From the death of Sulla to the murder of Caesar — the years in which the conquest of the world became the private property of a few great men.
Sulla laid down his dictatorship and died in his bed in 78 B.C., certain that he had fixed the Republic in place forever. He had crippled the tribunate, doubled the Senate, and settled his veterans on confiscated Italian land. What he could not repair was the memory he himself had made: that a Roman general with a loyal army could take the city by force, publish the names of his enemies, and rewrite the law with the sword. The forms of the constitution survived him. The restraint that had once animated them did not.
The settlement began to come apart at once. The consul Lepidus tried to overturn it and raised the dispossessed of Italy; he was crushed. In Spain a gifted Marian officer, Sertorius, held out for years as the head of an alternative Roman state, and it took the Republic the better part of a decade to grind him down. To fight him the Senate reached, as it would reach again and again in this chapter, for an irregular expedient: it gave a proconsul’s army to a young man named Pompey, who had never held any of the offices that were supposed to come first.
Pompey had made his name in Sulla’s civil war as a private commander barely out of his twenties — ruthless enough that his enemies called him adulescentulus carnifex, “the teenage butcher.” Sulla, half in mockery, had saluted him as Magnus, “the Great.” When Sulla balked at granting him a triumph, the young man is said to have faced the dictator down.
“More people worship the rising than the setting sun.” Pompey to Sulla, as reported by Plutarch, Life of Pompey — trans. J. Dryden, rev. A. H. Clough (public domain)
From Sulla's retirement to the death of Cleopatra: Pompey's East, Caesar's Gaul, and Egypt.
Sulla lays down his dictatorship. Rome governs Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, southern Gaul, Macedonia, Africa and Asia, and holds a command in Cilicia against the pirates. In Spain the exile Quintus Sertorius, a Marian general, is holding much of the peninsula against the government at Rome.
Nicomedes IV of Bithynia dies and leaves his kingdom to Rome; Cyrene, bequeathed in 96, is at last organised as a province. Mithridates of Pontus answers by invading Bithynia, and the consul Lucullus is sent east. In 73 he relieves the siege of Cyzicus.
Lucullus has driven Mithridates out of Pontus and beaten Tigranes of Armenia at Tigranocerta (69), but his army will go no further. Quintus Metellus completes the conquest of Crete. The Gabinian law gives Pompey a command over the whole sea, and he clears it of pirates in a single summer. Sertorius is dead and Spain obedient again.
With Mithridates beaten, Pompey redraws the East. Syria, the last remnant of the Seleucid kingdom, becomes a province (64); the coast of Pontus is joined to Bithynia; Cilicia is enlarged. Jerusalem falls after a siege of three months. Galatia, Cappadocia and Judaea keep their rulers as clients of Rome.
A tribune's law annexes Cyprus from its Ptolemaic king, and Cato is sent to collect its treasure. Caesar takes up his five-year command in Gaul; within months he has turned back the migrating Helvetii near Bibracte and driven the German king Ariovistus back across the Rhine.
Eight campaigns have carried Roman arms to the Rhine and the Channel, and twice across it into Britain (55, 54). The great revolt of 52 ends at Alesia; Uxellodunum falls in 51. In the East, Crassus and most of his army have been destroyed by the Parthians at Carrhae (53). Egypt's king rules by grace of a Roman garrison.
Caesar crosses the Rubicon in 49. He beats the Pompeians in Spain at Ilerda (49), is checked at Dyrrachium and wins at Pharsalus (48), then at Thapsus in Africa (46) and Munda in Spain (45). King Juba's Numidia becomes the province of Africa Nova; Cyprus is handed back to Egypt. On the Ides of March, 44, Caesar is killed.
Caesar's heirs beat his murderers at Philippi (42) and then fall out. Octavian's fleet defeats Antony and Cleopatra off Actium (31); the next year both are dead, and Egypt passes to Rome as the property of its conqueror. Mauretania, bequeathed by its king in 33, is also under Roman administration.
