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

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    up a hill like this. An amateur, or a man who had become accustomed to victory, who had underestimated his opponents, who was impatient to bring the war to an end. If the Pompeians charged down the hill now, there was every possibility that Caesar’s men would break—even the vaunted legionaries of the mighty 10th. And, veterans or not, they would run for their lives.
    Swiftly dismounting, Caesar grabbed a shield from a startled legionary of the 10th in a rear rank, then barged through his troops, up the slope, all the way to the shattered front rank, with his staff officers, hearts in mouths, jumping to the ground and hurrying after him. Dragging off his helmet with his right hand and casting it aside so that no one could mistake who he was, he stepped out in advance of the front line.
    According to the classical historian Plutarch, Caesar called to his troops, nodding toward the tens of thousands of teenage recruits on the Pompeian side: “Aren’t you ashamed to let your general be beaten by mere boys?”
    Greeted by silence, he cajoled his men, he berated them, he encouraged them, while his opponents smiled down from above. But none of his panting, sweating, bleeding legionaries took a forward step. Then he turned to the staff officers who’d followed him.
    “If we fail here, this will be the end of my life, and of your careers,”
    Caesar said, according to Appian, another classical reporter of the battle.
    Caesar then drew his sword and strode up the slope, proceeding many yards ahead of his men toward the Pompeian line.
    A junior officer on Pompey’s side yelled an order, and his men, those within range of Caesar, loosed off a volley of missiles in his direction.
    According to Appian, two hundred javelins flew toward the lone, exposed figure of Caesar. The watching men of the 10th held their breath. No one could live through a volley like that. Not even the famously lucky Julius Caesar. . . .

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    IMPATIENT FOR GLORY
    n the spring of 61 b.c., the staff at the governor’s palace at Córdoba would have stood anxiously awaiting the arrival of the new I governor of the province of Baetica, so-called Farther Spain. Several of them had probably served under him eight years before, in 69 b.c., when he’d been the province’s quaestor, its chief financial administrator, under the then governor, Major General Vetus. They would have known him as a man with a phenomenal memory and an extraordinary grasp of detail. His name was Gaius Julius Caesar, and at the age of thirty-eight he was about to embark on a career that would make him one of the most famous men of all time.
    That day, a small, lean, narrow-faced general alighted from a litter and strode purposefully up the steps into the palace. Almost certainly he would have remembered men he hadn’t seen in eight years and greeted them by name. His hair had thinned over those years. According to Suetonius, conscious of his growing baldness, Caesar brushed his hair forward to disguise it, not altogether successfully, and donned headwear whenever appropriate. Later, on official occasions, he would habitually wear the crown of laurel leaves that went with the honors granted him by the Senate. His skin was pale and soft, and it appears that despite all the time he would spend in the field in the coming years he would never acquire a deep tan.
    Appian says Caesar’s overland journey from Rome took twenty-four days. Some might have wanted to rest after more than three weeks on the road, but impatience would be a recurring feature of the career of Julius Caesar, and he was in a hurry to begin making his mark on the world.
    Only the previous year, at age thirty-seven, he’d been appointed a praetor, which brought with it the equivalent modern-day military rank of major 6

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    I M PAT I E N T F O R G L O R Y
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    general. Most of his contemporaries had achieved a praetorship as much as eight years