He also underwent military training and quickly showed his aptitude for soldiering, being tough and brave and possessing a gift for leadership. In 55 B.C., when he was twenty-five or twenty-six, he played a junior role in a Roman invasion of Egypt to restore an unpopular monarch, Ptolemy XII Auletes, to his throne. While in Alexandria he met for the first time one of the Auletes’ daughters, a fourteen-year-old princess called Cleopatra. According to Appian, he was “provoked by the sight of her.”
Antony then caught Caesar’s eye and fought bravely with him in Gaul, becoming one of the victorious general’s most trusted followers. His features were bold and masculine. He had a broad forehead and an aquiline nose, and wore a well-grown beard. He reminded people of traditional sculptures of Hercules, an association he cultivated in his choice of dress: at public events, he would wear his tunic low over his hips, with a large sword by his side and a heavy cloak. It was observed that his behavior was as Herculean as his appearance; he liked talking dirty and getting drunk in public. He used to sit down beside his soldiers as they ate, or he took his food standing up at the common mess table; they loved him for it.
He much enjoyed having sex with women, a weakness that won him considerable sympathy, writes Plutarch, “for he often helped others in their love affairs and always accepted with good humour the jokes they made about his own.” When he was in funds, he showered money on his friends and was usually generous to soldiers under his command.
Few senators had any appetite for civil war; in December 50 B.C. the Senate voted by a huge majority that Pompey and Caesar, both of whom had armies, should demobilize. It looked as if peace would break out, a prospect that the die-hard consul Marcellus, Octavia’s husband, was determined to avoid. He believed that Caesar would be easily defeated on the battlefield, and wanted to see him eliminated. He decided to act decisively. Without senatorial approval or the other consul’s consent, he put a sword in Pompey’s hand and gave him authority to defend the state.
On January 7, the Senate acknowledged that matters were now past recall and declared a state of emergency. Fearing for their lives, Antony and other supporters of Caesar fled to their commander, who was waiting at the little river Rubicon in northern Italy, which separated his province of Cisalpine Gaul from Roman territory proper.
While these high events unfolded, Philippus will have felt obliged to be at the heart of affairs in Rome, as would Atia as a close relative of Caesar’s. There was much at stake, and a threat to Caesar could be equally a threat to them. However, they quietly sent Gaius to one of his father’s country places, near Velitrae, where he would be out of harm’s way.
During the night of January 10, in the full knowledge that he was launching a civil war, Caesar ordered his soldiers, all passionately loyal to him, to invade Italy.
“Let the dice fly high!” he said, as if he were playing a game of chance.
There was panic in Rome. The consuls fled southward. Pompey, whom the Senate appointed commander in chief, gave up Italy as a lost cause and sailed to Greece. His idea was to recruit a large army from the eastern provinces. He would invade Italy when he was ready and, with the help of some legions in Spain, crush Caesar as if in a pincer.
Caesar had hoped to catch Pompey, but just missed him. So, after a whirlwind stay at Rome, he rushed off to Spain. A praetor, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, was instructed to look after his interests in the city, and Mark Antony was put in command of the troops remaining in Italy and given the responsibility for its administration.
Caesar was a master of the art of persuasion. When senior opponents fell into his hands, he did not take revenge, as expected, and execute them. Instead, he freed them all. Clemency was to be “the new style of conquest.” Some middle-of-the-road senators gratefully took the hint and returned without fanfare to the capital.
Philippus was on tenterhooks, knowing that he would soon have to choose sides. He had left Rome with everyone else, but not for Pompey’s camp. We hear of him a few weeks later in Naples, then a charming city founded by Greek colonists and called variously Parthenope or Neapolis. But, uncommitted as ever, he did not cross over to join Pompey, and eventually Caesar gave him leave to travel abroad if he wished (there is no evidence that, in the event, he took up this permission). Interestingly, the bellicose Marcellus, who as consul had precipitated the fighting, belatedly remembered into which family he had married, began to regret his bold stand, and unobtrusively slid into neutrality.
What Gaius made of these fine judgments and cautious calculations is unknown. His health was delicate and he did not have the full-blooded Roman delight in soldiering. So it may be that he was less impressed than others by Caesar’s extraordinary military adventures in Gaul. It should be borne in mind that, unless in infancy, he had never met his great-uncle, who had left Rome for his governorship when Gaius was only four years old. If their paths did cross in his earliest years, Gaius would have had at most a dim memory of his celebrated relative.
At the very least, though, the boy would have known all about the sensational doings of the head of the Julian clan: they must have been a frequent, sometimes anxious topic of conversation among his relatives.
Letters arrived in Rome from Spain. After some early setbacks when he had been cornered by flash floods, Caesar had won a brilliant campaign of maneuver with minimum bloodshed. With the western arm of Pompey’s pincers put out of action, he returned to Rome, where he was voted dictator. He made sure that at last he won the much-disputed consulship of 48 B.C., the prize for which he had set off the conflagration.
We may guess that Philippus visited Rome with Atia and Gaius and was present at Senate meetings as one of the few ex-consuls in Italy. So at some time during these eleven action-crammed days during the late autumn of 49 B.C., a momentous but inevitably brief encounter may have taken place between a busy fifty-one-year-old man at the height of his fame and his powers and an unknown teenager in his fifteenth year. Caesar would have had no time to make a considered judgment of Gaius, except perhaps for noting that he seemed a bright boy who had promise.
Then Caesar was off again—down to Brundisium and overseas to seek out his great rival Pompey.
Rome reverted to its default setting of worried waiting. Once again, the news seesawed. Letters traveled unpredictably back to Italy through messengers dispatched by participants, whether by the northern land route or, once spring had set in, over the dangerous seas.
In mid-August of 48 B.C., astonishing reports reached the city. Pompey’s army had been utterly defeated in a great battle near the town of Pharsalus in central Greece. Fifteen thousand of his legionaries were dead, against only two hundred of Caesar’s. The Republic’s commander in chief had survived, but promptly disappeared, presumably making his way eastward. Caesar followed. For the moment, no one knew where either man was.
In Rome, the immediate reaction was to accept that Caesar had become the first man in the state. He was awarded unprecedented honors and powers. In the middle of September, within a few weeks of the battle, Caesar was nominated dictator for a year (the usual limit was six months), and Mark Antony was proclaimed his deputy as magister equitum, master of the horse.
It emerged that Pompey had fled to Egypt, where he hoped that the boy pharaoh, Ptolemy XIII, would give him refuge and a base from which he might be able to recruit a new army in Asia Minor and raise the resources to pay for it. The king’s advisers, feeling that it was far too dangerous to become implicated in someone else’s civil war on what looked like the losing side, and wishing to ingratiate themselves with the winner, had the defeated general killed even before he landed on Egyptian soil.