Province outlines: Ancient World Mapping Center, “Roman Empire c. 60 BC”, “c. AD 117 extent” and “c. AD 200 extent and provinces” (ODbL; after the Barrington Atlas). Each territory is drawn at its c. 60 BC or c. AD 200 extent from the date it came under Roman rule, so earlier inland limits are drawn too large. The c. 60 BC Bithynia–Pontus strip is divided here at the river Parthenius, and Spain beyond the c. 60 BC limit is shown as a single band; both are approximations. Coastlines and rivers: Natural Earth. Sites: Pleiades.
While Roman armies fought Roman exiles in Spain, a breakout from a gladiatorial school at Capua grew into the most frightening war Italy had seen since Hannibal. Its leader, a Thracian named Spartacus, gathered escaped gladiators, herdsmen, and field-slaves from the great estates until he commanded a host tens of thousands strong. Twice he broke Roman consular armies; twice he marched the length of the peninsula. The rebellion was not a programme for abolishing slavery — no such idea existed — but it laid bare how much human coercion the profitable Roman countryside silently required.
After a string of humiliating defeats, the command was given to Marcus Crassus, the richest man in Rome, who restored discipline by the old brutal expedient of decimation and hemmed the rebels into the toe of Italy behind a wall of his own building. Spartacus fell in the final battle in 71 B.C.; some six thousand of his captured followers were crucified at intervals along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome, a hundred and thirty miles of warning left to rot. Pompey, returning from Spain, cut down the fugitives and coolly claimed to have ended the war himself. The two men — rivals already — camped their armies outside Rome and were elected consuls together for 70 B.C., dismantling as they went the very Sullan settlement they had risen to defend.
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Rome fed herself from the sea, and by the 60s B.C. the sea had become unsafe. Decades of civil war had hollowed out the coastal authorities, and pirate fleets based in Cilicia raided shipping, sacked ports, and even carried off Roman magistrates for ransom. When the grain supply of the capital itself was threatened, the assembly acted where the Senate feared to. The lex Gabinia of 67 B.C. gave Pompey a sweeping command over the entire Mediterranean and its coasts — money, ships, and men on a scale never before entrusted to one man.
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He justified it with terrifying efficiency. Dividing the sea into sectors and sweeping from west to east, he cleared the shipping lanes in a single season and resettled the defeated pirates inland as farmers, turning suppression into administration. The following year a second law, the lex Manilia, handed him the long war in the East against Mithridates of Pontus. Pompey finished it, annexed Syria, intervened in a dynastic quarrel in Judaea and entered the Temple in Jerusalem, and redrew the map of the Roman East into a lasting system of provinces and client kings.
He came home in 62 B.C. the richest and most celebrated Roman alive — and then, at the height of his power, disbanded his army and waited, like an ordinary citizen, for the Senate to ratify his eastern settlement and grant land to his veterans. The Senate, jealous and small, refused to do either. In that refusal lay the seed of everything that followed: Rome had learned to create commanders greater than the state, but had found no honest way to make them ordinary again.
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Scroll to follow the campaign that won every battle and lost the war — the one the lex Manilia handed to Pompey.
Mithridates of Pontus overruns Bithynia, just bequeathed to Rome, and lays siege to Cyzicus. Lucullus does not fight him: he pins the huge royal army against the city and lets hunger and winter destroy it. The war turns before a blow is struck.
He carries the war into Mithridates' own kingdom, routs him at Cabira, and takes the Greek city of Amisus after a long siege. The king flees east to his son-in-law Tigranes of Armenia, leaving his crown behind.
When Tigranes refuses to surrender the fugitive, Lucullus crosses the Euphrates and marches on the Armenian king's brand-new capital. Before its walls a handful of legions shatter a vast royal host — the deepest Roman thrust into the East so far.
