As matters stood, therefore, Caesar’s position was precarious. He had his back to the sea and was blockaded, with no chance of resupply, with winter coming on, and was about to be confronted by a much larger force.
As we were nearing the end of our march, Cicero received a further dispatch from Pompey:
Pompey Imperator to Cicero Imperator.
I have received a proposal from Caesar that we should hold an immediate peace conference, disband both our armies within three days, renew our old friendship under oath, and return to Italy together. I regard this as proof not of his friendly intentions but of the weakness of his position and of his realisation that he cannot win this war. Accordingly, knowing that you would concur, I have rejected his offer, which I suspect was in any case a trick.
‘Is he right?’ I asked him. ‘Would you have concurred?’
‘No,’ responded Cicero, ‘and he knows perfectly well I wouldn’t. I would do anything to stop this war – which of course is why he never asked for my opinion. I cannot see anything ahead of us except slaughter and ruin.’
At the time I thought that Cicero was being unduly defeatist even for him. Pompey deployed his vast army in and around Dyrrachium, and contrary to expectations, he once again settled down to wait. No one in the supreme war council could fault his reasoning: that with every passing day Caesar’s position became weaker; that he might eventually be starved into submission without the need for fighting; and that in any case, the best time to attack would be in the spring when the weather was less treacherous.
The Ciceros were billeted in a villa just outside Dyrrachium, built up high on a headland. It was a wild spot, with commanding views of the sea, and I found it odd to think of Caesar encamped only thirty miles away. Sometimes I would lean out over the terrace and crane my neck to the south in the hope that I might see some evidence of his presence, but naturally I never did.
And then at the beginning of April a very remarkable spectacle presented itself. The weather had been calm for several days, but suddenly a storm blew up from the south that howled around our house in its exposed position, the rain whipping down on the roof. Cicero was in the middle of composing a letter to Atticus, who had written from Rome to inform him that Tullia was desperately short of money. Sixty thousand sesterces was missing from the first payment of her dowry, and once again Cicero suspected Philotimus of shady dealing. He had just dictated the words You tell me she is in want of everything; I beg you not to let this continue when Marcus came running in and said that a great number of ships were visible out at sea and that he thought a battle might be in progress.
We put on our cloaks and hurried into the garden. And there indeed was a vast fleet of several hundred vessels a mile or more offshore, being tossed up and down in the heavy swell and driven at speed by the wind. It reminded me of our own near-shipwreck when we were crossing to Dyrrachium at the start of Cicero’s exile. We watched for an hour until they had all passed out of sight, and then gradually a second flotilla began to appear – making, as it seemed to me, much heavier weather of it, but obviously trying to catch up with the ships that had gone before. We had no idea what it was that we were watching. To whom did these ghostly grey ships belong? Was it actually a battle? If so, was it going well or badly?
The next morning Cicero sent Marcus to Pompey’s headquarters, to see what he could discover. The young man returned at dusk in a state of eager anticipation. The army would be breaking camp at dawn. The situation was confused. However, it appeared that the missing half of Caesar’s army had sailed over from Italy. They had been unable to make land at Caesar’s camp at Apollonia, partly because of our blockade but also because of the storm, which had blown them more than sixty miles north along the coast. Our navy had tried to pursue them, without success. Reportedly, men and materiel were now coming ashore around the port of Lissus. Pompey’s intention was to crush them before they could link up with Caesar.
The next morning we rejoined the army and headed north. It was rumoured that the newly arrived general we would be facing was Mark Antony, Caesar’s deputy – a report Cicero hoped was true, for he knew Antony: a young man of only thirty-four with a reputation for wildness and indiscipline; Cicero said he was not nearly as formidable a tactician as Caesar. However, when we drew closer to Lissus, where Antony was supposed to be, we found only his abandoned camp, dotted with dozens of smouldering fires where he had burned all the equipment his men could not carry with them. It turned out that he had led them east into the mountains.
We performed an abrupt about-turn and marched back south again. I thought we would return to Dyrrachium. Instead we passed by it in the distance, pressed on further south and after a four-day march took up a new position in a vast camp around the little town of Apsos. And now one began to get a sense of just how brilliant a general Caesar was, for we learned that somehow he had linked up with Antony, who had brought his army through the mountain passes, and that although Caesar’s combined force was smaller than ours, nevertheless he had retrieved a hopeless position and was now on the offensive. He captured a settlement to our rear and cut us off from Dyrrachium. This was not a fatal disaster – Pompey’s navy still commanded the coast, and we could be resupplied by sea across the beaches as long as the weather was not too rough. But one began to experience the uneasy sensation of being hemmed in. Sometimes we could see Caesar’s men moving on the distant slopes of the mountains: he had control of the heights above us. And then he began a vast programme of construction – felling trees, building wooden forts, digging trenches and ditches and using the excavated earth to erect ramparts.
Naturally, our commanders tried to interrupt these works, and there were many skirmishes – sometimes four or five in a day. But the labour went on more or less continuously for several months until Caesar had completed a fifteen-mile fortified line that ran all the way round our position in a great loop, from the beaches to the north of our camp to the cliffs to the south. Within this loop we built our own system of trenches facing theirs, with perhaps fifty or a hundred paces of no man’s land between the two sides. Siege engines were brought up and the artillerymen would lob rocks and flaming missiles at one another. Raiding parties would creep across the lines at night and slit the throats of the men in the opposing trench. When the wind dropped, we could hear them talking. Often they shouted insults at us; our men yelled back. I remember a constant atmosphere of tension. It began to prey on one’s nerves.
Cicero fell ill with dysentery and spent most of his time reading and writing letters in his tent. ‘Tent’ was something of a misnomer. He and the leading senators seemed to vie with one another to see who could make their accommodation the most luxurious. There were carpets, couches, tables, statues and silverware shipped over from Italy on the inside, and walls of turf and leafy bowers outside. They dined with one another and bathed together as if they were still on the Palatine. Cicero became particularly close to Cato’s nephew Brutus, who had the tent next door, and who was seldom seen without a book of philosophy in his hand. They would spend hours sitting up talking late into the night. Cicero liked him for his noble nature and his learning but worried that his head was actually crammed too full of philosophy for him to make practical use of it: ‘I sometimes fear he may have been educated out of his wits.’
One of the peculiarities of this style of trench warfare was that one could also have quite friendly contact with the enemy. The ordinary soldiers would periodically meet in the unoccupied middle ground to talk or gamble, although our officers inflicted severe penalties for fraternisation. Letters were lobbed over from one side to the other. Cicero received several messages by sea from Rufus, who was in Rome, and even one from Dolabella, who was with Caesar less than five miles away, and who sent a courier under a flag of truce: