And so now, for both sides, began a desperate race against time. Speeding south from Corfinium, Caesar was brought the news that half of the enemy’s army had already sailed, under the command of the two consuls, but that the other half, under Pompey, still waited crammed inside the port. There they would have to remain, holed up, until the fleet returned from Greece. Caesar, arriving outside Brundisium, immediately ordered his men to sail pontoons to the harbour mouth and throw a breakwater across the gap. Pompey responded by having three-storey towers built on the decks of merchant ships, then sending them across the harbour to rain missiles down on Caesar’s engineers. For days the struggle continued, a desperate tumult of slingshot, heaving timbers and flames. Then, with the breakwater still unfinished, sails were spotted out to sea. Pompey’s fleet was returning from Greece. Breaking through the harbour mouth, it docked successfully, and the evacuation of Brundisium was at last able to begin. The operation was conducted with Pompey’s customary efficiency. As twilight deepened the oars of his transport fleet began to plash across the harbour’s waters. Caesar, warned by sympathisers inside the city, ordered his men to storm the walls – but they broke into Brundisium too late. Out through the narrow bottleneck left them by the siegeworks, Pompey’s ships were slipping into the open night. With them went Caesar’s last hope of a speedy resolution to the war. It was barely two and a half months since he had crossed the Rubicon.
When dawn came it illumined an empty sea. The sails of Pompey’s fleet had vanished. The future of the Roman people now waited not in their own city, nor even in Italy, but beyond the still and mocking horizon, in barbarous countries far from the Forum or the Senate House or the voting pens.
As the Republic tottered, so the tremors could be felt throughout the world.
Pompey’s Victory Feast
The East, unlike Rome, was familiar with kings. The stern subtleties of republicanism meant little to people who could conceive of no form of government save monarchy, and might on occasion even worship their sovereigns as divine. To the Romans, naturally, this superstition appeared contemptible. All the same, their magistrates had long been awarded their own elevated places in the pantheons of their subjects: their praises had been wafted to the heavens upon dense clouds of incense, their images placed in the temples of strange gods. For the citizen of a republic in which jealousy and suspicion accompanied every parade of greatness, these were heady pleasures – but also perilous ones. Rivals back in Rome were quick to denounce any hint of regal delusion. ‘Remember you are a man’* – this was the warning whispered by a slave into Pompey’s ear at the moment of his most godlike felicity, when the conqueror of the East had ridden in his triumph for the third time through Rome. His enemies, however, had been unwilling to leave a message so vital to the future health of the Republic merely to a slave. Such had been their envy of Pompey that they had deployed all their machinations against him, and thereby driven him into the arms of Caesar. Now those same enemies were his allies in exile. Huddled in Thessalonica, the Senate had to try to swallow its resentment of Pompey’s godlike reputation. After all, they needed it to get them back home.
Fortunately for his cause, the credit of the new Alexander still held good. Even as he stripped the Eastern provinces bare of legions, Pompey sent out imperious summonses to the various potentates he had settled or confirmed on their thrones. The enthusiasm with which these client kings rallied to him suggested that it was Pompey, rather than the Republic, who had been keeping the gorgeous East in fee. Joining the legions of citizen soldiers in Greece were any number of bizarre-looking auxiliaries, led by princes with glamorous and exotically un-Roman names: Deiotarus of Galatia, Ariobarzanes of Cappadocia, Antiochus of Commagene. No wonder that Pompey, to whose training camp near Thessalonica these panjandrums flocked, began to appear in the light less of a Roman proconsul than of an Eastern king of kings.
Or so Domitius sneered. It was a typically abusive insult from a man whose defeat at Corfinium had done nothing to improve his temper. Yet it struck a chord. A whiff of the Oriental had long attached itself to the great man. Behind his back Cicero had once called him ‘Sampsiceramus’, a barbarously syllabled name suitable to a Persian despot. But this had been satire, and affectionately meant. Now, fretting miserably still in Campania, Cicero no longer saw the joke. It seemed to him that the champion of the Republic was growing altogether too Mithridatic for comfort. He confessed to Atticus that Pompey had revealed to him his strategy for bringing Caesar to his knees, and that it was a terrible one. The provinces were to be occupied; the grain supplies cut off; Italy left to starve. Then carnage. ‘From the very first, Pompey’s plan has been to plunder the whole world, and the seas too, to whip up barbarian kings into a frenzy, to land armed savages on our Italian shores, and to mobilise vast armies.’4 Here, from the pen of the Republic’s most eloquent spokesman, was an echo of prophecies at least a century old. Cicero’s imaginings had caught an apocalyptic fever long endemic among Rome’s subject peoples. Had not the Sibyl foretold that Italy would be raped by her own sons? And Mithridates himself that a great monarch armed with the dominion of the world would emerge triumphant from the East? No wonder, then, when men back in Italy heard news of Pompey’s preparations that they shuddered, despairing of the Republic.
Yet fear of one warlord did little to bolster the image of the other. True, Caesar had a genius for propaganda: he had succeeded brilliantly in quashing fears that he might be planning a bloodbath, and he was assiduous in identifying his own rights with those of a traduced and outraged people. Even so, his mastery of spin could not obscure the fact that he was guilty of the highest treason. In late March, when Caesar finally entered Rome, he found the city sullen and unwelcoming. No matter how many doles of grain he promised the Roman people, they refused to be charmed. The rump of the Senate left in the capital was even less accommodating. When Caesar formally summoned them to hear his self-justifications, hardly anyone showed up.
From those few who had appeared Caesar demanded the right to seize Rome’s emergency funds. After all, he pointed out, there was no longer any need to fear a Gallic invasion, and who could be more deserving of the treasure than himself, the conqueror of Gaul? The senators, cowed and nervous, appeared ready to give in. Then a tribune, Caecilius Metellus, had the nerve to impose his veto. Caesar’s patience gave out. No defence of the rights of the people now. Instead, troops entered the Forum, the temple of Saturn was broken open, the public treasure was seized. When the stubborn Metellus persisted in trying to block this sacrilege Caesar lost his temper again. He warned the tribune to stand aside or be cut down. For nine years Caesar had been accustomed to having his every order obeyed, and he did not have the time or the temperament to moderate this habit of command now. Metellus stood aside. Caesar took the gold.
It was with relief that he returned, after two frustrating weeks in Rome, to his army. As usual he was in a hurry to press on. There were Pompeian legions active in Spain, a fresh campaign to be won. Behind him, in charge of the fractious capital, he left an amenable praetor, Marcus Lepidus. The Senate was completely bypassed. The fact that Lepidus himself was of the very bluest blood, as well as being an elected magistrate, did little to disguise the unconstitutional nature of this appointment. Naturally, there was outrage. Caesar ignored it. The appearance of legality mattered to him, but not so much as the reality of power.