What happened at the Battle of Thapsus?
In April 46 BC Julius Caesar laid siege to the town of Thapsus on the coast of Roman Africa to force the republican army of Quintus Metellus Scipio and King Juba of Numidia into battle. Scipio marched round the lagoon behind the town to block Caesar in, and while his men were still building their camp Caesar’s legions attacked without waiting for orders. Slingers and archers turned the elephants back into Scipio’s own lines, the army broke, and the fugitives were cut down even as they tried to surrender. Scipio, Juba and Cato all died within days, and Caesar’s war in Africa was over.5
After Pharsalus the war against Caesar moved to Africa, where King Juba and Pompey’s father-in-law Scipio had built up a large army, and Cato joined them after a hard march. The battle that began the Senate’s defeat is told in the Battle of Pharsalus, and the whole war in our guide to the Roman civil wars.6
The war moves to Africa
Pompey was killed in Egypt in 48 BC, but, as Velleius Paterculus puts it, his name still lived. In Africa the war was led by Quintus Metellus Scipio, Pompey’s father-in-law, and by King Juba of Numidia, and Cato brought his legions to them across the desert. Velleius says Cato refused the supreme command the soldiers offered him and took orders from Scipio, his superior in rank.7
Appian puts the forces advancing against Caesar at eight legions, 20,000 horse and thirty elephants under Scipio, and with Juba some 30,000 foot, 20,000 Numidian horse and sixty elephants. He says Caesar’s men were alarmed above all by the Numidian cavalry and the elephants, which they had never fought.8
A landing with three thousand men
The African War, the account of the campaign written by an officer in Caesar’s army, says Caesar reached Lilybaeum in Sicily on 17 December, impatient to sail with only one legion of recruits and 600 horse. Six legions and 2,000 cavalry were eventually gathered, but storms scattered the fleet, and when Caesar landed near Hadrumetum he had about 3,000 infantry and 150 cavalry with him.9
Suetonius tells how Caesar stumbled as he disembarked and turned the bad omen round by crying out that he held Africa fast. To mock a prophecy that the Scipios were bound to win in Africa, he kept in his camp an obscure member of the Cornelian family nicknamed Salvito.10
Surrounded at Ruspina
A few days after landing Caesar nearly lost everything. Near Ruspina, the African War relates, Labienus, Caesar’s former lieutenant now fighting for the republicans, came on with a long, dense line of cavalry mixed with light Numidian infantry, which from a distance looked like foot soldiers. The Numidians ran out between the horsemen, threw their javelins and fell back, and Caesar’s men, chasing them, were picked off from the flank. Caesar ordered that no man go more than four feet from the standards, but the enemy cavalry closed round his small force until it was fighting in a ring.11
The African War gives Labienus riding bareheaded along the front and mocking a recruit, and a veteran of the Tenth throwing off his helmet so that Labienus would know him and driving his javelin into Labienus’ horse. Caesar broke out by extending his line and turning every other cohort to face the rear, splitting the encircling horsemen in two. Holmes tells the same story and calls it a narrow escape from defeat.12
Months of manoeuvre
For about four months Caesar waited for his reinforcements and tried in vain to bring the republicans to battle on good ground, around Ruspina, Uzita and Aggar. The Enciclopedia Italiana counts four months of campaigning before Thapsus, and Dodge thinks the African campaign showed a lack of decisiveness unlike Caesar. Juba joined Scipio with, by the African War’s count, three legions, 800 bridled horse, many Numidians riding without bridles and light infantry.13
Georg Veith, the Austrian officer who studied the African battlefields for Kromayer’s Antike Schlachtfelder in 1912, divided the campaign into periods named after Ruspina, Uzita and Aggar, followed by Thapsus. Holmes notes that Scipio and his allies, whatever their cavalry, could not match Caesar’s regular infantry.14
The march to Thapsus