He pushes north toward the old capital Artaxata and takes Nisibis in the south, but the Armenian highland, the weather and his own unpaid, mutinous soldiers stop him short and force the army back. Every battle won; the war unwon.
While Lucullus' men sulk in camp, Mithridates slips back into Pontus and destroys a Roman force at Zela. Brilliant, rich, and hated by his troops, Lucullus is superseded: the lex Manilia hands the unfinished war to Pompey.
Sites: Pleiades — Cabira has no Pleiades record and is placed by hand near modern Niksar (later Neocaesarea). Land and rivers: Natural Earth. Both routes are schematic; no precise ancient track survives.
Scroll to see what Rome already held, Pompey’s campaign, and the provinces he made of it.
Before Pompey came east, Rome ruled four provinces around the Aegean and the Libyan coast — Macedonia, Asia, Crete and Cyrene — and left the interior of Asia Minor to a patchwork of client kings. Beyond them stood the two great enemies: Mithridates of Pontus and Tigranes of Armenia.
Given sweeping powers to finish the war Lucullus had left unwon, Pompey drives Mithridates out of Pontus to his death, and forces Tigranes of Armenia to submit at Artaxata. In three seasons he settles the whole East by the sword and the pen.
Pompey turns conquest into administration. Bithynia-Pontus and an enlarged Cilicia become provinces; Syria, the last Seleucid remnant, is annexed in 64; and in 63 he takes Jerusalem and enters the Temple. Around this new Roman rim he leaves a ring of client kings to guard it cheaply.
Provinces: AWMC c. 60 B.C. (ODbL, after the Barrington Atlas) — one extent per province, and AWMC draws Bithynia-Pontus and Cilicia as one shape. Client kingdoms are labels, not borders. Land, rivers: Natural Earth. Sites: Pleiades.
Conquest made Rome rich, but it did not spread security evenly. Senators borrowed ruinous sums to win the offices that alone could repay them; tax-farmers advanced money against provincial revenue; smallholders and Sulla’s own settled veterans slid back into debt. Out of this wreckage the patrician Lucius Sergius Catilina — Catiline — assembled a coalition of ruined aristocrats, discontented veterans, and the desperate, around the electric promise of novae tabulae: the cancellation of all debts.
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The consul who faced him was a man without a single consul among his ancestors — Marcus Tullius Cicero, a “new man” who had climbed by sheer force of oratory. When his agents uncovered the conspiracy, Cicero rose in the Senate and turned the full engine of his eloquence on Catiline to his face.
“How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience? How long shall your madness mock us? To what end will your unbridled audacity hurl itself?” Cicero, First Oration against Catiline — trans. C. D. Yonge (public domain)
Catiline fled to his army in Etruria and died fighting early in 62 B.C. But five conspirators were seized inside the city, and the Senate faced a graver question: could Roman citizens be put to death without trial? Caesar, then a rising politician, argued against execution; the rigid Cato the Younger, heir to the old republican severity, argued for it and carried the house. Cicero had the five strangled in the Tullianum. He counted it the salvation of the Republic; his enemies would spend the next fifteen years reminding him that a consul had killed citizens without a trial — the same weapon, aimed now from the other side.
By 60 B.C. three men found their ambitions blocked by the same jealous Senate. Pompey could not get land for his veterans or ratification of his eastern acts. Crassus wanted relief for the tax-farmers who were his clients, and a military glory to match his wealth. Gaius Julius Caesar — a patrician of ancient name and modern debts, back from governing Spain — wanted the consulship and, after it, a province worth conquering. Separately, the Senate could obstruct each of them. Together, they were irresistible.
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Their compact, which a later age miscalled the “First Triumvirate,” was no legal office and no public alliance — it was a private understanding among three men to pool their votes, money, and soldiers’ loyalty. As consul in 59 B.C., Caesar forced through the land law for Pompey’s veterans and the ratification of his settlement, brushing aside his colleague and the courts. Pompey sealed the bond by marrying Caesar’s daughter Julia. Caesar took for himself an extraordinary five-year command over Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul — and when the pact frayed, the three renewed it in 56 B.C. at Luca, dividing the Roman world among themselves as if it were an estate: a second consulship and the Spanish and Syrian commands for Pompey and Crassus, and a longer leash in Gaul for Caesar.
