What happened at the Battle of Dyrrachium?
In 48 BC Julius Caesar crossed the Adriatic and cut Pompey off from the port of Dyrrachium. Although his army was smaller and short of food, he tried to wall Pompey in behind a ring of forts and earthworks some seventeen miles long, while Pompey was fed by sea. After weeks of skirmishing Pompey broke through at the unfinished southern end of the lines by the shore. Caesar’s counterattack ended in a panic in which he lost, by his own count, 960 men and 32 officers. He gave up the siege and marched into Thessaly, where he beat Pompey at Pharsalus a few weeks later.5
Suetonius writes that only twice in the civil war was the outcome of a battle in doubt for Caesar, and that one of them was Dyrrachium, where he was put to flight. The decisive battle that followed is told in the Battle of Pharsalus, and the whole war in our guide to the Roman civil wars.6
Across the Adriatic in winter
In 49 BC Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and within weeks Pompey, the consuls and most of the senate had abandoned Italy and sailed from Brundisium to Dyrrachium. Velleius Paterculus describes Pompey spending the next year gathering legions from every province beyond the sea, the forces of kings and tetrarchs, and fleets meant to stop Caesar from crossing the Adriatic.7
Caesar, by his own account, found ships at Brundisium for only 15,000 legionaries and 500 horse, and he sailed on the fourth day of January by the Roman calendar with seven understrength legions. Suetonius counts the crossing, made in winter through the enemy’s fleets, among his boldest acts. Caesar lists what was waiting for him: nine legions of Roman citizens, two more expected from Syria with Scipio, about 3,000 archers, six cohorts of slingers, 2,000 mercenaries and 7,000 horse.8
Antony brings the second half
The rest of the army was stuck in Italy behind Pompey’s fleet. Dio tells how Caesar tried to cross back alone in a small boat in disguise, telling the frightened captain to take heart because he carried Caesar, and failed to get through the storm. In the end Mark Antony slipped across with three veteran legions, one of recruits and about 800 horse, as Caesar records, and Appian has them come ashore at the port of Nymphaeum.9
Appian adds that the wind dropped in the middle of the voyage and twenty of Pompey’s ships came after the transports, until a sudden breeze filled their sails and carried them clear. Pompey, Dio writes, now pulled back towards Dyrrachium, and Caesar followed, encouraged by the reinforcements.10
The race to Dyrrachium
Caesar offered battle near Asparagium, and Pompey stayed inside his lines. Caesar then set off by a long, difficult road round through the hills, hoping either to force Pompey to follow him or to cut him off from Dyrrachium, where his stores, arms and engines were kept. Pompey at first thought Caesar had left for lack of food. When his scouts told him otherwise he hurried by the shorter road, but Caesar, resting only a small part of the night, reached the town first.11
T. Rice Holmes, who traced the march on the map in 1923, follows Caesar over the wooded hills between the valleys of the Genusus and the Arzen. From his camp near the town, Holmes writes, Caesar could see Pompey’s advance guard winding along the coast road towards him. Theodore Dodge, the American military historian, reckons the circuit at some forty-five miles against Pompey’s straight road of less than twenty-five, and calls it one of those bold operations that show the head and hand of the master.12
Pompey on the rock of Petra
Cut off by land, Pompey entrenched himself on a height Caesar calls Petra, where small ships could come in and shelter from some winds, and had corn and supplies brought from Asia and his other provinces. Holmes describes it as a white bluff, the only rock in that land of clay, and Georg Veith, the Austrian officer who studied the ground before and during the First World War, identifies it as the Skam, the Sasso bianco of the Italians. The Enciclopedia Italiana calls it without doubt the modern Shkamm, which in Albanian means a steep rock.13
Dyrrachium itself, the Pleiades gazetteer notes, had been founded in 627 BC by colonists from Corinth and Corcyra as Epidamnos. Dio records the Roman explanation of its new name and the belief that the old one sounded like the Latin word for loss. It was the main Roman port on that coast.14
A blockade by the weaker army
Caesar then did something unusual. He occupied the hills round Pompey’s camp with redoubts, linked them with earthworks and began to enclose the whole Pompeian army. He gives three reasons: to bring in his own supplies more safely, to stop Pompey’s cavalry from foraging, and to damage Pompey’s reputation once the world heard that he was blockaded and dared not fight. Pompey answered with lines of his own, twenty-four forts enclosing about fifteen miles, so that his men could forage inside them.15
