Dictator

X

I travelled by ship mostly – east across the Bay of Corinth and north along the Aegean coast. Curius had offered me one of his slaves as a manservant but I preferred to journey alone: having once been another man’s property myself, I was uneasy in the role of master. Gazing at that ancient tranquil landscape with its olive groves and goatherds, its temples and fishermen, one would never have guessed at the stupendous events now in train across the world. Only when we rounded a headland and came within sight of the harbour of Thessalonica did everything appear different. The approaches to the port were crammed with hundreds of troopships and supply vessels. One could almost have walked dry-footed from one side of the bay to the other. Inside the port, wherever one looked there were signs of war – soldiers, cavalry horses, wagons full of weapons and armour and tents, siege engines – and all that vast concourse of hangers-on who attend a great army mustering to fight.

I had no idea amid this chaos of where to find Cicero, but I remembered a man who might. Epiphanes didn’t recognise me at first, perhaps because I was wearing a toga and he had never thought of me as a Roman citizen. But when I reminded him of our past dealings, he cried out and seized my hand and pressed it to his heart. Judging by his jewelled rings and the hennaed slave girl pouting on his couch, he seemed to be prospering nicely from the war, although for my benefit he lamented it loudly. Cicero, he said, was back in the same villa he had occupied almost a decade before. ‘May the gods bring you a swift victory,’ he called after me, ‘but not perhaps before we have done good business together.’

How odd it was to make that familiar walk again, to enter that unchanged house, and to find Cicero sitting in the courtyard on the same stone bench, staring into space with the same expression of utter dejection. He jumped up when he saw me, threw wide his arms and clasped me to him. ‘But you’re too thin!’ he protested, feeling the boniness of my shoulders and ribs. ‘You’ll become ill again. We must fatten you up!’

He called to the others to come and see who was here, and from various directions came his son, Marcus, now a strapping, floppy-haired sixteen-year-old, wearing the toga of manhood; his nephew, Quintus, slightly sheepish as he must have known his uncle would have told me of his malicious blabbing; and finally Quintus senior, who smiled to see me but whose face quickly lapsed back into melancholy. Apart from young Marcus, who was training for the cavalry and loved spending his time around the soldiers, it was plainly an unhappy household.

‘Everything about our strategy is wrong,’ Cicero complained to me over dinner that evening. ‘We sit here doing nothing while Caesar rampages across Spain. Far too much notice is being taken of auguries, in my opinion – no doubt birds and entrails have their place in civilian government, but they sit badly with commanding an army. Sometimes I wonder if Pompey is quite the military genius he’s cracked up to be.’

Cicero being Cicero, he did not restrict such opinions to his own household but voiced them around Thessalonica to whoever would listen, and it was not long before I realised he was regarded as something of a defeatist. Not surprisingly Pompey hardly ever saw him, but then I suppose this may have been because he was away so much training his new legions. Close to two hundred senators with their staffs were crammed into the city by the time I arrived, many of them elderly. They hung around the Temple of Apollo with nothing to do, bickering among themselves. All wars are horrible, but civil wars especially so. Some of Cicero’s closest friends, such as young Caelius Rufus, were fighting with Caesar, while his new son-in-law, Dolabella, actually had command of a squadron of Caesar’s fleet in the Adriatic. Pompey’s first words to Cicero when he arrived had been a curt ‘Where’s your new son-in-law?’ To which Cicero had replied, ‘With your old father-in-law.’ Pompey had grunted and walked away.

I asked Cicero what Dolabella was like. He rolled his eyes. ‘An adventurer like all of Caesar’s crew; a rogue, a cynic, too full of animal spirits for his own good – I rather like him actually. But oh dear, poor Tullia! What kind of husband has she landed herself with this time? The darling girl gave birth at Cumae prematurely just before I left but the child didn’t last out the day. I fear another attempt at motherhood will kill her. And of course the more Dolabella wearies of her and her illnesses – she’s older than him – the more desperately she loves him. And still I haven’t paid him the second part of her dowry. Six hundred thousand sesterces! But where am I to find such a vast sum when I’m trapped here?’

