As we walked away, Quintus asked him why he didn’t want to go with the army.
Cicero said, “This global strategy of Pompey’s means we could be stuck out here for years. I can’t support it any longer. Nor to be frank can I face another journey through those damned mountains.”
“People will say it’s because you’re afraid.”
“Brother, I am afraid. So should you be. If we win, there’ll be a massacre of good Roman blood—you heard Labienus. And if we lose…” He left it at that.
When we got back to his tent, he made a half-hearted attempt to persuade his son not to go either, even though he knew it was hopeless: Marcus had shown much bravery at Dyrrachium and despite his youth had been rewarded with the command of his own cavalry squadron. He was eager for battle. Quintus’s son was also determined to fight.
Cicero said, “Well then, go if you must. I admire your spirit. However, I shall stay here.”
“But Father,” protested Marcus, “men will speak of this great clash of arms for a thousand years.”
“I’m too old to fight and too squeamish to watch others doing it. You three are the soldiers in the family.” He stroked Marcus’s hair and pinched his cheek. “Bring me back Caesar’s head on a stick, won’t you, my darling boy?” And then he announced that he needed to rest and turned away so that no one could see that he was crying.
Reveille was scheduled for an hour before dawn. Plagued by insomnia it seemed to me that I had barely fallen asleep when the infernal caterwauling of the war horns started. The legion’s slaves came in and began dismantling the tent around me. Everything was timed exactly. Outside the sun had yet to show over the ridge. The mountains were still in shadow. But above them loomed a cloudless blood-red sky.
The scouts moved off at dawn, followed half an hour later by a detachment of Bythinian cavalry, and then, a further half-hour after that, Pompey, yawning loudly, surrounded by his staff officers and bodyguards. Our legion had been chosen for the honour of serving as the vanguard on the march and therefore was the next to leave. Cicero stood by the gate, and as his brother and son and nephew passed, he raised his hand and called farewell to each in turn. This time he did not try to conceal his tears. Two hours later, all the tents were down, the refuse fires were burning and the last of the baggage mules was swaying out of the deserted camp.
—
With the army gone, we set off to ride the thirty miles to Dyrrachium escorted by Cicero’s lictors. Our road took us past Caesar’s old defensive line, and soon we came upon the spot where Labienus had massacred the prisoners. Their throats had been cut and a gang of slaves was burying the corpses in one of the old defensive ditches. The stench of ripening flesh in the summer heat and the sight of the vultures circling overhead are among the many memories of that campaign I would prefer to forget. We spurred our horses and pressed on to Dyrrachium, reaching it before dusk.
We were billeted away from the cliffs this time for safety, in a house within the walls of the city. Command of the garrison should, in principle, have been awarded to Cicero, who was the senior ex-consul and who still possessed imperium as governor of Cilicia. But it was a sign of the mistrust in which he had come to be held that Pompey gave the position instead to Cato, who had never risen higher than praetor. Cicero was not offended. On the contrary, he was glad to escape the responsibility: the troops Pompey had left behind were his least reliable, and Cicero had serious doubts about their loyalty if it came to fighting.
The days dragged by very slowly. Those senators who, like Cicero, had not gone with the army acted as if the war was already won. For example they drew up lists of those who had stayed behind in Rome, and who would be killed on our return, and whose property would be seized to pay for the war; one of the wealthy men they proscribed was Atticus. Then they squabbled over who would get which house. Other senators fought shamelessly over the jobs and titles that would fall vacant with the demise of Caesar and his lieutenants—Spinther I remember was adamant that he should be pontifex maximus. Cicero observed to me, “The one outcome worse than losing this war will be winning it.”
As for him, his mind was full of cares and anxieties. Tullia continued to be short of money and the second instalment of her dowry remained unpaid, despite Cicero’s instructions to Terentia to sell some of his property. All his old worries about her relationship with Philotimus and their fondness for questionable money-making schemes came crowding back into his mind. He chose to convey his anger and suspicion by writing her infrequent, short and chilly letters in which he did not even address her by name.
