Pharsalus 48 BC

OPPOSING PLANS

Every day after Pompey’s arrival on the plain of Pharsalus Caesar drew out his army and offered battle. But he was stymied on every occasion by the limitation inherent in ancient warfare; other than by ambush (as Rome found out to her cost at Lake Trasimene in 217) or by accident (as Rome found out to her advantage at Cynoscephalae in 197), a battle could only be initiated if both sides considered it to their advantage. In response to Caesar, Pompey would draw out his army but advance it no farther than the slopes of the hills that bordered the northern edge of the plain. Unwilling to cede the advantage of the high ground, Caesar would disengage each time.

Caesar had anticipated this response from Pompey but was prepared to play along, marshalling his lines a little closer to Pompey’s camp each day in order to boost the morale of his men. Having proved his point, Caesar finally decided to break camp and march initially north-east for Scotussa but to keep on the move thereafter. He remained confident his veteran troops were better conditioned to life on the road than Pompey’s army, ‘which was unused to hard effort’, and hoped to lure his rival into battle on better terms somewhere along the way.

On the morning of 9 August (7 June by the modern calendar), Caesar’s troops struck their tents and fell into line of column at the gate in preparation for the march out. Initially they took no heed as Pompey’s army emerged from its camp and took its accustomed position along the foothills. But then Caesar’s lookouts reported something was different on this occasion; Pompey had moved his army off the slopes and it was advancing onto the plain, swinging counterclockwise as it did so to face south-east on the level ground between the heights and the river.

It was the opportunity Caesar had been waiting for; ‘we shall not easily get the chance again’, he snapped to his officers. He ordered the march halted and displayed a purple flag, the signal for battle. The camp must have burst into a hive of frantic activity as men scrambled to drop their packs and make ready for combat. Caesar was so intent on not losing the moment he ordered the rampart levelled in places and the ditch filled in with its debris so his army could march out in full cohorts. Posting a guard of 2,000 of his oldest men on the camp, Caesar led his legions onto the plain. Sensing the mood of their commander, and relishing the prospect of avenging the reverse at Dyrrachium, spirits among Caesar’s legions were high; as he rode among them he spied one of the centurions in his X legion, a re-enlistee named Caius Crastinus, urging on the men in his cohort. When Caesar called on him by name Crastinus stretched out his arm in salute and, according to Plutarch, cried in a loud voice, ‘We shall conquer nobly, Caesar; and I this day will deserve your praises, either alive or dead.’

Why had Pompey decided on battle? Historians both ancient and modern have advanced several hypotheses; that Pompey was anxious not to lose the confidence his men had accrued in breaking Caesar’s blockade at Dyrrachium; that with the season advancing and the corn now ripening, Fabian tactics would have an ever diminishing impact on Caesar’s capacity to provision his army; that the prospect of allowing Caesar to remain at large indefinitely in the east was an insult to his authority among the client kings of the region and a threat to his prestige in Rome.

But none of these factors outweighed the positive results Pompey was enjoying from the strategy he had adopted of keeping Caesar isolated and on the run. Considering the resources at his disposal balanced against the fighting quality of his opponent, a war of attrition remained the better option. As Appian relates, Pompey ‘thought it risky to stake everything on a single engagement against men who were well trained and desperate and against Caesar’s famous good luck.’

Pompey’s problem, one that had plagued him since the outbreak of the war, remained that while there was never any question about Caesar being entirely master in his own household, Pompey, according to the very tenets upon which he had taken up arms in the first place, could never be more than first among equals. As he was the appointed defender of the republic, the republic had a vested interest in his performance, and the representatives of the republic – senators, office holders, and office seekers – incessantly swarmed around him. United as they were solely by their hatred of Caesar, needling and critiquing their delegated champion was their only contribution to the war effort save squabbling with each other. Too eager to finish off the upstart Caesar and return to Rome to commence the political (and financial) purge of his supporters, they had been urging Pompey to seek a final confrontation since Dyrrachium. That Caesar had been prepared to offer battle every morning since their arrival at the plain of Pharsalus only inflamed them further. Though Pompey warned them that Caesar was forced to do this because of his inferior supply situation, and that precisely for this reason the best response was to do nothing, they accused him of deliberately drawing out the campaign only in order to prolong his extraordinary authority over them. Pompey, the champion of the republic, found himself being derided in his own camp as King of Kings, and Agamemnon, because Agamemnon, too, had kings under his command in war.

That Pompey offered Caesar the decisive confrontation he wanted against his better judgement is illustrated by the less than enthusiastic exhortation Appian records him making on the morning of the battle: ‘I still wanted to wear Caesar down, but you yourselves have invited this contest’, he told his men; ‘Advance then, as you have been demanding.’

That Pompey still retained deep misgivings about the quality of the forces under his command can clearly be appreciated from the tactical dispositions he revealed at an eve-of-battle council of war in the republican camp. To the astonishment of his subordinates, he claimed that Caesar’s army would be routed before the battlelines even met. It was simply a matter of deploying the superior republican cavalry to turn Caesar’s flank and encircle him from the rear. The republican infantry would therefore serve as the anvil, the massed cavalry as a giant hammer; Caesar’s army would be crushed between them. Unstated but implicit in this master plan was the fact that it would minimize the possibility of the republican legions being subjected to the protracted trial of strength with their Caesarean counterparts that Pompey had consistently sought to avoid.

Labienus enthusiastically endorsed Pompey’s proposed plan of attack, not least because, at the head of the republican cavalry, the glory of Caesar’s downfall would largely accrue to him. He assured the council Caesar’s army was but a shadow of that which had conquered Gaul and swore an oath not to return to camp from the battlefield save in victory. Pompey praised his zeal and swore an oath in the same terms, followed by all the others. The misgivings of its commander notwithstanding, the council separated in buoyant spirits and with high hopes.