to march by land around the north end of the Adriatic and down into Greece. Antony, however, was still hoping to break the blockade, yet dared not risk the total loss of his army which would mean the end of Caesar. At last it was decided that the forces should be divided, and that Gabinius should attempt the long march by land and Antony the dash by sea, so that, in the likely event of disaster to the latter half of the army there would still be a chance of success for the former. Thereat, one morning in the spring, Gabinius marched forth, and Antony was left to choose the best moment for the perilous adventure upon which he had decided.

Just then, as luck would have it, news came through that Bibulus, the enemy admiral, had died; and a few days later, while there was a chance that the Pompeian fleet was without orders, a strong south-west wind sprang up. Seizing the opportunity, Antony embarked some ten or fifteen thousand men, and set sail at dead of night, thus staking his life and his all upon this one throw of Fate’s dice. In the darkness most of his vessels passed the blockading fleet unobserved, but when at length the alarm was given a few of his small battleships attacked the enemy, thus distracting them until the transports had escaped; and when day dawned he was far out to sea. The following morning found him close to the Greek shore, thirty miles south of Caesar’s camp at Durazzo; but now the wind dropped, and the pursuing ships of war, propelled by their five and six banks of oars, bore down upon them. Antony’s men could do no more than prepare to sell their lives dearly, and the first enemy vessel which approached was received with a shower of arrows.

Just then, as by a miracle, the wind revived in increased force, and soon the transports were scudding northwards under full sail, while the oared battleships plunged after them in a heavy sea which in the end drove them onto the shore, where many of them were wrecked. Antony, thus, got clean away, sailed past Caesar’s camp, and safely landed at Lissus (Alessio), some thirty miles to the north of Durazzo. Pompey at once marched upon this place to annihilate the newly landed troops, leaving, however, a sufficient garrison at his base; but Caesar marched after him, giving Durazzo a wide berth, and by a rapid maneuver joined forces with Antony, whereupon Pompey had to retrace his steps, this time pursued by his reunited enemies.

Thus Antony’s breathless adventure ended in complete success, and he could congratulate himself upon having literally saved his chief’s life. It was a perilous feat after Caesar’s own heart, and it strengthened the bond between them so that nothing, it seemed, could sever it.

Caesar now felt himself strong enough to undertake a spectacular movement designed to impress all Greece and the neighboring provinces with his power. With a sudden rush he occupied the semicircle of hills around Pompey’s camp, and so rapidly dug trenches and threw up earth-works that in a few days the Pompeians found themselves in a state of siege. They replied by making their own lines a short distance back from Caesar’s, a narrow No-man’s-land being left between the two opposing armies; and in this condition of stalemate matters remained for several weeks while spring passed into summer, the deadlock being at last broken by a sharp battle in which Pompey’s men were the victors, and Caesar, who was, as usual, in the thick of the fight, very nearly lost his life. At about the same time news arrived that Gabinius had been defeated in Illyria, and was dead and his army dispersed; but these disasters only had the effect of making Caesar all the more anxious to force a full-dress battle, and at last, in June, he abandoned his entrenchments and marched south-eastwards into Thessaly where one of Pompey’s generals was still at large.

His object was to enhance his reputation by overpowering this force, and also to entice Pompey away from his base and the sea, and then to outflank him. Neither Caesar nor Antony were happy men at this time, for their enemies still had the advantage, and the war seemed likely to be protracted; but their depression was as nothing compared with that of Pompey, who could not make up his mind whether to follow Caesar, or to stay where he was, or to invade Italy.

At last, however, he decided to march into Thessaly also, and to give battle, leaving a small force at Durazzo under the command of Cato; but when the army was about to march Cicero excused himself on the time-honored plea of ill-health, and remained with Cato. Once again his nervous doubts as to which side would win had led him to keep out of the whole business; but when it was reported to Caesar and Antony that he was not with the oncoming Pompeian army they must have laughed together and have been not a little heartened, for Cicero was the best of weather-cocks. As a matter of fact the orator was not in good health. “Mental anxiety is wearing me out, he wrote, and is causing me also extreme bodily weakness”—a condition which may well have been aggravated by a proposal made by Domitius Ahenobarbus (who had escaped from Marseilles back to Pompey) that all senators who had not immediately come to Greece at the outbreak of hostilities should now be put to death. The suggestion, of course, was not taken up; but the very thought of it must have brought the cold perspiration out on Cicero0s intellectual forehead.