Unable to draw his enemies onto level ground, Caesar left Aggar at the third watch of the night of 4 April, marched sixteen miles and camped before Thapsus, a coastal town held for Scipio by Vergilius with a strong garrison. The author of the African War says he began at once to surround it with siege works and to occupy strong points around it. Holmes dates the march, by the true seasons, to early February.15
Dio explains the trap. Thapsus stood on a kind of peninsula with the sea on one side and a lagoon on the other, and the narrow, marshy ground between them could be reached by two roads running along either side of the marsh. Scipio could not abandon so loyal a town, and Mommsen thought that garrisoning it at all had given Caesar an easy target. The Pleiades gazetteer places Thapsus at Ras Dimass, near Bekalta in Tunisia.16
Scipio goes round the lagoon
Scipio followed along the high ground and camped eight miles from Thapsus. He first tried to reach the town by the narrow strip between the lagoon and the sea, no more than a mile and a half wide, but Caesar had built a fort there the day before and held it with three cohorts. Scipio then marched round the other side of the lagoon through the next day and night and, at first light, began to fortify a new camp a mile and a half from the sea, close to Caesar’s works.17
Veith reckoned that march round the lagoon at about thirty kilometres. In his reconstruction Juba and Afranius stayed behind in separate camps to the south with about half the army, about five legions, while Scipio brought five or six legions, most of the elephants and his share of the cavalry to the northern isthmus. Holmes thought the plan was to shut Caesar in and starve him, and that the ground was too narrow for the Numidian horse.18
The lines drawn up
Caesar left the proconsul Asprenas with two legions to hold his camp, sent part of his fleet round to threaten Scipio’s rear and raise a shout on a signal, and marched against Scipio with a force in light order. He found the enemy line drawn up in front of their unfinished rampart with elephants on both wings, while others were still digging behind them.19
The African War gives Caesar’s order of battle in three lines: the Tenth and Seventh legions on the right, the Eighth and Ninth on the left, and five cohorts of the Fifth on each wing as a fourth line to face the elephants, with archers and slingers on the wings. Holmes gives a different order, with the Tenth and Ninth on the right and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth on the left, with recruits in the centre. He counts 64 elephants in the enemy line.20
The trumpeter who would not wait
As Caesar went along the ranks on foot, encouraging the veterans and the recruits, he and his officers could see Scipio’s men running to and fro, in and out of the gates of the unfinished camp. His officers begged him to give the signal. Caesar refused, saying a disorderly rush was not his way of fighting, and kept holding the line back.21
Then a trumpeter on the right wing, forced by the soldiers, sounded the charge without orders, and every cohort surged forward although the centurions stood in their way and tried to hold them back. The African War says Caesar, seeing he could not stop them, gave the watchword Good Luck and galloped at the enemy’s front. Mommsen and Dodge tell the same story, Dodge adding that it was the restless Tenth legion that began it.22
Elephants turned back
On the right the slingers and archers poured stones, lead bullets and arrows at the elephants. Frightened by the noise and the missiles, the beasts wheeled round, trampled the troops packed behind them and stampeded towards the half-finished gates of their own camp, and the Moorish cavalry beside them fled too. Dio describes the same thing: Caesar threw the elephants into confusion with slings and arrows and broke into the camp with the fugitives.23
The African War tells of a veteran of the Fifth legion who attacked a wounded elephant that was crushing an unarmed man, was lifted into the air by its trunk and hacked at it until it dropped him and ran. Appian says the Fifth legion had asked to face the elephants and that ever since it carried an elephant on its standards, and Dodge repeats it. Mommsen calls Thapsus the last great battle in which elephants were used.24
Was Caesar in the battle?