But his greatest fears were for Marcus and Quintus, still on the march somewhere with Pompey. Two months had passed since their departure. The Senate’s army had pursued Caesar across the mountains to the plain of Thessalonica and had then struck south: that much was known. But where exactly they were now, no one knew, and the further Caesar drew them away from Dyrrachium and the longer the silence went on, the more uneasy the atmosphere in the garrison became.
The commander of the fleet, Caius Coponius, was a clever but highly strung senator who had a strong belief in signs and omens, especially portentous dreams, which he encouraged his men to share with their officers. One day, when there was still no news from Pompey, he came to dine with Cicero. Also at the table were Cato and M. Terentius Varro, the great scholar and poet, who had commanded a legion in Spain and who, like Afranius, had been pardoned by Caesar.
Coponius said, “I had an unsettling encounter just before I set off to come here. You know that immense Rhodian quinquereme, the Europa, anchored offshore down there? One of the oarsmen was brought to see me to recount his dream. He claims to have had a vision of a terrible battle on some high Grecian plain, with the blood soaking into the dust and men limbless and groaning, and then this city besieged with all of us fleeing to the ships and looking back and seeing the place in flames.”
Normally this was just the sort of gloomy prophecy Cicero liked to laugh at, but not this time. Cato and Varro looked equally pensive. Cato said, “And how did this dream end?”
“For him, very well—he and his comrades will enjoy a swift voyage back to Rhodes, apparently. So I suppose that’s hopeful.”
Another silence fell over the table. Eventually Cicero said, “Unfortunately, that merely suggests to me that our Rhodian allies will desert us.”
The first hints that some terrible disaster had occurred began to emanate from the docks. Several fishermen from the island of Corcyra,* about two days’ voyage to the south, claimed to have passed a group of men encamped on a beach on the mainland, who had shouted out that they were survivors from Pompey’s army. Another merchant vessel put in the same day with a similar tale—of desperate, starving men crowding the little fishing villages trying to find some means of escape from the soldiers they cried out were pursuing them.
Cicero attempted to console himself and others by saying that all wars consisted of rumours that frequently turned out to be false, and that perhaps these phantoms were merely deserters, or the survivors of some skirmish rather than a full-scale battle. But I think he knew in his heart that the gods of war were with Caesar: I believe he had foreseen it all along, which was why he did not go with Pompey.
Confirmation came the next evening, when he received an urgent summons to attend Cato’s headquarters. I went with him. There was a terrible atmosphere of panic and despair. The secretaries were already burning correspondence and account books in the garden to prevent them falling into enemy hands. Inside, Cato, Varro, Coponius and some of the other leading senators were seated in a grim circle around a bearded, filthy man, badly cut about the face. This was the once-proud Titus Labienus, commander of Pompey’s cavalry and the man who had slaughtered the prisoners. He was exhausted, having ridden non-stop for ten days with a few of his men across the mountains. Sometimes he would lose the thread of his story and forget himself, or nod off, or repeat things—occasionally he would break down entirely—so that my notes are incoherent and perhaps it i
s best if I simply say what we eventually discovered happened.
The battle, which at that time had no name but afterwards came to be called Pharsalus, should never have been lost, according to Labienus, and he spoke bitterly of Pompey’s generalship, calling it vastly inferior to Caesar’s. (Mind you, others, whose tales we heard later, blamed the defeat partly on Labienus himself.) Pompey occupied the best ground, he had the most troops—his cavalry outnumbered Caesar’s by seven to one—and he could choose the timing of the battle. Even so, he had hesitated to engage the enemy. Only after some of the other commanders, notably Ahenobarbus, had openly accused him of cowardice had he drawn up his forces to fight. Labienus said, “That was when I saw his heart wasn’t in it. Despite what he said to us, he never felt confident of beating Caesar.” And so the two armies had faced one another across a wide plain; and the enemy, at last offered his chance, had attacked.
