In response, one of the new consuls, Lucius Cornelius Lentulus launched a tirade. Now was not the time to be weak, he said. If the senators caved in, the consuls would have no option but to deploy Pompey and his army anyway. He was the source of the republic’s safety and if they did not act now, they could not rely on Pompey’s help later. The majority were so stung by these threats that when Pompey’s father-in-law Metellus Scipio stood up and proposed that a date should be fixed by which Caesar must lay down his arms or else be declared an enemy of the state, the majority of the Senate agreed with him. When the motion was taken to the people’s assembly, Mark Antony vetoed it, so the stalemate continued.45
Caesar tried again. If the Senate would not lay down arms, then nor would he simply give up his office and hand himself over to them for prosecution. He was, however, prepared to make concessions. He proposed giving up both provinces of Gaul and the ten legions stationed there so long as he could retain the province of Illyricum and its one legion. Once again, this proposal collided with the steamroller of Cato and his faction. On no account was Caesar to dictate conditions to the Senate, they cried. With this, the political process came to a dead end and war was now inevitable. The consuls passed an ‘ultimate decree’ of the Senate. Steps must now be taken, it said, o ensure that the republic came to no harm. Bellowing threats and abuse, the consul Lentulus then promptly threw Mark Antony and his followers out of the Senate House.46
The lives of Caesar’s allies in Rome were now in danger. Mark Antony, Caelius and the former tribune Gaius Scribonius Curio were given six days to leave the city or be killed. They disguised themselves as slaves and made their escape stowed on the back of wagons. Such an unseemly exit was a fitting conclusion to the stand-off, for it gave Caesar one final proof of the Senate’s injustice, one last piece of propaganda. The contemptuous, corrupt and arrogant senators had yet again insulted the liberty of the Roman people by threatening the tribunes and violating the sanctity of their persons. To illustrate the point Caesar paraded his humiliated friends before his army, clad just as they were in the clothes of slaves.47
The action now moved south. The Rubicon is a small river that once marked the boundary between Gaul and Italy. It was against the law for Roman commanders to bring troops out of their province and into Italy, so the decision to cross the river under arms amounted to an irrevocable declaration of war. But on 10 January 49 BC it was to the Rubicon that Caesar, upon hearing the news from Rome, now sent ahead a detachment of his boldest soldiers. This decision was typical of the man. He was against collecting the full weight of his ten legions from the other side of the Alps because ‘better results could be obtained by surprise, daring and taking the quickest advantage of the moment’.48 On the afternoon before he set off from his camp to join them, Caesar watched some gladiators exercise. He then took a bath, got dressed in the toga of his rank and sat down to make polite conversation with his friends over dinner. It was as though he had no fear. When it became dark he quietly took leave of his guests and slipped away.
Today no one knows where the Rubicon lies or whether it even still exists. To add to the mystery, the river is not even mentioned by Caesar in his account of the civil war. Nonetheless, all other Greek and Roman historians have focused their accounts on the moment before he crossed the Rubicon. Their attention to this reflects the ancient world’s enduring fascination with trying to work out what was going through Caesar’s mind at this critical instance. Some say he hesitated and nearly lost his nerve, paralysed at the thought of going to war with his fellow Romans.49 Others say that a spirit appeared, stole a trumpet from one of his soldiers and, letting out a loud blast, crossed to the other side; Caesar took it as a sign and did the same.50 All agree, however, that Caesar said, ‘The die is cast,’ and with those words, he crossed the river.
The republic, with its ancient system of free elections, democracy and concord between the classes of Roman society, was in the hands of Pompey and Caesar. Although they did not yet know it, the very thing that both sides were fighting for was to become the very thing they would destroy. The fight for liberty would reverberate across the entire Roman world.
THE FIGHT FOR LIBERTY
The march of Caesar’s thirteenth legion through Italy was as swift and clinical as a bolt of lightning. But just as effective was Caesar’s clever campaign of spin. Its slogan was ‘Clemency’. Within a day, he had reached Ariminum (now called Rimini); the town voluntarily opened its gate and came over to Caesar without so much as the unsheathing of a sword. Other towns, including Auximum, Asculum, Picenum and Corfinium, followed suit, even though they had troops stationed there who had been levied in Pompey’s name. The form these engagements took was the same. The Pompeian officers attempted a meagre resistance; once captured, they were immediately discharged, free to decide which side they were on; the majority of their soldiers deserted to Caesar’s army and the towns were thanked. The general himself described his spin offensive in a letter of the time: ‘I have of my own accord decided to show all possible clemency and to reconcile myself to Pompey . . . Let this be a new style of conquest, to make mercy and generosity our shield.’51 That style was proving very effective.
In Rome, Caesar’s enemies were thrown into a fit of panic. They had hoped that the respectable classes in towns throughout Italy would rise up as one in defence of the republic against the invader. But as Caesar waged his blitzkrieg without significant opposition, they quickly realized that they had hopelessly misread the majority view. The senator Cicero was astonished by the complete reversal of advantage between Pompey and Caesar:
[Do] you see what sort of man this is into whose hands the state has fallen, how clever, alert, well-prepared? I truly believe that if he takes no lives and touches no man’s property, those who dreaded him most will become his warmest admirers. Both town and country people talk to me a great deal. They really think of nothing except their fields and their bits of farms and investments. And look how the tables are turned! They fear the man they used to trust and love the man they used to dread.52
Militarily too, the constitutionalists were utterly wrong-footed. Pompey did not expect Caesar to attack so swiftly, believing that their forces would not meet until the spring.53 Blinded by arrogance, Caesar’s opponents had failed to complete the levy of the troops in Italy, and there was now no time to wait for Pompey’s legions in Spain to reach Rome. The two legions that Pompey did have outside the city walls were simply no match for Caesar’s eleven.
A plague of quarrelling and rabid recrimination broke out in the senatorial faction, infecting even the mind of their champion. Indeed it paralysed him. Pompey’s old friendship with their common enemy was to blame for arming Caesar in the first place, cried one senator. And where were those armies that he had so proudly boasted would come to him at the stamp of his foot, whinged another. Was Pompey stamping now?54 The anarchy in the senatorial ranks was echoed on the streets of Rome in one poetic account. All magistrates threw off their robes of office, ordinary people moved through the streets like ghosts heavy with sorrow and fear, and the temples were thronged with women in mourning who threw themselves on the floor and tore at their hair.55 The city was convulsed with the fear of Roman fighting Roman, of Caesar’s unstoppable, relentless advance on Rome.