Early in August Pompey’s army came up with Caesar’s in the plain of Pharsalia, near the city of Pharsalus (Farsa), in the heart of Thessaly; and having some fifty thousand fighting men as against Caesar’s twenty-five thousand, he decided, after much hesitation, to fight it out. On the morning of the battle he addressed his troops, telling them to make an end of this madman who had thrown the whole empire into confusion. “Fight in the consciousness of a just cause”, he said, “for we are contending for liberty and country, and on our side are law and honorable tradition”. Caesar, on his part, encouraged his men by reminding them that it was Pompey who had demanded that they should be disbanded without rewards after all their triumphs in Gaul. “Yet this Pompey has now become slow and hesitating in all he does”, he declared, “and his star has obviously passed its zenith. As for his foreign allies, pay no attention to them whatsoever, but fight only with the Roman legions. Yet after your victory, spare your countrymen, for they are your own flesh and blood. Kill only these wretched foreigners”.

Pompey then placed himself in command of his right wing, and assigned the left to Domitius Ahenobarbus; while Caesar, on his side, took the right wing opposite Domitius, and gave the left to Antony who thus faced Pompey himself. The long-expected battle, which was to be the crisis of this war between the conservatives and democrats, was neither very sanguinary, as battles go, nor long protracted. Pompey’s cavalry were officered for the most part by young aristocrats in the flower of their youth and the height of their beauty, as Plutarch tells us; and with his whimsical smile, Caesar instructed his veterans to aim all their blows at the faces of these elegant young men, for experience had taught him that this type of soldier would not be willing to risk both a present danger and a future blemish. And so it proved; for at the first encounter these young officers ducked their heads, put up their left arms before their faces, lost control of their horses, and threw the whole brigade into confusion and finally into flight.

The foreign auxiliaries, meanwhile, proved to be quite worthless, and got in the way of the legionaries, whose hearts, anyhow, were not in the fight; and soon an indescribable muddle developed amongst the Pompeians, which ended in a general panic and rout. Antony, like Caesar, was never able to remember in battle that a general’s business is to keep out of the actual fighting; and in this case he seems to have hurled himself into the thick of the fray, and to have fought his way through to Domitius Ahenobarbus, and to have killed him with his own hand. Caesar lost about two hundred men all told; the enemy about six thousand, together with nearly two hundred standards and the eagles of eight legions.

Pompey could not stem the flight, became bewildered, and at last rode in a sort of stupor back to his camp, where he sat down in his tent, speechless. “He was no longer himself”, says Plutarch, “nor remembered that he was Pompey the Great, but was like one whom some god had deprived of his wits”. When the shouts and cries warned him, however, that the Caesarians were coming, he sprang to his feet, and moaning: “What!—even into my very camp?” mounted his horse and fled northwards along the road to Larissa and the sea. And when Caesar, bareheaded and breathless, dashed in amongst the tents, with Antony, sweating in the summer heat at his side, he found his rival gone. “He would have it”, he groaned, as he saw the havoc around him; “he brought it upon himself!”

Curiously enough, the victor’s first thought was for Brutus. Before the battle Caesar had given strict orders that on no account was this son of Servilia and perhaps of himself to be harmed; and now, hearing that he had fled, he scribbled a note to him telling him that all was forgiven, and sent a detachment of mounted men to find him and give him the message. The young man was soon traced, and wrote a reply apparently explaining his conduct in joining Pompey as being due to his conscience; whereupon Caesar sent for him and presently received him with every mark of affection. He then asked him whither Pompey was directing his flight; and when Brutus told him that he supposed it would be towards Syria or Egypt, Caesar made up his mind personally to hunt him down before he could get out of Greece.

Most of Pompey’s forces surrendered during the following day, and Caesar and Antony were soon free to gallop off with a squadron of cavalry in pursuit of their fallen enemy; but when some days later, they reached the Hellespont, they heard, to their bitter vexation, that Pompey had sailed for the east, and thereupon Caesar made perhaps the most reckless decision of his career. In spite of the fact that the home government had to be re-established, the empire pacified, Pompey’s troops in various provinces rounded up, the unconquered fleet captured, Cato and the other “die-hards” arrested, and a hundred outstanding tasks performed, he announced that under the escort of such ships-of-war as he could now command he was going to take a legion or two to Syria or Egypt or whatever the country might be wherein Pompey would seek asylum. He had no idea what perils on sea and land would be encountered, or when he would be back: possibly he would be away for months, but he would not return until he had given the coup de grâce to Pompey. As to the cleaning up of the situation here at home, he would leave the whole business to Antony; and therewith he gave him his instructions and, with an affectionate slap on the back, sent him off on his long journey to Rome to play, at the age of thirty-five, the part of vice-autocrat of the Roman world.