Caesar had obviously recognised from the start that his cavalry was his greatest weakness and therefore had cunningly stationed some two thousand of his best infantry out of sight behind them. So when Labienus’s horsemen had broken the charge of their opponents and gone after them in an attempt to turn Caesar’s flank, they suddenly found themselves confronted by a line of advancing legionaries. The cavalrymen’s attack broke upon the shields and javelins of these fierce unyielding veterans and they galloped from the field, despite Labienus’s attempts to rally them. (All the time he was speaking I was thinking of Marcus: a reckless youth, he, I was sure, would not have been one of those who fled.) With their enemy’s cavalry gone, Caesar’s men had fallen upon Pompey’s unprotected archers and wiped them out. After that, it was a slaughter as Pompey’s panicking infantry had proved no match for Caesar’s disciplined, hardened troops.
Cato said, “How many men did we lose?”
“I cannot say—thousands.”
“And where was Pompey amid all this?”
“When he saw what was happening, he was like a man paralysed. He could barely speak, let alone issue coherent orders. He left the field with his bodyguard and returned to camp. I never saw him after that.” Labienus covered his face with his hands; we waited; when he had recovered, he went on: “I’m told he lay down in his tent until Caesar’s men broke through the defences and then he got away with a handful of others; he was last seen riding north towards Larissa.”
“And Caesar?”
“No one knows. Some say he’s gone off with a small detachment in pursuit of Pompey, others that he’s at the head of his army and coming this way.”
“Coming this way?”
Knowing Caesar’s reputation for forced marches and the speed at which his troops could move, Cato proposed that they should evacuate Dyrrachium immediately. He was very cool. To Cicero’s surprise, he revealed that he had already discussed precisely this contingency with Pompey, and that it had been decided that in the event of a defeat, all the surviving leadership of the senatorial cause should attempt to make for Corcyra—which, as an island, could be sealed off and defended by the fleet.
By now, rumours of Pompey’s defeat were spreading throughout the garrison, and the meeting was interrupted by reports of soldiers refusing to obey orders; there had already been some looting. It was agreed that we should embark the next day. Before we returned to our house, Cicero put his hand on Labienus’s shoulder and asked him if he knew what had happened to Marcus or Quintus. Labienus raised his head and looked at him as if he were crazy even to ask the question—the slaughter of thousands seemed to swirl like smoke in those staring, bloodshot eyes. He muttered, “What do I know? I can only tell you that at least I did not see them dead.” Then he added, as Cicero turned to go, “You were right—we should have returned to Rome.”
* * *
* Corfu
And so the prophecy of the Rhodian oarsman came true, and the following day we fled from Dyrrachium. The granaries had been ransacked and I remember how the precious corn was strewn across the streets and crunched beneath our shoes. The lictors had to clear a passage for Cicero, striking out with their rods to get him through the panicking crowds. But when we reached the dockside, we found it even more impassable than the streets. It seemed that every captain of a seaworthy craft was being besieged by offers of money to carry people to safety. I saw the most pitiful scenes—families with all the belongings they could carry, including their dogs and parrots, attempting to force their way on to ships; matrons wrenching the rings from their fingers and offering their most precious family heirlooms for a place in a humble rowing boat; the white doll-like corpse of a baby dropped from the gangplank by its mother in a fumble of terror and drowned.
The harbour was so clogged with vessels it took hours for the tender to pick us up and ferry us out to our warship. By then it was growing dark. The big Rhodian quinquereme had gone: Rhodes, as Cicero had predicted, had deserted the Senate’s cause. Cato came aboard, followed by the other leaders, and immediately we slipped anchor—the captain preferring the dangers of a night-time voyage to the risks of remaining where we were. When we had gone a mile or two we looked back and saw an immense red glow in the sky; afterwards we learnt that the mutinying soldiers had set all the ships in the harbour on fire so that they could not be forced to sail to Corcyra and continue to fight.
We rowed on throughout the night. The smooth sea and the rocky coastline were silvered in the moonlight. The only sounds were the splash of the oars and the murmur of men’s voices in the darkness. Cicero spent a long time talking alone with Cato. Later he told me that Cato was not merely calm, he was serene. “This is what a lifetime’s devotion to stoicism can do for you. As far as he’s concerned, he has followed his conscience and is at peace; he is fully resigned to death. He is as dangerous in his way as Caesar and Pompey.”
