Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome Read Free

by his staff, helmeted, and clad in armor, fifty-four-year-old Julius Caesar wore his paludamentum, the eye-catching scarlet cloak of a Roman general. While his troops waited, he spoke briefly with his cavalry commander, General Nonius Asprenas, finalizing tactics. Then Asprenas galloped away to take up his position—almost certainly joining his cavalry on the right wing, while his deputy, Colonel Arguetius, commanded the mounted troops on the left.
    Caesar gave an order. An orderly mounted close by and who held his red ensign inclined the general’s flag toward the front. An unarmed trumpeter sounded “Advance at the March.” Throughout the army, the trumpets of individual units repeated the call. The eagles of the legions and the standards of the smaller units all inclined forward. As one, the men of Caesar’s army moved off, in perfect step, advancing to the attack at the march, in three lines of ten thousand men each.
    Caesar had hoped to lure his opponents down onto the flat. But ahead, the men of the opposing army didn’t budge, didn’t advance to meet his troops. Instead, they stood stonily in their lines on the hillside, and waited for Caesar’s army to come to them.
    The general commanding the opposition army was Gnaeus Pompey.
    Eldest son of a famous general, Pompey the Great, and grandson of another, he was only in his late twenties and had no military reputation to speak of. He had captained a successful naval strike for his father on the Adriatic a few years back, followed by an unsuccessful land operation in Libya shortly after. More recently he’d led his forces in a gradual, fighting withdrawal through southwestern Spain ahead of Caesar’s advance. That was the sum total of his experience of command. But he was Pompey’s heir, and here in Spain, where his late father was revered, that counted for a lot. Besides, as his deputy commanders he had two of Pompey’s best generals. What was more, one of them had been Caesar’s second-in-command for nine years and knew how Caesar thought and fought.
    While his younger brother Sextus held the regional capital of Córdoba, Gnaeus had assembled and equipped a large field army of between S TA R I N G D E F E AT I N T H E F A C E
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    fifty thousand and eighty thousand men. But few of his units were of quality. Nine of his thirteen legions were brand-new, made up of raw, inexperienced teenagers drafted from throughout western Spain and Portugal.
    The weight of responsibility for success in this battle would lay with his four veteran legions.
    There was his father’s elite 1st Legion, the Pompeian equivalent of Caesar’s 10th. The loyal, tough 1st had taken part in all the major battles of the civil war, but unlike the undefeated 10th Legion, it had been forced to fight its way out of one disaster after another. There were the 2nd and Indigena Legions, both originally Pompeian units that had gone over to Caesar, only to defect back to the Pompeys when Gnaeus and Sextus arrived in Spain the previous year. Then there was the 8th Legion, a brother unit of the 10th and one of three Caesarian legions to recently desert to the Pompeys. Young Gnaeus’s suspicions had been raised by these mass defections and he’d only retained the 8th, sending the other two turncoat legions, the 9th and the 13th, to his brother at Córdoba.
    The previous day, young Pompey had set up camp on the plain near Munda. Caesar had arrived with his legions after nightfall and set up his own camp five miles away. Then, in the early hours of the morning, Pompey had formed up his army in battle order on the slope below the town, determined to bring Caesar to battle. Pompey had decided to venture all and capitalize on his numerical superiority before his supporters tired of retreating and deserted the cause. As Pompey’s advisers had no doubt suggested, Caesar had been quick to accept the invitation to fight. “To Arms”
    had sounded throughout his camp shortly after scouts woke him with news