“All who took part in political struggles… used specious pretexts, but under pretence of the public welfare each in reality was striving for his own advancement.” Sallust, The War with Catiline — trans. J. S. Watson (public domain)
The compact had no charter, no shared belief, and no rule for what would happen if one partner died or grew too strong. It worked only so long as each of the three still needed the other two. Caesar, the junior and poorest of them, was about to spend eight years in Gaul turning that weakness into the largest private army and fortune in the Roman world.
Caesar arrived in his province in 58 B.C. to find a pretext waiting. A whole people, the Helvetii, were migrating westward across Roman interests; he stopped them, then turned on the German war-leader Ariovistus, and having begun, did not stop for eight years. What was launched as the defence of a frontier became the outright conquest of everything between the Rhine, the Pyrenees, the Atlantic, and the Alps — a territory that had never been Roman and that no Roman had been sent to take.
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“All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in ours Gauls, the third.” Caesar, The Gallic War, opening lines — trans. W. A. McDevitte & W. S. Bohn (public domain)
Roman success rested on engineering, discipline, allied cavalry, and the chronic inability of the Gallic peoples to combine. It also rested on massacre and enslavement on a scale that shocked even some Romans. Caesar recorded the war himself, in the cool third person of his Commentaries — a work of genius that was also a dispatch home, making his distant campaigns legible and glorious to the voters who would decide his future. Where his account gives numbers, they are best read as the boasts of conquest rather than a census; the later biographer Plutarch claimed a million Gauls killed and a million more enslaved, figures no one can verify.
The greatest test came in 52 B.C., when the young Arvernian prince Vercingetorix united much of Gaul in a single rising. Caesar ran him to ground at the hill-fort of Alesia and there fought the most extraordinary siege of the ancient world — building one ring of works facing inward against the town and a second facing outward against the relief army, and winning against both at once. Vercingetorix rode out and laid his arms at Caesar’s feet. Gaul was Roman, and Caesar commanded a veteran army that loved him and a fortune that could buy Rome.
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Scroll to follow the eight seasons of the war, from the Helvetii to Alesia.
Caesar reaches his province to find a whole people, the Helvetii, migrating west across Roman interests. He blocks them at Geneva, then destroys them near Bibracte and sends the survivors home. In the same year he turns on the German war-leader Ariovistus and drives him back over the Rhine.
He marches north against the Belgic confederacy of the far north of Gaul. On the river Sabis the Nervii fall on the legions as they make camp and very nearly break them, before discipline — and Caesar snatching up a shield in the front line — turns the day.
The seafaring Veneti of Armorica revolt. Caesar builds a fleet from nothing and beats their high-sided ships in a sea-battle off the Breton coast, carrying the war to the ocean itself.
To overawe the barbarians on either edge of Gaul, Caesar throws a timber bridge across the Rhine in ten days and marches into Germany, then twice crosses the Channel into Britain — feats of engineering and dispatch-writing more than of conquest.
The Belgae rise again under Ambiorix, and a Roman force of fifteen cohorts is lured out and annihilated among the Eburones. Caesar crosses the Rhine a second time and wages a winter of reprisal across the northern tribes.
All Gaul unites behind the young Arvernian prince Vercingetorix. After storming Avaricum but being thrown back from Gergovia, Caesar runs him to ground at the hill-fort of Alesia and there fights the most famous siege of the ancient world — one ring of works facing inward against the town, a second facing outward against the relief army, and winning against both at once. Gaul is Roman.