I asked him what he meant. He took his time replying.
“Do you remember what I wrote in my little work on politics? How long ago that seems! ‘Just as the purpose of a pilot is to ensure a smooth passage for his ship, and of a doctor to make his patient healthy, so the statesman’s objective must be the happiness of his country.’ Not once has either Caesar or Pompey conceived of their role in that way. For them, it is all a matter of their personal glory. And so it is with Cato. I tell you, the man is actually quite content simply to have been right, even though this is where his principles have led us—to this fragile vessel drifting alone in the moonlight along a foreign shore.”
He was utterly disillusioned with it all—recklessly so, in truth. When we reached Corcyra, we found that beautiful island crowded with refugees from the carnage of Pharsalus. The tales of chaos and incompetence were appalling. Of Pompey, there was no word. If he was alive, he sent no message; if he was dead, no one had seen his body: he had vanished from the earth. In the absence of the commander-in-chief, Cato called a meeting of the Senate in the Temple of Zeus, on its promontory overlooking the sea, to decide the future conduct of the war. That once-numerous assembly was now reduced to about fifty men. Cicero had hoped to be reunited with his son and brother, but they were nowhere to be found. Instead he saw other survivors—Metellus Scipio, Afranius and young Gnaeus, the son of Pompey, who had convinced himself that his father’s ruin was entirely the result of treachery. I noticed how he kept glaring at Cicero; I feared he could be dangerous. Cassius was also present. But Ahenobarbus was not—it turned out that he was one of the many senators who had been killed in the battle. Outside, it was hot and dazzling; inside, cool and shadowy. A statue of Zeus, twice the size of a man, looked down with indifference upon the deliberations of these beaten mortals.
Cato began by stating that in Pompey’s absence the Senate needed to appoint a new commander-in-chief. “It should go, according to our ancient custom, to the most senior ex-consul among us, and therefore I propose it should be Cicero.”
Cicero burst out laughing. All heads turned to look at him.
“Seriously, gentlemen?” responded Cicero with incredulity. “Seriously—after all that has occu
rred, you think that I should assume direction of this catastrophe? If it was my leadership you wanted, you should have listened to my counsel earlier, and then we would not be in our present desperate straits. I refuse this honour absolutely.”
It was unwise for him to have spoken so harshly. He was exhausted and overwrought, but then so were they all, and some were also wounded. The cries of protest and disgust were eventually stilled by Cato, who said, “I take it from what Cicero says that he regards our position as hopeless, and that he would sue for peace.”
Cicero said, “I would, most certainly. Haven’t enough good men died to satisfy your philosophy?”
Scipio said, “We have suffered a reverse but we are not defeated. There are still allies loyal to us all over the world, especially King Juba in Africa.”
“So that is what we have sunk to, is it? Fighting alongside Numidian barbarians against our fellow Romans?”
“Nevertheless, we still have seven eagles.”
“Seven eagles would be fine if we were fighting jackdaws.”
“What do you know of fighting,” demanded Gnaeus Pompey, “you contemptible old coward?” And with that he drew his sword and lunged at Cicero. I was sure that Cicero was about to die, but with the skill of an expert swordsman Gnaeus checked his thrust at the last moment and left the tip of his blade touching Cicero’s throat. “I propose we kill this traitor, and I ask the Senate’s permission to do the deed this instant.” And he pressed just a fraction harder so that Cicero had to tilt his head right back to avoid having his windpipe pierced.
“Stop, Gnaeus!” cried Cato. “You will bring shame on your father! Cicero is a friend of his—he wouldn’t want to see him insulted in this way. Remember where you are and put your sword down.”
I doubt whether anyone else could have stopped Gnaeus when his blood was up. For a moment or two the young brute hesitated, but then he withdrew his sword, and swore and stamped back to his place. Cicero straightened and stared directly ahead. A trickle of blood ran down his neck and stained the front of his toga.