The History of Rome, Theodor Mommsen [good english books to read txt] 📗

general and his army; the contemptuous setting aside of the comitia; the overawing of the senate; the sacred duty of protecting with armed hand the tribunate of the people wrested five hundred years ago by their fathers arms in hand from the nobility, and of keeping the ancient oath which these had taken for themselves as for their children's children that they would man by man stand firm even to death for the tribunes of the people.(27) And then, when he— the leader and general of the popular party—summoned the soldiers of the people, now that conciliatory means had been exhausted and concession had reached its utmost limits, to follow him in the last, the inevitable, the decisive struggle against the equally hated and despised, equally perfidious and incapable, and in fact ludicrously incorrigible aristocracy—there was not an officer or a soldier who could hold back. The order was given for departure; at the head of his vanguard Caesar crossed the narrow brook which separated his province from Italy, and which the constitution forbade the proconsul of Gaul to pass. When after nine years' absence he trod once more the soil of his native land, he trod at the same time the path of revolution. "The die was cast." CHAPTER X

Brundisium, Ilerda, Pharsalus, and Thapsus

The Resources on Either Side

Arms were thus to decide which of the two men who had hitherto jointly ruled Rome was now to be its first sole ruler. Let us see what were the comparative resources at the disposal of Caesar and Pompeius for the waging of the impending war.

Caesar's Absolute Power within His Party

Caesar's power rested primarily on the wholly unlimited authority which he enjoyed within his party. If the ideas of democracy and of monarchy met together in it, this was not the result of a coalition which had been accidentally entered into and might be accidentally dissolved; on the contrary it was involved in the very essence of a democracy without a representative constitution, that democracy and monarchy should find in Caesar at once their highest and ultimate expression. In political as in military matters throughout the first and the final decision lay with Caesar. However high the honour in which he held any serviceable instrument, it remained an instrument still; Caesar stood, in his own party without confederates, surrounded only by military-political adjutants, who as a rule had risen from the army and as soldiers were trained never to ask the reason and purpose of any thing, but unconditionally to obey. On this account especially, at the decisive moment when the civil war began, of all the officers and soldiers of Caesar one alone refused him obedience; and the circumstance that that one was precisely the foremost of them all, serves simply to confirm this view of the relation of Caesar to his adherents.

Labienus

Titus Labienus had shared with Caesar all the troubles of the dark times of Catilina(1) as well as all the lustre of the Gallic career of victory, had regularly held independent command, and frequently led half the army; as he was the oldest, ablest, and most faithful of Caesar's adjutants, he was beyond question also highest in position and highest in honour. As late as in 704 Caesar had entrusted to him the supreme command in Cisalpine Gaul, in order partly to put this confidential post into safe hands, partly to forward the views of Labienus in his canvass for the consulship. But from this very position Labienus entered into communication with the opposite party, resorted at the beginning of hostilities in 705 to the headquarters of Pompeius instead of those of Caesar, and fought through the whole civil strife with unparalleled bitterness against his old friend and master in war. We are not sufficiently informed either as to the character of Labienus or as to the special circumstances of his changing sides; but in the main his case certainly presents nothing but a further proof of the fact, that a military chief can reckon far more surely on his captains than on his marshals. To all appearance Labienus was one of those persons who combine with military efficiency utter incapacity as statesmen, and who in consequence, if they unhappily choose or are compelled to take part in politics, are exposed to those strange paroxysms of giddiness, of which the history of Napoleon's marshals supplies so many tragi-comic examples. He may probably have held himself entitled to rank alongside of Caesar as the second chief of the democracy; and the rejection of this claim of his may have sent him over to the camp of his opponents. His case rendered for the first time apparent the whole gravity of the evil, that Caesar's treatment of his officers as adjutants without independence admitted of the rise of no men fitted to undertake a separate command in his camp, while at the same time he stood urgently in need of such men amidst the diffusion—which might easily be foreseen—of the impending struggle through all the provinces of the wide empire. But this disadvantage was far outweighed by that unity in the supreme leadership, which was the primary condition of all success, and a condition only to be preserved at such a cost.