That summer was even hotter than the one when Cicero was exiled – and now half of Rome was exiled with him. We wilted in the humidity of the teeming city. Sometimes I found it hard not to take a certain grim satisfaction at the sight of so many men who had ignored Cicero’s warnings about Caesar – who had been prepared indeed to see Cicero driven from Rome in the interests of a quiet life – and who now found themselves experiencing what it was like to be far from home and facing an uncertain future.

If only Caesar had been stopped earlier! That was the lament upon everyone’s lips. But now it was too late and all the momentum of war was with him. At the height of the summer’s heat, messengers reached Thessalonica with the news that the Senate’s army in Spain had surrendered to Caesar after a campaign of just forty days. The news provoked intense dismay. Not long afterwards the commanders of that defeated army arrived in person: Lucius Afranius, the most loyal of all Pompey’s lieutenants, and Marcus Petreius, who fourteen years earlier had defeated Catilina on the field of battle. The Senate-in-exile was flabbergasted at their appearance. Cato rose to ask the question on the minds of them all: ‘Why are you not dead or prisoners?’ Afranius had to explain somewhat shamefacedly that Caesar had pardoned them, and that all the soldiers who had fought for the Senate had been allowed to return to their homes.

‘Pardoned you?’ raged Cato. ‘What do you mean, pardoned you? Is he now a king? You are the legitimate leaders of a lawful army. He is a renegade. You should have killed yourselves rather than accept a traitor’s mercy! What’s the use of living when you’ve lost your honour? Or is the point of your existence now just so that you can piss out of the front and shit out of the back?’

Afranius drew his sword and declared in a trembling voice that no man would ever call him a coward, not even Cato. There might have been serious bloodshed if the two had not been jostled away from one another.

Cicero said to me later that of all the clever strokes that Caesar pulled, perhaps the most brilliant was his policy of clemency. It was, in a curious way, akin to sending home the garrison of Uxellodunum with their hands cut off. These proud men were humbled, neutered; they crept back to their astonished comrades as living emblems of Caesar’s power. And by their very presence they lowered morale across the entire army, for how could Pompey persuade his soldiers to fight to the death when they knew that if it came to it they could lay down their arms and return to their families?

Pompey called a council of war to discuss the crisis, consisting of the leaders of the army and of the Senate. Cicero, who was still officially the governor of Cilicia, naturally attended, and was accompanied to the temple by his lictors. He tried to take Quintus in with him but he was barred at the door by Pompey’s aide-de-camp, and much to his fury and embarrassment Quintus had to stay outside with me. Among those I watched going in were Afranius, whose conduct in Spain Pompey staunchly defended; Domitius Ahenobarbus, who had managed to escape from Massilia when Caesar besieged it and now saw traitors wherever he looked; Titus Labienus, an old ally of Pompey’s who had served as Caesar’s second in command in Gaul but had refused to follow his chief across the Rubicon; Marcus Bibulus, Caesar’s former consular colleague, now admiral of the Senate’s huge fleet of five hundred warships; Cato, who had been promised command of the fleet until Pompey decided it would not be wise to give so fractious a colleague so much power; and Marcus Junius Brutus, who was only thirty-six and Cato’s nephew, but whose arrival was said to have given more joy to Pompey than anyone else’s, because Pompey had killed Brutus’s father back in Sulla’s time and there had been a blood feud ever since.

Pompey, according to Cicero, exuded confidence. He had lost weight, had put himself on an exercise regime, and looked a full decade younger than he had in Italy. He dismissed the loss of Spain as inconsequential, a sideshow. ‘Listen to me, gentlemen; listen to what I have always said: this war will be won at sea.’ According to Pompey’s spies in Brundisium, Caesar had less than half the number of ships that the Senate possessed. It was purely a question of mathematics: Caesar did not have sufficient troop transports to break out of Italy in anything like the strength he would need to confront Pompey’s legions; therefore he was trapped. ‘We have him where we want him, and when we are ready we shall take him. From now on, this war will be fought on my terms and according to my timetable.’

It must have been about three months after this, in the middle of the night, that we were roused by a furious hammering on the door. We gathered bleary-eyed in the tablinum, where the lictors were waiting with an officer from Pompey’s headquarters. Caesar’s forces had landed four days earlier on the coast of Illyricum, near Dyrrachium; Pompey had ordered the entire army to begin moving out at dawn to confront them. It would be a march of three hundred miles.

