Having become accustomed to my attempts to bully him, Apollonius was unperturbed. “I imagine that he’s giving Pharnaces a chance to reconsider his decision to stay put. Not to mention that he has to give the 36th time to march overland to the place Caesar has designated for us to meet.”
He gave me a smug look, raising his cup in a mock salute, giving a girlish squeal when I kicked the chair out from under him.
Meeting Caesar in Tarsus were two men, and I use the term men loosely, none other than Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius, both of whom came begging Caesar’s forgiveness. More accurately, Brutus had already been forgiven by Caesar, but was now interceding with him on behalf of Cassius, and it should be no surprise that Caesar did indeed forgive Cassius, restoring him to favor. Of course, Cassius went on to repay this kindness with the vilest example of treachery in history. In Tarsus, it took Caesar just a few days to dispose of all outstanding matters, then at dawn one day near the end of Junius, we marched out of the city, heading north through Cappadocia. Stopping in the capital Mazaca for two days, Caesar did more of his administrative work before we pushed on for the Pontus border. Just a day out of Mazaca, shortly before sunset, a large group of horsemen along with a small force of infantry approached the camp, asking for entrance. The leader was none other than Deiotarus, tetrarch of Lesser Armenia, coming not as a head of state but as a supplicant; another bottom feeder throwing himself on Caesar’s mercy because he had chosen to support Pompey. I do not know what he said, but I know that Caesar forgave him, except not without a demand for Deiotarus to supply one of his Roman-trained Legions, along with all of his cavalry to augment our force. More accurately, the Legion he ended up supplying was the combined remnants of the two Legions that Domitius had led at Nicopolis, but they were so badly cut up that they had to be combined to make one full Legion. Deiotarus had no choice but to agree, promising that they would be at the same place that Caesar had designated for the 36th to wait for us to arrive, at the appointed time. With this matter settled, we marched across the border into Pontus in late Quintilis, the month now named for Caesar.
~ ~ ~ ~
The 36th, the amalgamated Deiotaran Legion and the Pontic cavalry arrived the day after we reached the spot by a river that Caesar had designated as our meeting place. Rather than go immediately into action, we worked on fortifying our camp, which may sound somewhat strange given the fact that we were there to take offensive action against Pharnaces. However, we had long since learned that the sight of a fortified Roman army camp was one of the most powerful weapons in our arsenal, almost always filling our enemy with fear and dread at the sight of our precision and skill in erecting defenses. It is the same reason why we built a marching camp every single night, almost without exception, because it sent a signal to all who thought to oppose us that there was no stopping us and that we would be relentless foes. I do not believe there has ever been a general in our history who understood the power of warfare against the minds of men better than Caesar; one only has to look at the bridge we built across the Rhenus as an example of that. Therefore, it was into this fortified camp that envoys from Pharnaces came, under a flag of truce, claiming to want peace and that his invasion was nothing more than a big misunderstanding.
I was present at the meeting, along with the other Primi Pili of the 36th, the Deiotaran Legion and the commanders of the auxiliary forces. That is when we learned of some of the outrages that Pharnaces had committed against Roman citizens who lived in the region that he had taken. Aside from the usual rapine and looting, the most outrageous act was the castration of every young Roman teenager that his men could get their hands on, along with acts so despicable that I will not enumerate them here. Yet, despite the horrific nature of these crimes, Pharnaces’ envoys stood there, behaving as if these acts were mere trifles, even going so far as saying that he deserved to be praised for not siding with Pompey, unlike Deiotarus. The main spokesman for Pharnaces went even further, saying that if Caesar had pardoned Deiotarus for his siding with Pompey, then it was a case of simple justice for Pharnaces to be pardoned, despite the atrocities committed in his name. They also said that they would be more than happy to return within their own borders and leave Pontus, giving their word that Caesar could trust them to do so, enabling Caesar to return to Rome with his army, confident that Pharnaces would withdraw. Fortunately, Caesar was not buying anything that Pharnaces was selling, telling the envoys that he not only expected them to withdraw immediately, but also to restore all property seized from Roman citizens and to free all those Romans they had taken as slaves. As far as what had been taken from the young men, that could not be restored, but Caesar demanded that each defiled man must be compensated with hard currency, at a rate set by Caesar. To my surprise, the envoys of Pharnaces did not balk at any of this, saying instead that they believed that Pharnaces would agree to these terms, but they had to go to their king to discuss them, which Caesar gave them leave to do. To my eyes at least, it appeared as if we had marched a long way for nothing, but Caesar immediately dispelled that idea.