Caesar himself remarks that this method of war was new: those who besiege an enemy usually do so when he is weak or beaten, and with superior forces, whereas he, with fewer men, was enclosing an undefeated army that had plenty of everything. Dodge puts Caesar’s army at about half the size of Pompey’s. Appian gives the circuit of the lines as 1,200 stades and calls the attempt extremely difficult and chimerical, while Caesar later says his works enclosed seventeen miles.16
Roots, bread and water
Caesar’s men soon ran out of corn. They lived on barley, pulse and meat, and on a root Caesar calls chara, which they mixed with milk and baked into a kind of bread. Plutarch and Caesar both tell how they threw loaves of it into the Pompeian outposts, saying they would never stop the siege while the earth grew such roots. Appian says that when deserters showed Pompey the bread he exclaimed that they were fighting wild beasts. Holmes adds that Albanians near Durrës still ate a root they called kelkass.17
Pompey’s men had food from the sea but little water and no grazing. Caesar writes that he dammed or diverted every stream that ran to the sea, that Pompey’s cavalry horses were reduced to leaves and pounded reed roots, and that Pompey finally shipped them away. Suetonius, who tells the story of the wild beasts too, adds that Pompey had the bread of herbs hidden from his own men for fear it would break their spirit.18
Skirmishes along the lines
There was fighting almost every day. In one clash the ninth legion was driven off a hill it was fortifying, and Pompey told his friends he would accept being called an inexperienced general if Caesar’s legions got away without heavy loss. Caesar had hurdles and a trench placed behind them and Antony ordered a charge, and Caesar says the legion withdrew with the loss of only five men. Holmes names the hill Paliama.19
On one day, Caesar writes, six engagements were fought, three at Dyrrachium and three at the lines, with about 2,000 Pompeians killed and no more than twenty Caesarians missing. In one fort every man was wounded, 30,000 arrows were counted, and the shield of the centurion Scaeva had 230 holes. Appian tells Scaeva’s story differently, with a ruse in which the wounded centurion pretended to surrender and killed one of the men who came to fetch him. Dio describes a failed night attempt by Caesar on Dyrrachium itself, which he expected to be betrayed to him.20
Meanwhile in Macedonia and Thessaly
The blockade was not the only front. Caesar had sent Lucius Cassius Longinus and Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus inland to find supplies and to stop Metellus Scipio, who was bringing two legions from Syria to join Pompey. Dio says Longinus was badly beaten in Thessaly by Scipio and a Thracian chief, Sadalus, while Calvinus, after being repulsed from Macedonia, beat Scipio in an ambush and won over a few towns. Appian records another reverse: Caesar’s general Gaius Calvisius lost a whole legion except 800 men to Scipio in Macedonia.21
Mommsen describes Calvinus and Scipio facing each other for a long time on the river Haliacmon, neither able to strike. These detachments mattered later. When Caesar abandoned the coast, it was towards them that he marched, hoping, Dio says, to find corn and to join forces before Pompey could destroy them one by one.22
Two deserters
The turning point, in Caesar’s account, was the desertion of two Allobrogian brothers, Roscillus and Aegus, cavalry officers he had favoured since the Gallic wars, who had been cheating their men of pay. Caesar says no soldier had deserted to Pompey until then. They knew where the works were unfinished, how the guards were posted and which officers were careless, and they told Pompey everything. Mommsen calls them Celtic deserters.23
The breakout by the sea
The weak spot was at the southern end, by the sea. Caesar describes a ditch fifteen feet wide and a rampart ten feet high facing the enemy, and a second rampart 600 feet behind it facing the other way against a landing, with the cross wall that should have joined them by the shore not yet built. Pompey sent sixty cohorts by land at midnight and put light troops and archers into boats, with wicker covers on their helmets against the stones that were the defenders’ only missiles.24
At dawn they struck the cohorts of the ninth legion from front, sea and rear. Caesar says the defenders were driven from both ramparts and the relief cohorts sent by Lentulus Marcellinus were swept up in the flight. A dying eagle bearer handed the eagle to Caesar’s horsemen, and all the centurions of the first cohort except the senior one were killed. The rout stopped only when Antony came down from the nearest fort with twelve cohorts. Holmes dates the attack, with a question mark, to about 9 July by the Roman calendar.25
Caesar’s counterattack goes wrong
Pompey now had a camp on the shore and the sea open behind him. Caesar saw a chance to cut off a Pompeian legion that had moved into an old abandoned camp, and attacked it with thirty-three cohorts in two columns, leading the left himself. The left wing broke in, but the right wing, lost among the old earthworks, followed a rampart that ran from the camp to the river, thinking it the camp wall, and climbed over it with the cavalry behind.26