Cicero said, ‘Is Caesar with his army?’

‘So we believe.’

Quintus said, ‘But I thought he was in Spain.’

‘Indeed he was in Spain,’ replied Cicero drily, ‘but apparently now he’s here. How strange: I seem to remember being categorically assured that such a thing was impossible because he didn’t have sufficient ships.’

At daybreak we went up to the Egnatian Gate to see if we could discover any more. The ground was vibrating with the weight of the military traffic on the road – a vast column was passing through the town, forty thousand men in all. I was told it stretched for thirty miles, although of course we could only see a fraction of it – the legionaries on foot carrying their heavy packs, the cavalrymen with their javelins glinting, the forest of standards and eagles all bearing the thrilling legend ‘SPQR’ (‘The Senate and People of Rome’), trumpeters and cornet players, archers, slingers, artillerymen, slaves, cooks, scribes, doctors, carts full of baggage, pack mules laden with tents and tools and food and weapons, horses and oxen dragging crossbows and ballistae.

We joined the column around the middle of the morning, and even I, the least military of men, found it exhilarating; even Cicero for that matter was filled with confidence for once. As for young Marcus, he was in heaven, moving back and forth between our section and the cavalry. We rode on horseback. The lictors marched in front of us with their laurelled rods. As we tramped across the plain towards the mountains, the road began to climb and I could see far ahead the reddish-brown dust raised by the endless column and the occasional glitter of steel as a helmet or a javelin caught the sun.

At nightfall we reached the first camp, with its ditch and earthen rampart and its spiked palisade. The tents were already pitched, the fires lit; a wonderful scent of cooking rose into the darkening sky. I remember especially the clink of the blacksmiths’ hammers in the dusk, the whinnying and movement of the horses in their enclosure, and also the pervading smell of leather from the scores of tents, the largest of which had been set aside for Cicero. It stood at the crossroads in the centre of the camp, close to the standards and to the altar, where Cicero that evening presided over the traditional sacrifice to Mars. He bathed and was anointed, dined well, slept peacefully in the fresh air, and the following morning we set off again.

This pattern was repeated for the next fifteen days as we made our way across the mountains of Macedonia towards the border with Illyricum. Cicero constantly expected to receive a summons to confer with Pompey, but none came. We did not know even where the commander-in-chief was, although occasionally Cicero received dispatches, and from these we pieced together a clearer picture of what was happening. Caesar had landed on the fourth day of January with a force of several legions, perhaps fifteen thousand men in all, and had achieved complete surprise, seizing the port of Apollonia, about thirty miles south of Dyrrachium. But that was just one half of his army. While he stayed with the bridgehead, his troopships had set off back to Italy to bring over the second half. (Pompey had never factored into his calculations the audacity of his enemy making two trips.) At this point, however, Caesar’s famous luck ran out. Our admiral, Bibulus, had managed to intercept thirty of his transports. These he set on fire and all their crews he burnt alive, and then he deployed his immense fleet to prevent Caesar’s navy returning.

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:

If you are well I am glad. I myself am well and so is our Tullia. Terentia has been rather out of sorts, but I know for certain that she has now recovered. Otherwise all your domestic affairs are in excellent shape.

You see Pompey’s situation. Driven out of Italy, Spain lost, he is now, to crown it all, blockaded in his camp – a humiliation which I fancy has never previously befallen a Roman general. One thing I do beg of you: if he does manage to escape from his present dangerous position and takes refuge with his fleet, consult your own best interests and at long last be your own friend rather than anybody else’s.

My most delightful Cicero, if it turns out that Pompey is driven from this area too and forced to seek yet other regions of the earth, I hope you will retire to Athens or to any peaceful community you please. Any concessions that you need from the commander-in-chief to safeguard your dignity you will obtain with the greatest ease from so kindly a man as Caesar. I trust to your honour and kindness to see that the courier I am sending you is able to return to me and brings a letter from you.

