R. W. Peake
Marching With Caesar — Civil War
Chapter 1- Campaign against Afranius and Petreius
These are the words of Titus Pullus, formerly Legionary, Optio, Pilus Prior and Primus Pilus of Caesar's 10th Legion Equestris, now known as 10th Gemina, Primus Pilus of the 6th Ferrata, and Camp Prefect, as dictated to his faithful former slave, scribe, and friend, Diocles.
I am dictating this in my 61st year, three years after my retirement as Camp Prefect, in the tenth year of the reign of Augustus, and 489 years after the founding of the Roman Republic. I have more than 40 military decorations, including three gold torqs, three set of phalarae, two coronae civica, three coronae murales, and a corona vallaris. I have more than 20 battle scars on my body, all of them in the front, and my back is clean, never having been flogged in my 42 years in the Legions, nor have I turned my back to the enemy. Although my record is not as great as the revered Dentatus, I am well known in the Legions, and I have given the bulk of my life and blood to Rome.
My goal is straightforward; with these words, I plan to record all of the momentous events in which I participated as a member of Rome’s Legions, during a period that changed the very foundations of Rome itself.
Now that I have recovered and refreshed myself, I pick up my tale where I left off. The conquest of Gaul is over, Caesar and his armies triumphing in the greatest campaign in Roman, or I suspect, world history. However, his success has roused great jealousy by those men, small in every measurable way, who call themselves the boni. Using Pompeius Magnus as their stooge, they are doing everything they can to destroy our general, ignoring his popularity with the people of my class. Caesar, given no choice by the boni, has crossed the Rubicon with just the 13th Legion. However, the rest of his army, including my own 10th Legion, is preparing to march. Matters between my childhood friend and long-time comrade, Vibius Domitius, are growing increasingly strained because of the situation with Caesar, since Vibius is a strict Catonian in sentiment. Making matters more difficult for me personally, I am forced to leave behind my wife and newborn child, Vibius' namesake, whom we call Vibi. I have been the Secundus Pilus Prior for some time now, but I still have to worry about my nemesis, Secundus Pilus Posterior Celer, who constantly seeks to undermine me. Although none of us are looking forward to facing fellow Romans, we are all prepared to do our duty, even Vibius, if for no other reason than for the men standing next to him in the ranks, if not for Caesar and his dignitas.
Caesar’s army was a mixed lot of veteran and new Legions; there was us, the 7th, 9th, and 14th from the Gallic Army, and also two new Legions that Caesar had raised in Italy, the 21st and 30th, full of raw tirones. This army marched west to confront the Pompeian forces, heading through the Pyrenees and sweeping aside the Cohort-sized Pompeian units that guarded the passes through the mountains, suffering few losses. Once across the mountains, we moved towards the spot where our scouts had located Pompey’s Legions, in the northeast around the town of Ilerda, on the other side of the Sicoris River. Gathered there to face us was the most veteran of Pompey’s army, the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th Legions, veterans all, and from whose ranks our cadre like Crastinus and Calienus had originally come. They were led by two stalwart Pompeians, Afranius and Petreius, one of whom we would have cause to hate with an abiding passion, but that was in the future. However, the Pompeian Legions’ veteran status also meant that their discharges were due, just as they had been for Crastinus, meaning there was some question about how steadfast they actually were in their devotion to Pompey and his cause. At least, that was what the Legates and the good young men tried to tell us. Nevertheless, they were Spanish Legions like us and we held little illusion that they would not fight when the time came, a fact that bothered us a great deal, because there were friends and kinsmen across that river that we might have to kill. Little else was discussed around the fires at night, none of us liking the prospect a bit, but also knowing that when the time came, we would do what needed to be done, no matter how distasteful it might be. I could not help wondering if they felt the same way, staring across at us from the other side of the river.
During the period in which we were waiting for Caesar, Fabius put us to work constructing two bridges, about four miles apart. One was on the upstream side of the river from the town, and the other was on the downstream side. The construction of these bridges was contested hotly by the Pompeians, with fierce fighting around the bridge sites, but we managed to get them built despite the resistance. With the bridges built, we waited for Caesar to arrive. He was supposedly coming with about 900 cavalry he had gathered to replace the ones who defected with Labienus. Also, Fabius sent messengers laden with gold across the river and behind the Pompeian positions, bribing the surrounding towns to close their gates and to refuse any aid to Afranius and his troops, instead giving what food they could spare to us. In order to get to what food these towns had to offer, we were forced to send foraging parties out in force across the bridges to get to them.
During one of these forays, a potentially disastrous event struck the 14th and 30th Legions, the former being the reconstituted 14th full of green troops, and the latter being one of the new Legions Caesar had commissioned after crossing the Rubicon. Once they were on the other side of the river, a storm in the mountains higher upriver hit, creating a flash flood downriver. The flood sent a wall of water, accompanied by a maelstrom of wind. It then hit the bridge that the Legions had marched across, sweeping it away and sending the debris downstream. The presence of that debris alerted Afranius that something was afoot, whereupon he sent scouts out who reported to him that there was a part of our force upstream stranded on the Pompeian side of the river. Afranius immediately sent a force out to trap our men on the wrong side, prompting a sharp fight where the Legate in charge of our foraging party, Plancus as I recall, shook his men out into an orbis on a small hill, forcing Afranius to reconsider any headlong charge. While Afranius was deploying his men into a standard assault formation, our commander Fabius sent a relief force consisting of the remainder of our cavalry, along with the 9th, across on the remaining intact bridge to come to Plancus’ aid. Seeing the standards, Afranius called off his attack after a brief skirmish that claimed few casualties on either side, and once relieved by our force, Plancus marched back across the remaining bridge. It was a close call, and easily could have been a disaster if Afranius was a bolder commander like Caesar and had risked an all-out attack on green troops, but as usual, even by proxy, Caesar’s luck held.
A couple of days later, Caesar arrived with his 900 German cavalrymen, and the tempo of our operations immediately picked up. The day after he arrived, he left some Cohorts behind to guard the original camp, marching the rest of us across the nearer bridge to shake us out in a triplex acies facing the Afranius camp. This camp had been thrown up a few hundred yards from the walls of the town. Afranius linked the two together by a ditch where supplies could be carried from the town to allow men to move back and forth. Consistent with Roman practice, the camp of Afranius took advantage of high ground and Afranius sent his own forces out to face ours on the slopes of this hill. That was as far as it got, however; he seemed content to let his men stand out in the hot sun, meaning that we had to do the same. The sun moved slowly through the sky, and only through the discipline and experience of countless other days spent in identical circumstances was this day bearable.