Caesar's Army

This unity of leadership acquired its full power through the efficiency of its instruments. Here the army comes, first of all, into view. It still numbered nine legions of infantry or at the most 50,000 men, all of whom however had faced the enemy and two-thirds had served in all the campaigns against the Celts. The cavalry consisted of German and Noric mercenaries, whose usefulness and trustworthiness had been proved in the war against Vercingetorix. The eight years' warfare, full of varied vicissitudes, against the Celtic nation—which was brave, although in a military point of view decidedly inferior to the Italian—had given Caesar the opportunity of organizing his army as he alone knew how to organize it. The whole efficiency of the soldier presupposes physical vigour; in Caesar's levies more regard was had to the strength and activity of the recruits than to their means or their morals. But the serviceableness of an army, like that of any other machine, depends above all on the ease and quickness of its movements; the soldiers of Caesar attained a perfection rarely reached and probably never surpassed in their readiness for immediate departure at any time, and in the rapidity of their marching. Courage, of course, was valued above everything; Caesar practised with unrivalled mastery the art of stimulating martial emulation and the esprit de corps, so that the pre-eminence accorded to particular soldiers and divisions appeared even to those who were postponed as the necessary hierarchy of valour. He weaned his men from fear by not unfrequently—where it could be done without serious danger—keeping his soldiers in ignorance of an approaching conflict, and allowing them to encounter the enemy unexpectedly. But obedience was on a parity with valour. The soldier was required to do what he was bidden, without asking the reason or the object; many an aimless fatigue was imposed on him solely as a training in the difficult art of blind obedience. The discipline was strict but not harassing; it was exercised with unrelenting vigour when the soldier was in presence of the enemy; at other times, especially after victory, the reins were relaxed, and if an otherwise efficient soldier was then pleased to indulge in perfumery or to deck himself with elegant arms and the like, or even if he allowed himself to be guilty of outrages or irregularities of a very questionable kind, provided only his military duties were not immediately affected, the foolery and the crime were allowed to pass, and the general lent a deaf ear to the complaints of the provincials on such points. Mutiny on the other hand was never pardoned, either in the instigators, or even in the guilty corps itself.

But the true soldier ought to be not merely capable, brave, and obedient, he ought to be all this willingly and spontaneously; and it is the privilege of gifted natures alone to induce the animated machine which they govern to a joyful service by means of example and of hope, and especially by the consciousness of being turned to befitting use. As the officer, who would demand valour from his troops, must himself have looked danger in the face with them, Caesar had even when general found opportunity of drawing his sword and had then used it like the best; in activity, moreover, and fatigue he was constantly far more exacting from himself than from his soldiers. Caesar took care that victory, which primarily no doubt brings gain to the general, should be associated also with personal hopes in the minds of the soldiers. We have already mentioned that he knew how to render his soldiers enthusiastic for the cause of the democracy, so far as the times which had become prosaic still admitted of enthusiasm, and that the political equalization of the Transpadane country—the native land of most of his soldiers— with Italy proper was set forth as one of the objects of the struggle.(2) Of course material recompenses were at the same time not wanting— as well special rewards for distinguished feats of arms as general rewards for every efficient soldier; the officers had their portions, the soldiers received presents, and the most lavish gifts were placed in prospect for the triumph.

Above all things Caesar as a true commander understood how to awaken in every single component element, large or small, of the mighty machine the consciousness of its befitting application. The ordinary man is destined for service, and he has no objection to be an instrument, if he feels that a master guides him. Everywhere and at all times the eagle eye of the general rested on the whole army, rewarding and punishing with impartial justice, and directing the action of each towards the course conducive to the good of all: so that there was no experimenting or trifling with the sweat and blood of the humblest, but for that very reason, where it was necessary, unconditional devotion even to death was required. Without allowing each individual to see into the whole springs of action, Caesar yet allowed each to catch such glimpses of the political and military connection of things as to secure that he should be recognized—and it may be idealized—by the soldiers as a statesman and a general. He treated his soldiers throughout, not as his equals, but as men who are entitled to demand and were able to endure the truth, and who had to put faith in the promises and the assurances of their general, without thinking of deception or listening to rumours; as comrades through long years in warfare and victory, among whom there was hardly any one that was not known to him by name and that in the course of so many campaigns had not formed more or less of a personal relation to the general; as good companions, with whom he talked and dealt confidentially and with the cheerful elasticity peculiar to him; as clients, to requite whose services, and to avenge whose wrongs and death, constituted in his view a sacred duty. Perhaps there never was an army which was so perfectly what an army ought to be—a machine able for its ends and willing for its ends, in the hand of a master, who transfers to it his own elasticity. Caesar's soldiers were, and felt themselves, a match for a tenfold superior force; in connection with which it should not be overlooked, that under the Roman tactics—calculated altogether for hand-to-hand conflict and especially for combat with the sword—the practised Roman soldier was superior to the novice in a far higher degree than is now the case under the circumstances of modern times.(3) But still more than by the superiority of valour the adversaries of Caesar felt themselves humbled by the unchangeable and touching fidelity with which his soldiers clung to their general. It is perhaps without a parallel in history, that when the general summoned his soldiers to follow him into the civil war, with the single exception already mentioned of Labienus, no Roman officer and no Roman soldier deserted him. The hopes of his opponents as to an extensive desertion were thwarted as ignominiously as the former attempts to break up his army like that of Lucullus.(4) Labienus himself appeared in the camp of Pompeius with a band doubtless of Celtic and German horsemen but without a single legionary. Indeed the soldiers, as if they would show that the war was quite as much their matter as that of their general, settled among themselves that they would give credit for the pay, which Caesar had promised to double for them at the outbreak of the civil war, to their commander up to its