Base geography: Natural Earth 50m coastline & rivers (public domain). The Provincia band, the crossings and the 52 campaign are schematic — no surveyed ancient track survives; sites are placed by longitude and latitude, after the narrative of Caesar’s Gallic War. Peoples are labels, not borders.
Every season of the war: who stood with Rome, who submitted, who rose — and where Caesar marched and wintered.
Caesar reaches Genava to find a whole people, the Helvetii, setting out west. He bars the Rhône, follows them into the lands of the Aedui, cuts down one clan at the crossing of the Arar and beats the rest near Bibracte; the survivors are sent home. In late summer he marches on the Suebian king Ariovistus, drives him back over the Rhine, and winters among the Sequani.
The northern peoples combine against him. The Remi go over to Rome at once. The Belgic host breaks up on the Axona, and the Suessiones, Bellovaci and Ambiani surrender one by one. On the Sabis the Nervii fall on the legions as they pitch camp and nearly win. The Aduatuci are sold as slaves, while one legion under Publius Crassus takes the submission of the Atlantic coast.
The Veneti of the Breton coast seize Roman officers, and the sea-peoples rise with them. Caesar builds a fleet on the Loire; off the coast his ships cut down the rigging of the Gallic sailing ships and take them one by one. The Veneti council is executed and the people sold. Sabinus beats the Venelli, Crassus conquers Aquitania, and the Morini and Menapii hold out in their marshes.
Two German peoples, the Usipetes and Tencteri, cross the lower Rhine. Caesar detains their leaders at a parley and falls on their camp; at Rome, Plutarch says, Cato proposed handing him over to the Germans. He bridges the Rhine in ten days and spends eighteen on the far bank, then crosses to Britain late in the season. Neither crossing conquered anything; the dispatches made him famous.
Five legions cross to Britain, force the Thames and storm the stronghold of the war-leader Cassivellaunus, who submits and promises tribute. Back in Gaul a poor harvest scatters the legions into distant winter camps. Ambiorix of the Eburones lures a legion and five cohorts out of Atuatuca and destroys them; the Nervii besiege Quintus Cicero until Caesar marches to his relief.
Caesar raises two new legions and borrows one from Pompey. He strikes the Nervii before spring, calls a council of Gaul to Lutetia, forces the Senones, Carnutes and Menapii to submit, and bridges the Rhine a second time. The Eburones are hunted down and their land thrown open to plunder. At Durocortorum the Senonian leader Acco is flogged and beheaded in the old Roman manner.
News of disorder at Rome sets Gaul alight. The Carnutes massacre Roman traders at Cenabum, and the young Arvernian noble Vercingetorix is hailed as king and war-leader. Caesar crosses the Cevennes through deep snow, gathers his legions, burns Cenabum and storms Avaricum, where by his count only 800 of 40,000 escaped. At Gergovia, in Vercingetorix' own country, he is thrown back.
The Aedui, Rome's oldest friends in Gaul, join the rising. Caesar reunites his army with Labienus' column, beats the Gallic horse on the march, and shuts Vercingetorix into the hill-town of Alesia. The peoples of Gaul send a relief army of 250,000 foot and 8,000 horse, in Caesar's figures. Only the Remi, the Lingones and the Treveri stand apart. The siege itself is the next map.
Alesia did not end the war at once. Through the winter and the following year the Bituriges, Carnutes and Bellovaci rise again and are put down one by one. The last stand is at Uxellodunum, in the land of the Cadurci; when it falls, Caesar has the hands of its defenders cut off as a warning. His officer Hirtius wrote the account of this year.
After eight campaigns everything between the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine and the Ocean has submitted. Caesar spends his last winter in Gaul at Nemetocenna, fixes a yearly tribute (40 million sesterces, Suetonius says) and treats the defeated peoples gently. Within the year he would lead the army that conquered Gaul across the Rubicon.
