The Horse Changer (23 page)

Brutus processed military decisions exactly as men shape law in the chambers of the senate. He was anxious to play the role of Rome’s liberator. To his thinking liberators do not give orders in the same manner as tyrants do. Rather, they build consensus. He was an idealist, of course. That created a certain degree of the unintended silliness in his command, but I must say whenever he spoke of liberty he affected all of us. I cannot recall any decision he made which did not include some philosophical touchstone. He was a hard man to despise, for all that I had loved the man he had murdered. But then, to be fair, I did not become well acquainted with the true character of Brutus at that point.

Once Cassius crossed the Hellespont, I joined his army. Unlike Brutus, Cassius had no interest in the opinions of tribunes and prefects; I attended none of his staff meetings. Still, I could see differences in the commands of the two men. Our food and fodder came punctually into our camp without the usual sorts of reminders being sent up the line. Our equipment was always in perfect order and when there were problems we had replacements or repairs often on the very day we made the requisition. A real general, in other words – not a philosopher on a horse. Or so Cassius seemed in the beginning.

If I had started to love my new patron, it all came to a halt on the morning Cassius finally rode out to inspect his legions. To my astonishment he sat atop Hannibal. It was easy enough to understand how Cassius had come to own my stallion: he had defeated Dolabella. In the aftermath of their battle he claimed Dolabella’s property as the spoils of war. Except that Hannibal was not Dolabella’s horse.

I sent word through our chain of command that Hannibal was my horse, bought from the eques Seius through the services of a Tuscan horse-trader whose name I provided, if verification was required. I concluded my letter by explaining that Dolabella had taken Hannibal without my permission. As such, the animal was still my property, and I should very much like him returned to me.

Cassius, who possessed the wealth of the orient, ignored my letter.

Our Thracian mercenaries were exceptionally skilled at the kind of fighting that patrols encounter, but this particular cohort was new to Roman discipline and needed extensive training. Scaeva performed this task admirably. That left me with the responsibility of bringing my staff of junior tribunes up to standard. These fellows were mostly from the great families of Rome, all of them splendidly educated in Greek literature. They could ride and most had some concept of which end of a sword to grab, but they were soft and spoiled. Schoolboys really. The worst of it was their fondness for jeering at the weakest fellow in our corps, a chubby tribune named Quintus Horatius Flaccus – Horace. Horace had originally been in the army of Brutus, severing as a legionary tribune. Brutus had loved Horace’s wit and poetry and assumed he would do well in a command position. When there were a number of complaints, Brutus sent his friend to serve as an officer in the auxiliaries. Whether by chance or design, Horace ended up in the army Cassius commanded.

Horace’s father had bought his son a fine education, but neither he nor his son had any interest in a political career. That meant Horace had never intended to become an officer in the army and was ill prepared for the challenges of such a life. He knew enough to ride a horse, but he was not good at it. When it came to handling a weapon he was perfectly awful. Nearly everything he attempted brought gales of laughter from the others. Seeing nothing funny about incompetence I made sure the abuse stopped. Rather than speak to the issue of hazing directly, I called out the loudest of the bullies to pair with me when we practiced sword fighting. I always gave the fellow a practice shield and a proper helmet so we might make a fight of it, then I grabbed up two practice swords for myself. I never bothered with anything more than the cuirass, which I wore habitually. If two fellows had abused Horace or if one had laughed harder than the rest at someone’s joke, I called them both forward for a session. A swipe at their helmeted heads, a hard poke in the chest, a crack on the fist, or a slap across the back of his thighs: I delivered the blows with the easy indifference of a master swordsman. Bright fellows that they were, they caught on to what I was doing and the hazing soon stopped.

Horace was actually a remarkably clever fellow; he had simply no talent for war. In fact, no one in our army possessed a finer command of the Greek language, with the possible exception of Junius Brutus and the Athenian nobility. For the chance to miss extra training sessions, Horace was happy to write my reports and was soon issuing orders in my name to our Thracians. These fellows knew no Latin and refused to comprehend what Greek I spoke to them.

At our evening meals, with a sack of wine passed around to loosen our cares, Horace would often recite the most wonderful poems. All were original, though some were satires of quite familiar verses. His most popular recitations were wickedly scatological, but sometimes he was simply clever; others answered him with their own creations, for we were erudite in the extreme, but these were never to Horace’s standard, and Horace was soon recognised as our corps’ unofficial poet laureate.

In the beginning, Scaeva was not really charmed by Horace. To his thinking Horace performed the same clerical work for me that a slave would do, if I had owned one. As for his wit and poetry, that counted very little in Scaeva’s worldview. A lifetime in the legions had taught him to appreciate martial valour and little else, but one evening Horace turned the old Cyclops into a hero with a poem in the heroic meter, the dactylic hexameter that Homer employed. It celebrated the day Cassius Scaeva lost his eye as he commanded a century of men in a battle that had famously stopped one of Pompey’s legions.

When Horace had finished his recitation old Scaeva was so touched he had to leave our campfire. A few days afterwards Scaeva confided to me that he thought Horace might be useful holding our horses, should we ever need to go somewhere on foot. Scant as it was, it was more praise than he offered the other officers under my command.