Cicero’s breast could barely contain all the conflicting emotions aroused by reading this extraordinary missive – delight that Tullia was well, outrage at his son-in-law’s impudence, guilty relief that Caesar’s policy of clemency still extended to him, fear that the letter could fall into the hands of a fanatic like Ahenobarbus who might use it to bring a charge of treason against him …

He scribbled a cautious line to say that he was well and would continue to support the Senate’s cause, and then he had the courier escorted back across our lines.

As the weather began to turn hotter, life became more unpleasant. Caesar had a genius for damming springs and diverting water – it was how he had often won sieges in France and Spain, and now he used the same tactic against us. He controlled the rivers and streams coming down from the mountains and his engineers cut them off. The grass turned brown. Water had to be brought in by sea in thousands of amphorae and was rationed. The senators’ daily baths were forbidden on Pompey’s orders. More importantly, the horses began to fall sick from dehydration and lack of forage. We knew that Caesar’s men were in an even worse state – unlike us, they could not be resupplied with food by sea, and both Greece and Macedonia were closed to them. They were reduced to making their daily bread out of roots they grubbed up. But Caesar’s battle-hardened veterans were tougher than our men; they showed no sign of weakening.

I am not sure how much longer this could have gone on. But about four months after our arrival in Dyrrachium, there was a breakthrough. Cicero was summoned to one of Pompey’s irregular war councils in his vast tent in the centre of the camp, and returned a few hours later looking almost cheerful for once. He told us that two Gallic auxiliaries serving in Caesar’s army had been caught stealing from their legionary comrades and sentenced to be flogged to death. Somehow they had managed to escape and come over to our side. They offered information in return for their lives. There was, they said, a weakness in Caesar’s fortifications some two hundred paces wide, close to the sea: the outer perimeter appeared sound but there was no secondary line behind it. Pompey warned them they would die the most horrible death if what they had said proved to be false. They swore it was true, but begged him to hurry before the hole was plugged. He saw no reason to disbelieve them, and an attack was fixed for dawn the following day.

All that night our troops moved stealthily into position. Young Marcus, now a cavalry officer, was among them. Cicero fretted sleeplessly about his safety, and at first light he and I, accompanied by his lictors and Quintus, went over to watch the battle. Pompey had brought up a huge force. We could not get close enough to see what was happening. Cicero dismounted and we walked along the beach, the waves lapping at our ankles. Our ships were anchored in a line about a quarter of a mile offshore. Up ahead we could hear the noise of fighting mingling with the roar of the sea. The air was dark with clouds of arrows, occasionally lit up by flaming missiles. There must have been five thousand men on the beach. We were asked by one of the military tribunes not to proceed any further because of the danger, so we sat down under a myrtle tree and had something to eat.

Around midday the legion moved off and we followed it cautiously. The wooden fort Caesar’s men had built in the dunes was in our hands, and in the flat lands beyond it thousands of men were deploying. It was very hot. Bodies lay everywhere, pierced by arrows and javelins or with horrible gaping wounds. To our right we saw several squadrons of cavalry galloping towards the fighting. Cicero was sure he spotted Marcus among them and we all cheered them loudly, but then Quintus recognised their colours and announced that they were Caesar’s. At that point Cicero’s lictors hustled him away from the battlefield and we returned to camp.

The battle of Dyrrachium, as it became known, was a great victory. Caesar’s line was irretrievably broken and his entire position thrown into danger. Indeed he would have been utterly defeated that very day had it not been for the network of trenches that slowed up our advance and meant we had to dig in for the night. Pompey was hailed as imperator by his men on the field, and when he got back to the camp in his war chariot, attended by his bodyguards, he raced around inside the perimeter and up and down the torchlit tented streets, cheered by his legionaries.

The next day, towards the end of the morning, far in the distance in the direction of Caesar’s camp, columns of smoke began to rise over the plain. At the same time reports started coming in from all around our front lines that the trenches opposite were empty. Our men ventured out cautiously at first but were soon wandering over the enemy’s fortifications, astonished that so many months of labour could be so readily abandoned. But there was no doubt about it: Caesar’s legionaries were marching off to the east along the Via Egnatia. We could see the dust. Whatever equipment they could not take was burning behind them. The siege was over.