Territories are schematic: no Gallic border survives, so each people is drawn round its chief town, after the Roman civitates that grew out of them, and clipped to the coast and the Rhine. Marches follow Caesar’s Gallic War (Book 8 is by his officer Hirtius) and are straightened between named places; numbers are Caesar’s own claims. Hover a people for its story. Coast and rivers: Natural Earth.
One army besieging a town while besieged itself: the works, the relief army, the last attack, the surrender.
Vercingetorix shuts some 80,000 men, by Caesar's count, into Alesia, a town on a flat-topped hill between two rivers, and camps them on its eastern slope. Caesar rings the hill with works eleven Roman miles round, strengthened by twenty-three redoubts, and plants his camps on the hills about. Before the ring closes, the Gallic horsemen slip out by night to summon all Gaul.
Caesar builds a second line facing outward, fourteen miles round, against the army he knows is coming. Before the inner line lie trenches, one flooded from the rivers, a rampart with a palisade and towers, and fields of hidden pits, sharpened stakes and iron barbs. Inside, food runs short; the Mandubii are driven out of their own town and, refused by the Romans, left between the lines.
The relief army camps on a hill outside the lines, a mile from the Roman works. Twice it attacks across the plain while Vercingetorix sallies from the town against the inner line, and twice the double ring holds. In a cavalry battle in the plain, Caesar's German horsemen decide the day.
The Gauls find the weak point: a camp on the lower slope of a hill to the north, too large to take inside the works. Vercassivellaunus, a kinsman of Vercingetorix, leads 60,000 picked men round by night and attacks it from above at noon, while every other sector is assaulted at once. Labienus brings six cohorts; Caesar leads fresh troops himself and sends cavalry round behind the attackers. The relief army breaks.
Next day Vercingetorix offers himself to the Gauls, to be killed or handed over. He is surrendered, the chiefs are brought out and the arms laid down. Caesar gives a captive to each of his soldiers, sparing the Aedui and Arverni in the hope of winning back their peoples. Vercingetorix is kept for Caesar's triumph six years later, and then put to death.
A schematic plan after Caesar’s own description (Gallic War 7.69–89) and the excavation plan made for Napoleon III in 1861–65; the lines are drawn to Caesar’s stated lengths over the real rivers and hills, not surveyed. The relief army’s camp is placed where it is usually put; its site is disputed.
The compact of three had always depended on the people who held it together, and in the space of two years they were gone. In 54 B.C. Julia — Caesar’s daughter and Pompey’s wife, the human bond between the two greatest men in Rome — died in childbirth. The following year Crassus, envious of the glory his partners had won and hungry for a conquest of his own, led a Roman army east against the Parthian empire and marched it into disaster.
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At Carrhae in 53 B.C., in the open plains of Mesopotamia, Parthian horse-archers and armoured lancers surrounded and destroyed the legions. Crassus’ son was killed before his eyes; Crassus himself died in the retreat, and the sacred eagle-standards of his legions were carried off as trophies — a wound to Roman pride that would fester for a generation. The richest man in Rome was dead, and with him the third weight that had kept Pompey and Caesar in balance.
Now only two men remained, and no rule for sharing power between them. In Rome itself politics had collapsed into open gang warfare between the partisans of Clodius and Milo; when Clodius was killed on the Appian Way in 52 B.C., his funeral mob burned down the Senate house. In the emergency the Senate turned, as ever, to a strong man — making Pompey sole consul to restore order. He governed Spain in absence through deputies while remaining outside Rome, an arrangement uncomfortably like the one for which Caesar was being condemned. The two survivors of the compact were drifting toward the one contest the Republic had no machinery to settle: which of them should be first.
The quarrel came down to a legal trap. Caesar wished to stand for a second consulship without first laying down his command and becoming a private citizen — exposed, the moment he did, to prosecution by his enemies. His opponents, with Pompey now among them, demanded that he give up his army first. Behind the constitutional language stood a simpler fact: neither man would consent to be at the other’s mercy. In January 49 B.C. the Senate passed its Last Decree, and Caesar’s tribunes fled to his camp.