In late summer, we received our orders to move in advance of the army on its march to Philippi. Our patrols, finding no enemy resistance, soon discovered a splendid site for the army, two miles west of the city. Our position actually straddled the Via Egnatia, with a camp to either side of the highway. A rugged line of cliffs along our northern flank and a vast marsh to the south guarded our flanks. The marsh actually spanned a distance of eight miles from north to south and ran from the very edge of our southern camp all the way to the sea. From east to west the marsh extended nearly three miles. The ground was inhospitable to a man on foot, utterly impossible for horses, so it served as a barrier against any flanking manoeuvres by enemy cavalry.

Our army occupied two large hills rising up to either side of the highway. Cassius claimed the southern hill, Brutus the northern one. The river, which fed the marsh, lay to the east of our camp. This provided us with the luxury of fresh water, while requiring the enemy to use well water. The highway that our two camps straddled kept supplies coming from Asia Minor, so long as our fleet guarded the Hellespont. In total, our generals commanded seventeen legions, divided evenly between the two commanders. There were another fifty thousand auxiliaries in the combined armies; almost half of them were cavalry. Most of our legions were close to full capacity, roughly five thousand men per legion. I would guess our total number of combatants amounted to one hundred thirty thousand men, with another ten thousand slaves and servants. Add to that number sixty thousand horses and mules. Antony and Caesar fielded roughly the same count of infantry, though easily ten thousand fewer cavalry. As with our own army, their legions were filled with veterans. That meant neither army was likely to panic; it also promised heavy casualties on both sides once the fighting began.

To keep the loyalty of their soldiers, each of the four generals paid his men from his own purse. They also promised their men splendid bonuses in the wake of a decisive victory. Having lost everything to the proscriptions that winter, those of us in the service of Cassius and Brutus were especially hungry. To put it plainly, paydays and the prospect of bonuses meant everything.

Once Antony’s legions began their march across Macedonia I spent nearly two weeks in western Macedonia on patrols with my Thracian cohort. Twice we encountered Antony’s scouts and made a fight of it, but these were quickly finished, as cavalry fights so often are. From the men we captured in these skirmishes I learned that Antony was coming at our position with eight legions. Caesar had crossed the Adriatic after Antony but, for reasons that were not entirely clear, he and his legions remained on the coast. All the men we interrogated said the rumour in Antony’s camp was that young Caesar was ill. Some said dying. This was critical news, which I sent back to Cassius at once, though Cassius did nothing with it.

Antony arrived with his eight legions at Philippi in mid-September. Quite unbelievably, he established his camp only a mile from our fortifications. Our splendid position was suddenly compromised by Antony’s choice of a campsite. It meant that after the armies had formed for battle they would be quite close to one another. Nor would there be any room at either side of our battle lines for the cavalry to manoeuvre. I expected Cassius if not Brutus to understand the problem at a glance. All we had to do was attack before Antony could set up his defences. We needed to drive him back three or four furlongs. Instead, our generals allowed Antony to place his camp where he pleased.

Antony established a ditch on the evening of his arrival. While this was being dug we had orders to remain behind a long palisade that fronted our two camps. Afterwards, we watched the enemy bring down timber from the forest. With these logs they erected a palisade behind their ditch, exactly like our own.

It made no sense to me that we let Antony construct such elaborate defensive works. We outnumbered his force two-to-one. Whether we swept down against his army with our own or simply harassed those parties collecting timber, we might have damaged him. Instead, we watched quietly until, a week later, Caesar joined Antony’s army.

From that point forward our armies began turning out each morning for battle. Because the legions of Cassius and Brutus enjoyed the high ground, much as Gnaeus Pompey had done in his battle against Julius Caesar at Ronda, Brutus and Cassius were content to form a battle line then wait for an attack.

My cohort was supposed to defend the army’s left wing, reinforcing the legion closest to the marsh. Should our infantry break through the enemy’s right wing, I would naturally lead my Thracian cohort forward, taking as many of the enemy as possible as they ran for their camp. In normal circumstances there would be ground to our left and considerable space between the back of our legions and the camp palisades. At Philippi there was no room for movement. Cassius and Brutus had let Antony compress the distance between the two armies. This meant our cavalry, far superior in number to Antony’s and Caesar’s, would have little or no effect on the outcome of the battle. Only in a rout would the majority of us be let loose to fight. And of course since we intended to establish a defensive posture a rout was unlikely.

Of all our cavalry, my cohort had the very worst of it, for we were set against the marsh with a legion immediately before us and our camp’s ditch and palisade close behind. I might send messengers behind the lines so long as we stood at formation, but there was no space available to take all my men at once.

That is not to say all of our cavalry units were useless. Once the armies faced one another, there was any number of skirmishes between the cavalries on both sides. We employed four thousand Parthian archers who spent their day riding between the two armies firing their arrows into the enemy. Antony’s and Caesar’s lancers came out to clear these fellows away and to form a cover for their own archers. We answered with attacks by heavy and light cavalry. So there were always horses and archers on the narrow strip of ground between the armies, but the infantry, with which battles are won and lost, stood by quietly like spectators at the races.