Pompey summoned a meeting of the Senate-in-exile late in the afternoon to decide what should be done next. Cicero asked me to accompany him and Quintus so that he could have a record of what was decided. The sentries guarding Pompey’s tent nodded me through without question and I took up a discreet position, standing at the side, along with the other secretaries and aides-de-camp. There must have been almost a hundred senators present, seated on benches. Pompey, who had been out all day inspecting Caesar’s positions, arrived after everyone else, and was given a standing ovation, which he acknowledged with a touch of his marshal’s baton to the side of his famous quiff.

He reported on the situation of the two armies after the battle. The enemy had lost about a thousand men killed and three hundred taken prisoner. Immediately Labienus proposed that the prisoners should all be executed. ‘I worry they will infect our own men who guard them with their treasonous thoughts. Besides, they have forfeited the right to life.’

Cicero, with a look of distaste, rose to object. ‘We have achieved a mighty victory. The end of the war is in sight. Isn’t now the time to be magnanimous?’

‘No,’ replied Labienus. ‘An example must be made.’

‘An example that can only cause Caesar’s men to fight with even more determination once they learn the fate that awaits them if they surrender.’

‘So be it. This tactic of Caesar’s of offering clemency is a danger to our fighting spirit.’ He glanced pointedly at Afranius, who lowered his head. ‘If we take no prisoners, Caesar will be forced do the same.’

Pompey spoke with a firmness that was designed to settle the matter. ‘I agree with Labienus. Besides, Caesar’s soldiers are traitors who have taken up arms illegally against their own countrymen. That puts them in a different category to our troops. Let’s move on.’

But Cicero wouldn’t let the matter drop. ‘Wait a moment. Are we fighting for civilised values or are we wild beasts? These men are Romans just like us. I would like it to be recorded that in my view this is a mistake.’

‘And I would like it to be recorded,’ said Ahenobarbus, ‘that it isn’t only those who have fought openly on Caesar’s side who should be treated as traitors, but all those who have tried to be neutral, or have argued for peace, or had contact with the enemy.’

Ahenobarbus was warmly applauded. Cicero’s face flushed and he fell silent.

Pompey said, ‘Well then, that’s settled. Now it is my proposal that the entire army, bar let’s say fifteen cohorts which I’ll leave behind to defend Dyrrachium, should set off in pursuit of Caesar with a view to offering him battle at the first opportunity.’

This fateful pronouncement met with loud grunts of approval.

Cicero hesitated, glanced around and then stood up again. ‘I seem to find myself playing the role of perennial contrarian. Forgive me – but is there not a case for seizing this opportunity and instead of chasing Caesar eastwards, sailing west instead to Italy and regaining control of Rome? That is after all supposed to be the point of this war.’

Pompey shook his head. ‘No, that would be a strategic error. If we return to Italy, there will be nothing to stop Caesar conquering Macedonia and Greece.’

‘Let him – I’d trade Macedonia and Greece for Italy and Rome any day. Besides, we have an army there under Scipio.’

‘Scipio can’t beat Caesar,’ retorted Pompey. ‘Only I can beat Caesar. And this war won’t end merely because we’re back in Rome. This war will end only when Caesar is dead.’

At the end of the conference, Cicero approached Pompey and asked for permission to remain behind in Dyrrachium rather than join the army on the campaign. Pompey, plainly irritated by his criticism, looked him up and down with something like contempt, then nodded. ‘I think that’s a good idea.’ He turned from Cicero as if dismissing him, and began discussing with one of his officers the order in which the legions should depart the next day. Cicero waited for their conversation to end, presumably intending to wish Pompey good fortune. But Pompey was too engrossed in the logistics of the march, or at any rate he pretended to be, and eventually Cicero gave up and left the tent.

As we walked away, Quintus asked him why he didn’t want to go with the army.

Cicero said, ‘This global strategy of Pompey’s means we could be stuck out here for years. I can’t support it any longer. Nor to be frank can I face another journey through those damned mountains.’

‘People will say it’s because you’re afraid.’

‘Brother, I am afraid. So should you be. If we win, there’ll be a massacre of good Roman blood – you heard Labienus. And if we lose …’ He left it at that.

When we got back to his tent, he made a half-hearted attempt to persuade his son not to go either, even though he knew it was hopeless: Marcus had shown much bravery at Dyrrachium and despite his youth had been rewarded with the command of his own cavalry squadron. He was eager for battle. Quintus’s son was also determined to fight.