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On the night of the tenth or eleventh of January, Caesar led a single legion across the little river Rubicon, the boundary beyond which his provincial command did not run. To cross it under arms was to make war on the Republic. The famous phrase belongs to the later historians, not to any transcript, but it caught the finality of the act.
“The die is cast.” Caesar at the Rubicon, as reported by Suetonius, The Deified Julius — trans. A. Thomson (public domain)
Pompey, though he commanded the Senate’s cause, had no army ready in Italy; rather than fight in the peninsula he abandoned Rome and then Italy itself, withdrawing across the Adriatic to raise the vast resources of the East. Caesar took Italy without a battle, secured Spain by defeating Pompey’s legions there, and then crossed the sea after him. After a near-defeat at Dyrrhachium, he broke Pompey’s much larger army decisively at Pharsalus in Greece in 48 B.C. Pompey fled to Egypt seeking refuge — and was murdered as he stepped ashore, by a boy-king’s courtiers who thought his severed head a gift for the winning side.
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Scroll to follow Julius Caesar as he crosses the Rubicon, disarms Spain at Ilerda, triumphs at Pharsalus, relieves Alexandria, and crushes senatorial resistance at Thapsus and Munda.
Ordered by the Senate to lay down his command, Julius Caesar pauses at the border of Italy on the Rubicon before declaring, 'Alea iacta est' — The die is cast. With only the XIII Legion, he sweeps south down the Adriatic coast at breakneck speed. The Senate panics; Pompey realizes Italy cannot be defended and evacuates his legions and senators by sea from Brundisium to Greece to assemble an immense eastern armada. In sixty days, Caesar secures Rome and the Italian peninsula without a battle.
'I go to fight an army without a general,' Caesar declares, 'and I shall return to fight a general without an army.' Leaving Trebonius and Decimus Brutus to invest the recalcitrant Greek port of Massilia, Caesar rushes over the Pyrenees into Hispania. At Ilerda, confronting Pompey's veterans under Afranius and Petreius, Caesar employs masterful ditch-digging and maneuver across flooded rivers, cutting off the Pompeians from water and forage until their five legions surrender without bloodshed. Hispania is subdued in forty days.
Braving the winter Adriatic in transport boats past Pompey’s superior fleet, Caesar lands on the rocky coast of Epirus. At Dyrrhachium, he attempts to wall in Pompey's larger force with colossal entrenchments, but Pompey breaks through, handing Caesar a sharp defeat. Caesar pulls back into Thessaly. On the plains of Pharsalus, facing odds of more than two to one, Caesar conceals a fourth line of cohorts behind his right wing. When Pompey's elite cavalry charges, the hidden legionaries thrust their javelins into the horsemen's faces, routing the cavalry and shattering the senatorial army. Pompey flees to Egypt, where he is treacherous assassinated upon landing.
Arriving in Alexandria, Caesar weeps upon being presented with Pompey's severed head and ring. Backing the young queen Cleopatra VII, he finds himself besieged inside the royal palaces by the Ptolemaic army, famously swimming for his life when his boat capsizes. Relieved by Mithridates of Pergamon, Caesar defeats the Egyptians on the Nile and places Cleopatra on the throne. Hearing that Pharnaces of Pontus has overrun Asia Minor, Caesar marches north, annihilating the Pontic army in a four-hour battle at Zela — reporting to the Senate in three immortal words: 'Veni, vidi, vici' (I came, I saw, I conquered).
The senatorial hardliners regroup in North Africa with King Juba of Numidia, mobilizing sixty thousand legionaries and 120 war elephants. Caesar lands in Tunisia amidst fierce winter storms. At Thapsus, his veterans attack spontaneously without waiting for the signal, panicking the enemy elephants back into their own lines and routing the senatorial host. At Utica, the stoic leader Cato the Younger, refusing to live under Caesar's clemency, reads Plato's dialogue on the soul and commits suicide, becoming the enduring martyr of the fallen Republic.
