Coponius said, ‘I had an unsettling encounter just before I set off to come here. You know that immense Rhodian quinquereme, the Europa, anchored offshore down there? One of the oarsmen was brought to see me to recount his dream. He claims to have had a vision of a terrible battle on some high Grecian plain, with the blood soaking into the dust and men limbless and groaning, and then this city besieged with all of us fleeing to the ships and looking back and seeing the place in flames.’
Normally this was just the sort of gloomy prophecy Cicero liked to laugh at, but not this time. Cato and Varro looked equally pensive. Cato said, ‘And how did this dream end?’
‘For him, very well – he and his comrades will enjoy a swift voyage back to Rhodes, apparently. So I suppose that’s hopeful.’
Another silence fell over the table. Eventually Cicero said, ‘Unfortunately, that merely suggests to me that our Rhodian allies will desert us.’
The first hints that some terrible disaster had occurred began to emanate from the docks. Several fishermen from the island of Corcyra,fn1 about two days’ voyage to the south, claimed to have passed a group of men encamped on a beach on the mainland, who had shouted out that they were survivors from Pompey’s army. Another merchant vessel put in the same day with a similar tale – of desperate, starving men crowding the little fishing villages trying to find some means of escape from the soldiers they cried out were pursuing them.
Cicero attempted to console himself and others by saying that all wars consisted of rumours that frequently turned out to be false, and that perhaps these phantoms were merely deserters, or the survivors of some skirmish rather than a full-scale battle. But I think he knew in his heart that the gods of war were with Caesar: I believe he had foreseen it all along, which was why he did not go with Pompey.
Confirmation came the next evening, when he received an urgent summons to attend Cato’s headquarters. I went with him. There was a terrible atmosphere of panic and despair. The secretaries were already burning correspondence and account books in the garden to prevent them falling into enemy hands. Inside, Cato, Varro, Coponius and some of the other leading senators were seated in a grim circle around a bearded, filthy man, badly cut about the face. This was the once-proud Titus Labienus, commander of Pompey’s cavalry and the man who had slaughtered the prisoners. He was exhausted, having ridden non-stop for ten days with a few of his men across the mountains. Sometimes he would lose the thread of his story and forget himself, or nod off, or repeat things – occasionally he would break down entirely – so that my notes are incoherent and perhaps it is best if I simply say what we eventually discovered happened.
The battle, which at that time had no name but afterwards came to be called Pharsalus, should never have been lost, according to Labienus, and he spoke bitterly of Pompey’s generalship, calling it vastly inferior to Caesar’s. (Mind you, others, whose tales we heard later, blamed the defeat partly on Labienus himself.) Pompey occupied the best ground, he had the most troops – his cavalry outnumbered Caesar’s by seven to one – and he could choose the timing of the battle. Even so, he had hesitated to engage the enemy. Only after some of the other commanders, notably Ahenobarbus, had openly accused him of cowardice had he drawn up his forces to fight. Labienus said, ‘That was when I saw his heart wasn’t in it. Despite what he said to us, he never felt confident of beating Caesar.’ And so the two armies had faced one another across a wide plain; and the enemy, at last offered his chance, had attacked.
Caesar had obviously recognised from the start that his cavalry was his greatest weakness and therefore had cunningly stationed some two thousand of his best infantry out of sight behind them. So when Labienus’s horsemen had broken the charge of their opponents and gone after them in an attempt to turn Caesar’s flank, they suddenly found themselves confronted by a line of advancing legionaries. The cavalrymen’s attack broke upon the shields and javelins of these fierce unyielding veterans and they galloped from the field, despite Labienus’s attempts to rally them. (All the time he was speaking I was thinking of Marcus: a reckless youth, he, I was sure, would not have been one of those who fled.) With their enemy’s cavalry gone, Caesar’s men had fallen upon Pompey’s unprotected archers and wiped them out. After that, it was a slaughter as Pompey’s panicking infantry had proved no match for Caesar’s disciplined, hardened troops.
Cato said, ‘How many men did we lose?’
‘I cannot say – thousands.’
‘And where was Pompey amid all this?’
‘When he saw what was happening, he was like a man paralysed. He could barely speak, let alone issue coherent orders. He left the field with his bodyguard and returned to camp. I never saw him after that.’ Labienus covered his face with his hands; we waited; when he had recovered, he went on: ‘I’m told he lay down in his tent until Caesar’s men broke through the defences and then he got away with a handful of others; he was last seen riding north towards Larissa.’
‘And Caesar?’
‘No one knows. Some say he’s gone off with a small detachment in pursuit of Pompey, others that he’s at the head of his army and coming this way.’
‘Coming this way?’
Knowing Caesar’s reputation for forced marches and the speed at which his troops could move, Cato proposed that they should evacuate Dyrrachium immediately. He was very cool. To Cicero’s surprise, he revealed that he had already discussed precisely this contingency with Pompey, and that it had been decided that in the event of a defeat, all the surviving leadership of the senatorial cause should attempt to make for Corcyra – which, as an island, could be sealed off and defended by the fleet.
By now, rumours of Pompey’s defeat were spreading throughout the garrison, and the meeting was interrupted by reports of soldiers refusing to obey orders; there had already been some looting. It was agreed that we should embark the next day. Before we returned to our house, Cicero put his hand on Labienus’s shoulder and asked him if he knew what had happened to Marcus or Quintus. Labienus raised his head and looked at him as if he were crazy even to ask the question – the slaughter of thousands seemed to swirl like smoke in those staring, bloodshot eyes. He muttered, ‘What do I know? I can only tell you that at least I did not see them dead.’ Then he added, as Cicero turned to go, ‘You were right – we should have returned to Rome.’
XI
And so the prophecy of the Rhodian oarsman came true, and the following day we fled from Dyrrachium. The granaries had been ransacked and I remember how the precious corn was strewn across the streets and crunched beneath our shoes. The lictors had to clear a passage for Cicero, striking out with their rods to get him through the panicking crowds. But when we reached the dockside, we found it even more impassable than the streets. It seemed that every captain of a seaworthy craft was being besieged by offers of money to carry people to safety. I saw the most pitiful scenes – families with all the belongings they could carry, including their dogs and parrots, attempting to force their way on to ships; matrons wrenching the rings from their fingers and offering their most precious family heirlooms for a place in a humble rowing boat; the white doll-like corpse of a baby dropped from the gangplank by its mother in a fumble of terror and drowned.
The harbour was so clogged with vessels it took hours for the tender to pick us up and ferry us out to our warship. By then it was growing dark. The big Rhodian quinquereme had gone: Rhodes, as Cicero had predicted, had deserted the Senate’s cause. Cato came aboard, followed by the other leaders, and immediately we slipped anchor – the captain preferring the dangers of a night-time voyage to the risks of remaining where we were. When we had gone a mile or two we looked back and saw an immense red glow in the sky; afterwards we learnt that the mutinying soldiers had set all the ships in the harbour on fire so that they could not be forced to sail to Corcyra and continue to fight.