Caesar rallied his army with a final speech. To Crastinus, a loyal centurion of the tenth legion who had served with him throughout Gaul, Alesia and Spain, he said, ‘Only this one battle remains. After it Caesar will regain his dignity and we our freedom.’ Crastinus replied, ‘Today, General, I shall earn your gratitude either dead or alive.’74 And with those words, Crastinus and 120 crack troops, bellowing at the tops of their voices, charged. The impetus lying with Caesar’s infantry, Roman now clashed with Roman, each side hacking down the other with mirror-image technique and brutality.
Soon enough, Pompey deployed his cavalry too. Immediately they succeeded in unsettling their enemy. Their assault was so committed, so convincing that Caesar’s cavalry was forced to give ground. However, as Pompey’s cavalry formed into squadrons and surrounded Caesar’s line on its exposed flank, Caesar gave the signal for his secret detachment to break away. Its standards brandished aloft, the fourth line swiftly attacked Pompey’s cavalry, jabbing their javelins upwards at enemy faces. It was a moment of military genius. Caesar had correctly guessed that the flower of Rome’s aristocratic youth, the scions of senators, might well have the eagerness for battle, but they had neither the experience nor the stomach for it. The decisive action threw them into a panic. They turned and fled to the hills.
Now it was Pompey’s flank that was exposed. The fourth line pressed home its advantage and attacked the rear. Caesar, scenting blood, dealt the death blow. He had kept his third line in reserve and inactive. Now, swooping into the bloody mêlée, fresh, unscathed and battle-hardened veterans from Caesar’s long-serving campaigns replaced the weary. Without mercy, they smashed and stabbed their way through the bloodied, exhausted Pompeian ranks. Eventually, Pompey’s grand coalition, unable to hold the new assault, gave out and was routed.
Seeing his forces flee, Pompey had the look of a man half-crazed or ‘whom some god had deprived of his wits’.75 After waiting silently in his tent while his legionaries outside were slaughtered, he was suddenly taken by the belief that he could regroup and counter-attack. So, in the company of thirty cavalrymen, Pompey the Great also fled from Pharsalus. In reality, he had been utterly defeated. Caesar had decisively won the civil war. Pompey would launch no second offensive.
Caesar ordered his men to storm the fortifications of the enemy camp. The Pompeian cohorts guarding it either joined the flight or surrendered. Once inside Pompey’s camp, Caesar’s soldiers saw the evidence of a final hubris committed by the senatorial faction. A victory banquet had already been beautifully laid out on silver platters in arrogant expectation of a victory celebration. Every tent was decorated with wreaths of myrtle, the dining couches were strewn with flowers, and drinking vessels were filled to the brim with wine.76 But now it was not the aristocratic faction, the fathers and sons of the wealthy Roman élite who sat down to feast. That privilege now fell to Caesar and his men.
EPILOGUE
The next day 24,000 of Pompey’s army surrendered to Caesar, throwing themselves on the ground, weeping and begging for their lives to be spared. Of the estimated 15,000 dead, 6000 were Roman citizens. To the enemy Romans who survived, Caesar showed clemency once again in a first step to heal the sick republic. He also pardoned the noblemen who had fought against him.77 Many of them, however, had fled in an effort to reorganize and retrench. Pompey reunited with his wife and set sail from Cyprus, seeking refuge in Egypt. Perhaps he could raise a new army there and fight Caesar another day? Caesar followed him in pursuit. As Pompey stepped ashore at Alexandria, however, he was assassinated. An influential eunuch in the court of the Egyptian pharaoh had decided that the best way to make a friend of Caesar was to murder his adversary. Nothing could have been further from the truth. As Caesar looked on the decapitated head of his old ally and friend and then at his signet ring, which depicted a lion holding a sword, he burst into tears. This was no honourable, dignified way for a great Roman to die.78
Although the battle of Pharsalus had decided the civil war in Caesar’s favour, it would take further campaigns in North Africa and Spain to mop up the pockets of senatorial resistance. On his return to Rome in 46 BC, Caesar celebrated four lavish triumphs; his veterans were given a lifetime’s salary, and there was a gift of money for every Roman citizen. Between 49 and 44 BC Julius Caesar was voted four consulships and four dictatorships. With the power that these offices granted him, he honoured his pledges to reform the republic and restore the liberty of the people. Legislation, ranging from the suspension of rent for a year to the settlement of veterans and the urban poor in Italy and in colonies abroad, was enacted, but it was by no means the revolutionary, radical overhaul that the conservatives feared. Indeed, Caesar could be equally repressive. In a bid to curb the power of the mob in the future, for example, he put a stop to the practice of people gathering in clubs and colleges unless they had a licence.
The dictator also increased the number of senators and knights filling those ranks with new men from ordinary families. As it was Caesar who had made their social rise possible, these men willingly heaped more and more honours on him. In January 44 BC he ostentatiously rejected the title and crown of a king, yet a religious cult and statues suggest that he accepted deification. When, in February, he agreed to the office of dictator in perpetuity, it was hard to escape the reality that Caesar now ruled as an autocrat, as Rome’s first emperor. It seemed that rather than reforming the republic by building a relationship with the new senatorial élite, and governing with them towards genuine reform of the republic, Caesar ultimately cared more about his patrician dignity and the honours accorded it than the liberty of the people.
The end of the civil war, therefore, did not mean the end of the debate about liberty. Indeed, Caesar’s perpetual dictatorship fanned its flames once more. In mid-March 44 BC, Mark Antony suddenly found himself having a long conversation with a senator outside the Senate House built by Pompey. A strong, physically imposing man, he did not realize that he was being deliberately detained. Inside a group of senators made a pretence of petitioning against Caesar. They approached him and soon they were hemming him in. Then, one of the men broke cover, flashed the blade of his dagger and plunged it into the dictator. The others piled in, frenetically pulling at their togas to release the weapons hidden in their folds. They stabbed their political enemy twenty-three times. Brutus, who was a close family friend of Caesar but who had fought on the side of Pompey at Pharsalus, delivered one of the blows. Afterwards he left the Senate House in the company of some of the conspirators. Their bloody knives still in their hands, they marched to the Capitoline Hill and called out to the people. ‘Liberty,’ they cried, had been ‘restored’.79
The lifeless, bleeding body of Caesar now lay alone in the Senate House, the very building that his adversary had paid for and bequeathed to Rome. Indeed, the spot where he had fallen was at the foot of a statue of Pompey. While it might be thought that with this murder Pompey had got his revenge, the truth was that the republic was dead. Although Brutus and all the other patrician senators who wanted to end the ‘tyranny’ of Caesar and bring back the old idealized republic did not yet know it, Caesar had correctly seen the future. Popular elections and votes in the assemblies of Rome were no way to successfully govern a vast Roman empire. That could only be done by a single head, one ruler – an emperor.