Pompey’s sons raise a desperate final army of thirteen legions in southern Hispania. On the bloody slope of Munda, veterans clash in savage, hand-to-hand combat where neither side gives quarter. Seeing his lines waver, Caesar dismounts, seizes a shield, and rushes to within ten paces of the enemy spears, shouting: 'Are you not ashamed to deliver your general into the hands of boys?' The X Legion rallies, the Pompeian lines collapse, and thirty thousand die on the field. Returning to Rome, Caesar is declared Dictator Perpetuo — sole and absolute master of the Roman world.
Sites: Pleiades. Land, lakes and rivers: Natural Earth (public domain). Routes are schematic — reconstructed after Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Civili, and Plutarch, Life of Caesar and Life of Pompey. Provincial boundaries are labels only.
Pharsalus did not end the war. Caesar was drawn into a dangerous entanglement in Alexandria, where he secured the throne of Egypt for Cleopatra; he crushed a rebel king in Pontus with a speed he advertised in three immortal words; and he hunted down the last armies of the republican cause in Africa and Spain until, by 45 B.C., no one was left to fight him.
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“I came, I saw, I conquered.” Caesar, of his victory at Zela, 47 B.C. — as reported by Suetonius, The Deified Julius — trans. A. Thomson (public domain)
Master of the Roman world, Caesar ruled it through the old office of dictator, first for ten years and then, early in 44 B.C., for life. He used the power with real energy: he enlarged and reformed the Senate, planted colonies of his veterans and of Rome’s poor across the Mediterranean, relieved debt without abolishing it, and reformed the very calendar — the Julian year of 365¼ days that, in essence, we still keep. Much of it answered real needs. But all of it now flowed from the will of one man, whose statues stood among the gods, whose portrait — the first of a living Roman — went out on the coinage, and who held a perpetual office in a state that had expelled its last king four and a half centuries before.
That was the intolerable thing. The question was no longer whether Caesar governed well; it was whether any part of the Republic still stood above him. To a hard core of senators — some old enemies pardoned by his famous clemency, some men he had raised himself — the answer was no, and the cure was murder.
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More than sixty men joined the conspiracy, and they called themselves the Liberators. Their motives were not one thing: republican principle in Brutus, wounded ambition in others, personal grievance, and a genuine dread of monarchy, all tangled together. They struck on the fifteenth of March, at a meeting of the Senate held in the great hall attached to Pompey’s theatre — so that Caesar fell, stabbed by more than twenty wounds, at the foot of a statue of the rival he had defeated.
What he said as he died, no one can be sure. The soldier-biographer Suetonius, writing a century and a half later, records the doubt honestly.
“He was stabbed with three and twenty wounds, uttering not a word, but merely a groan at the first stroke; though some have related that, when Marcus Brutus fell upon him, he exclaimed, ‘And thou too, my son!’” Suetonius, The Deified Julius — trans. A. Thomson (public domain)
The murder solved nothing. The assassins had a corpse but no government; Brutus tried to address a Senate that had fled the hall. The next day the compromise came: an amnesty for the killers, and — in the same breath — the confirmation of all of Caesar’s acts and appointments, which protected the officials and the veterans who lived by them. The Republic had struck down the man who mastered it, and left standing every force that had made his mastery possible: the loyal armies, the debts, the veterans hungry for land, the great commands, and the ambitious men who would fight to inherit them. At the funeral, the crowd’s fury drove the Liberators from the city. Among the mourners was Caesar’s lieutenant Mark Antony — and, named in the dictator’s will as his adopted son and chief heir, an unknown eighteen-year-old great-nephew called Gaius Octavius.
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The daggers of the Ides did not save the Republic; they only opened the last and longest of its civil wars. The forms still stood — consuls, Senate, assemblies — but the thing they had once contained was gone, and no one now living would see it return.