When Antony arrived once more on the shores of the Adriatic he heard that, after Pharsalia, Cato, Cicero, and others had fled to Corfu, where the broken-hearted Cicero had narrowly escaped being put to death as a traitor by the distracted Pompeians, and had sought refuge at last at Patras at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth; while Cato had gone at length to North Africa. Antony then crossed the sea, was met at Brindisi by his mistress, Cytheris, and so returned in triumph to Rome.

Meanwhile Pompey had played out in all its horror the role of a vanquished and fugitive leader. A day or two after the battle, the skipper of a Roman merchantship which was about to sail from the port of Tempe in north-eastern Thessaly, was just telling his men, as he leant idly over the stern, how he had dreamed that Pompey had appeared before him, travel-stained and dejected, when, suddenly clapping his hand to his forehead, he recognized Pompey coming in actuality towards him in a small boat. The skipper’s political sympathies were republican, and he therefore took the wretched fugitive on board and agreed, at a price, to carry him whithersoever he wished to go, at which Pompey asked to be taken first to Lesbos where he might pick up his wife, Cornelia, and their young son, Sextus. On arriving there, a sailor was sent ashore to fetch Cornelia; but when the man was ushered into her presence—and she was housed, of course, like a queen, her husband's defeat being still unknown—he burst into tears, and conveyed his news rather by his sobs than by his words. Thereupon, Cornelia dropped at his feet in a dead faint.

As soon as she had revived she ran headlong down the street to the docks, and, boarding the ship, flung herself into Pompey's arms. “It is my fault!” she cried. “It is I who has brought you bad luck. O, why have you come back to me? You ought to have left to her evil genius one who has involved you only in her own ill-fortune. I ought to have killed myself when I brought disaster to my first husband, Publius Crassus, instead of letting myself be reserved for a worse mischief, the ruin of Pompey the Great!” To this Pompey replied that at any rate she had had a few years of happiness with him, a little longer, in fact, than was usual in the case of the great. “We are all mortals”, he said, “and we have to endure these ups and downs, hoping for better luck next time. After all, it is no less possible to retrieve my position than it was to lose it”.

The townspeople, headed by the philosopher Cratippus, then came down to the ship, offering to take care of him, but he told them to submit to Caesar without fear, saying that he was a man of great goodness and clemency; and he began to argue with Cratippus upon the nature of Providence, having much to say just then in dispraise of the gods, to which, however, the philosopher refused to reply, being convinced in his heart that all was for the best. He decided, however, to remain with Pompey and Cornelia to look after their spiritual welfare, and soon, taking their son Sextus with them, they set sail for Attalia (Adala) in Asia Minor, where, on their arrival, they found some sixty fugitive senators and a certain number of troops and ships, and heard that Cato had gone to Africa, and that a great part of the fleet had not yet surrendered to Caesar. Thereupon Pompey made some show of renewing the war, and, transferring himself to a battleship, set out for Egypt with a considerable escort, his object being to recoup his forces in that country, over which the young Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy, who were friendly to him, were supposed to be ruling jointly. Actually, Cleopatra had just been driven out of her kingdom by this brother of hers; and when Pompey arrived off the Egyptian shore in the last days of September, it was the latter to whom the news was conveyed. Tales of the battle of Pharsalia and its consequences, however, had already been brought to Egypt; and Ptolemy’s councilors decided that the best thing to do would be to put the fugitive to death.

A boat was therefore sent out to the battleship with an invitation to Pompey to land, and, in spite of Cornelia’s frantic protests that he was going to his doom, he stepped into it and was rowed towards the shore, passing the time by reading over the speech which he proposed to make to the Egyptian monarch. Only a short distance had been covered, however, when one of the men in the boat stabbed him in the back, at which the others also set upon him. Pompey in the old aristocratic manner, pulled his gown face, and sank to the bottom of the boat; and a moment later his head was severed from his body. Cornelia witnessed the murder, and her shriek of horror was heard by those on shore. The Roman ships at once weighed anchor, and escape to sea.

Three days later, Caesar arrived in hot pursuit; and thereupon an Egyptian deputation brought him Pompey's head as a token of good will. Caesar, however, turned in abhorrence from them, and, moving aside, bent down his face and wept.

CHAPTER IX

Antony as Vice-Dictator in Rome, and his Temporary Estrangement from Caesar.

40—45 BC.