Pompey came up with the fifth legion and his cavalry. Caesar’s horsemen fled first, the right wing jumped down from a ten-foot rampart into the ditches and the men at the front were trampled, and the left wing ran too, afraid of being trapped between the ramparts. Caesar admits that when he seized the standards of fleeing men and told them to stand, some let go of their horses and kept running and others threw their standards away. Plutarch says one of them raised his sword at Caesar and was cut down by his shield bearer, and Appian tells the same of a standard bearer.27
What saved the army, by Caesar’s own reckoning, was Pompey’s caution: he suspected an ambush and held back, and the same rampart that had misled Caesar’s right wing slowed the Pompeian cavalry. Appian blames Labienus for persuading Pompey to pursue the fugitives outside instead of storming the unguarded camp.28
Counting the losses
Caesar puts his losses that day at 960 rank and file, several Roman knights and 32 military tribunes and centurions, most of them crushed in the ditches and on the ramparts by their own men. Plutarch’s Life of Caesar says 32 standards were captured, and his Life of Pompey that Pompey killed 2,000 of Caesar’s men. Appian says Pompey took 28 standards in the two engagements of the day. Holmes reads the casualty list as 960 men, 32 centurions and 200 horsemen, and the Enciclopedia Italiana gives 1,000 foot, 200 horse and 32 standards. Mommsen speaks of the loss of 1,000 of the best soldiers.29
Pompey was hailed imperator after the battle. Caesar adds that Labienus, his own former lieutenant, asked for the prisoners, mocked them by asking whether veterans were in the habit of running away, and had them all put to death in front of the army. No ancient writer gives a figure for Pompey’s own losses in the breakout.30
A victor in command
Plutarch has Caesar say, as he left his friends that night, that the enemy would have won the war that day if they had had a victor in command. The saying appears in his Life of Pompey too, and Appian and Suetonius give versions of it. Plutarch describes Caesar lying awake all night, convinced that he had shown bad generalship by fighting on a coast commanded by the enemy fleet instead of carrying the war into Macedonia and Thessaly.31
Appian goes further and has Caesar confess to his friends that he had been wrong to encamp before Dyrrachium, where Pompey had abundant supplies, instead of drawing him somewhere he would suffer the same scarcity. Caesar’s own Commentaries say nothing of the kind: they blame the narrow ground, the separation of the army into two parts and fortune.32
What went wrong
Modern judgements are harsh. Mommsen wrote that Caesar had lost the work of four months of gigantic labour and was beaten not merely in tactics but also in strategy. Dodge called the blockade a reckless undertaking that compels admiration for its audacity but must sooner or later come to grief, and a false position brought on by rashness, saved only by Pompey’s failure to strike.33
Holmes was kinder. He argued that the blockade was Caesar’s only possible course and less hazardous than it looks, since the soil was easy to dig and many of the hills were naturally strong, and he answered Napoleon’s charge of rashness by noting that Napoleon had never seen the ground and had no good map. Veith, who had commanded troops in Albania, describes his own soldiers there being driven by hunger to eat the same root as Caesar’s men.34
Pompey’s choice
Pompey now had to decide what to do with his victory. Appian says that at a council of war Afranius advised him to use his command of the sea, leave Caesar wandering in Greece and cross with the infantry to Italy, which was well disposed to him and empty of hostile troops. Pompey rejected it, persuaded by those who said Caesar’s army would soon desert from hunger and that it would be shameful for the victor to run as though beaten. He also wanted, Appian adds, to protect Lucius Scipio in Macedonia.35
Plutarch shows how far the victory had gone to the heads of Pompey’s camp: his wife Cornelia, at Mytilene, believed the war had been ended at Dyrrachium. Dio says Pompey thought he had finished the war, took the title of imperator, but did not wreathe his fasces with laurel. Mommsen thought the Italian plan the more attractive of the choices before him.36
From Dyrrachium to Pharsalus
Caesar called his men together, blamed fortune rather than their courage and degraded a few standard bearers. Caesar and Appian both say the soldiers were so ashamed that they asked to be punished and wanted to fight at once, and Suetonius notes that he chose to console them rather than chastise them. Caesar decided they needed time to recover, sent his baggage off to Apollonia by night and slipped away.37
Pompey followed for a few days and then gave up, Mommsen says, and chose to march inland against Caesar’s detachments instead of crossing to Italy. Veith reckons that about thirty-five days separated the second battle at Dyrrachium from Pharsalus. There, in Thessaly, Pompey accepted battle with an army whose leaders believed the war already won, and was defeated at Pharsalus.38
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