Cicero said, ‘Well then, go if you must. I admire your spirit. However, I shall stay here.’

‘But Father,’ protested Marcus, ‘men will speak of this great clash of arms for a thousand years.’

‘I’m too old to fight and too squeamish to watch others doing it. You three are the soldiers in the family.’ He stroked Marcus’s hair and pinched his cheek. ‘Bring me back Caesar’s head on a stick, won’t you, my darling boy?’ And then he announced that he needed to rest and turned away so that no one could see that he was crying.

Reveille was scheduled for an hour before dawn. Plagued by insomnia it seemed to me that I had barely fallen asleep when the infernal caterwauling of the war horns started. The legion’s slaves came in and began dismantling the tent around me. Everything was timed exactly. Outside the sun had yet to show over the ridge. The mountains were still in shadow. But above them loomed a cloudless blood-red sky.

The scouts moved off at dawn, followed half an hour later by a detachment of Bythinian cavalry, and then, a further half-hour after that, Pompey, yawning loudly, surrounded by his staff officers and bodyguards. Our legion had been chosen for the honour of serving as the vanguard on the march and therefore was the next to leave. Cicero stood by the gate, and as his brother and son and nephew passed, he raised his hand and called farewell to each in turn. This time he did not try to conceal his tears. Two hours later, all the tents were down, the refuse fires were burning and the last of the baggage mules was swaying out of the deserted camp.

With the army gone, we set off to ride the thirty miles to Dyrrachium escorted by Cicero’s lictors. Our road took us past Caesar’s old defensive line, and soon we came upon the spot where Labienus had massacred the prisoners. Their throats had been cut and a gang of slaves was burying the corpses in one of the old defensive ditches. The stench of ripening flesh in the summer heat and the sight of the vultures circling overhead are among the many memories of that campaign I would prefer to forget. We spurred our horses and pressed on to Dyrrachium, reaching it before dusk.

We were billeted away from the cliffs this time for safety, in a house within the walls of the city. Command of the garrison should, in principle, have been awarded to Cicero, who was the senior ex-consul and who still possessed imperium as governor of Cilicia. But it was a sign of the mistrust in which he had come to be held that Pompey gave the position instead to Cato, who had never risen higher than praetor. Cicero was not offended. On the contrary, he was glad to escape the responsibility: the troops Pompey had left behind were his least reliable, and Cicero had serious doubts about their loyalty if it came to fighting.

The days dragged by very slowly. Those senators who, like Cicero, had not gone with the army acted as if the war was already won. For example they drew up lists of those who had stayed behind in Rome, and who would be killed on our return, and whose property would be seized to pay for the war; one of the wealthy men they proscribed was Atticus. Then they squabbled over who would get which house. Other senators fought shamelessly over the jobs and titles that would fall vacant with the demise of Caesar and his lieutenants – Spinther I remember was adamant that he should be pontifex maximus. Cicero observed to me, ‘The one outcome worse than losing this war will be winning it.’

As for him, his mind was full of cares and anxieties. Tullia continued to be short of money and the second instalment of her dowry remained unpaid, despite Cicero’s instructions to Terentia to sell some of his property. All his old worries about her relationship with Philotimus and their fondness for questionable money-making schemes came crowding back into his mind. He chose to convey his anger and suspicion by writing her infrequent, short and chilly letters in which he did not even address her by name.

But his greatest fears were for Marcus and Quintus, still on the march somewhere with Pompey. Two months had passed since their departure. The Senate’s army had pursued Caesar across the mountains to the plain of Thessalonica and had then struck south: that much was known. But where exactly they were now, no one knew, and the further Caesar drew them away from Dyrrachium and the longer the silence went on, the more uneasy the atmosphere in the garrison became.

The commander of the fleet, Caius Coponius, was a clever but highly strung senator who had a strong belief in signs and omens, especially portentous dreams, which he encouraged his men to share with their officers. One day, when there was still no news from Pompey, he came to dine with Cicero. Also at the table were Cato and M. Terentius Varro, the great scholar and poet, who had commanded a legion in Spain and who, like Afranius, had been pardoned by Caesar.

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.’