Plutarch gives two versions. In the first, Caesar outflanked some of the enemy, attacked others in front and took three camps at the first onset. In the second, which he reports from other writers, Caesar was not in the action at all: his usual sickness came on as he was drawing up the army, and he was carried to a nearby tower and stayed there while the battle was fought.25
Dodge thought the epilepsy story fitted badly with the other accounts, but admitted that the lack of control Caesar showed over his men at the start and the end of the battle lent it some colour. The African War, written by someone who was there, has Caesar riding at the head of the charge.26
Massacre on the hill
The garrison of Thapsus sallied out by the sea gate and waded waist-deep into the water, but the slaves and camp followers drove them back with stones and javelins. Scipio’s men fled first to the camp they had left the day before, found it unguarded, then ran for Juba’s camp and found it already taken. They gathered on a hill and lowered their arms in the military salute of surrender.27
It did them no good. The African War says Caesar’s veterans were so enraged that they killed even men of culture on their own side whom they called ringleaders, and massacred every one of Scipio’s troops though Caesar himself was watching and begging them to spare them. Mommsen blamed the habit of civil war and the bitterness of the recent mutiny, and Dio says the soldiers spared not even those who came over. Velleius, by contrast, praises Caesar’s clemency to the vanquished in Africa.28
Counting the dead
The African War says Caesar took three camps, killed 10,000 of the enemy and lost 50 men missing and a few wounded, and that he then paraded 64 captured elephants in front of Thapsus to persuade the garrison to give up. Plutarch gives 50,000 enemy dead for fewer than 50 of Caesar’s men, and Mommsen followed him. Holmes accepted 10,000 and called Plutarch’s figure an absurd exaggeration. The African War’s author was an eyewitness on the winning side, and no account from the other side survives.29
The accounts also disagree about how hard the fighting was. In the African War the line broke almost at once. Appian says the battle was long, severe and doubtful in every part of the field until evening. Dodge writes that Scipio’s troops held their own for some hours. Appian adds that nearly 80,000 men, the whole republican army in Africa, were destroyed.30
Thapsus holds out
The town that had caused the battle did not surrender at once. The African War says Caesar drew up the 64 captured elephants, still in their towers and harness, in front of the walls to show Vergilius what had happened, and invited him to give up, reminding him of his own clemency. Vergilius made no answer. The next day Caesar held a parade in sight of the town, rewarded his veterans and decorated men for gallantry.31
He then left the proconsul Rebilus with three legions to continue the siege of Thapsus and Gnaeus Domitius with two to besiege Thysdra, and sent Messalla ahead with the cavalry to Utica, following himself. Dodge records the same dispositions.32
Juba, Scipio and Cato
Juba fled to his kingdom, where no one would take him in, and died with the Roman general Petreius: Dio says the two fought a duel, Appian that they killed each other at a banquet. Scipio escaped by sea and was caught by a storm. Appian says he met an enemy fleet, fought until he was overpowered and stabbed himself, Dio that he was cast ashore in Mauretania and killed himself for fear of Caesar’s ally Sittius, and Dodge that he fell fighting Sittius at Hippo.33
At Utica Cato heard the news three days later. Appian describes how he gave ships to everyone who wanted to escape, put the public accounts in order, dined as usual, read Plato’s dialogue on the soul and stabbed himself, and when doctors sewed up the wound tore it open again. Dio tells the same story and adds that Cato would not accept Caesar’s pardon, which he considered more hateful than death.34
A new province and a triumph
Caesar made Juba’s kingdom a Roman province, Africa Nova, and gave it to the historian Sallust to govern. Dio adds that Sallust took bribes and plundered it, so that his own histories condemned him. Thapsus and Hadrumetum were fined heavily, Dodge records, and Caesar sailed for Sardinia in April and reached Rome in late May.35
Holmes notes that the senate voted forty days of thanksgiving for the victory, twice as many as for the defeat of Vercingetorix. Suetonius lists the African triumph among the four Caesar celebrated in a single month after vanquishing Scipio, and Dodge points out that it was presented as a triumph over King Juba, since Romans could not triumph over fellow citizens.36
At Utica, Appian adds, Caesar pardoned the townspeople and Cato’s son, sent Pompey’s daughter and her two children safely to her brother Gnaeus, and put to death all the members of the republican council of three hundred he could find.37
How the battle has been judged
Mommsen thought Scipio made two blunders: garrisoning Thapsus so strongly that it became an easy target, and then fighting for it on ground where infantry decided the day. Appian says the defeated attributed everything to Caesar’s fortune, though their commanders had thrown away the chance to wear him down. Dodge calls Thapsus the victory Caesar prepared but his men won.38
Not everyone agrees that Caesar planned it well. Veith records, as the one dissenting voice among the scholars he reviewed, the German scholar Langhammer’s view that Caesar walked into a trap at Thapsus and was saved only by extraordinary luck. The Enciclopedia Italiana sees the battle as Caesar exploiting the division of his enemies and their poor position, and says it decided the African campaign in his favour.39
