Battle of Philippi

• 1. The Ghost at Philippi

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  Plutarch records that Brutus was visited by a ghost in the months before the Battle of Philippi. A huge and shadowy form appeared before him one night. He asked it: "What and whence art thou?" It answered: "Thy evil spirit, Brutus: I shall see thee at Philippi." He would encounter the same figure the night before battle itself.

  This was 42 BC, and the armies gathering in Macedonia carried the unresolved business of the Roman world. Brutus and Cassius, leaders of the so-called Liberators, had assembled their forces across Rome's eastern provinces. Against them marched Mark Antony and Octavian, the main partners of the Second Triumvirate, with the best armies of the west. The declared cause of the war was to avenge the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. The underlying conflict was older: a long-brewing struggle between the Optimates and the Populares, two opposing factions of Roman political life.

  The battle that loomed would be one of the largest in Rome's civil wars. Ancient estimates put the combined armies at up to 200,000 men. Before either side could face the other on land, the Republican admiral Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus was already at sea. His fleet of 130 ships controlled the Adriatic passage that Antony and Octavian would need to cross.

• 2. Race for High Ground

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  Norbanus and Saxa, two generals sent ahead as scouts, led eight legions along the Via Egnatia through northern Greece. Their task was to locate the Liberators' army. They passed through the town of Philippi in eastern Macedonia and secured a narrow mountain pass. But the Liberators had superior numbers. They outflanked the position and forced Norbanus and Saxa to abandon it and retreat west of Philippi.

  Antony followed close behind. Octavian was delayed at Dyrrachium by illness, a condition that would accompany him through the entire campaign. The Liberators, having forced back the advance guard, moved to claim the high ground. They positioned their camps along both sides of the Via Egnatia, about 3.5 kilometres west of the city. The southern position was anchored on a supposedly impassable marsh; the northern on impassable hills. They fortified the line with a rampart and ditch.

  The arrangement along the road reflected the command structure. Brutus set his camp north of the road; Cassius took the south. When Antony arrived, he positioned his forces south of the Via Egnatia, facing Cassius. Octavian's legions went north, facing Brutus. The Liberators held the high ground and had no intention of leaving it. They had spent the previous months plundering Greek cities to swell their war chest.

• 3. Soldiers and Loyalties

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  Nineteen legions marched under Antony and Octavian at Philippi. The Liberators fielded seventeen: eight assigned to Brutus and nine to Cassius. Of those seventeen, only two were at full strength. Reinforced by levies from eastern allied kingdoms, the Liberators' army still mustered around 80,000 foot soldiers. Their cavalry numbered 20,000 horsemen, including 5,000 mounted archers in the Eastern style.

  Many of the men carrying Republican standards had once fought for Caesar himself. The XXXVI legion, for instance, had been recruited from Pompeian veterans captured after the Battle of Pharsalus and enrolled into Caesar's army. For soldiers being asked to fight against Caesar's heir, loyalty was uncertain. Cassius addressed the question with both rhetoric and money. He told the troops: "Let it give no one any concern that he has been one of Caesar's soldiers. We were not his soldiers then but our country's." Then he gave each legionary a gift of 1,500 denarii and each centurion 7,500.

  Adrian Goldsworthy, estimating from the legion sizes, suggests the nineteen triumvir legions could have amounted to 95,000 men. He puts the seventeen Liberators' legions at around 85,000. But the months-long campaign made logistics for such numbers nearly impossible. Each side likely had only 40,000 to 50,000 legionaries in the field. The triumvirs' allied cavalry, at 13,000 horsemen, was smaller than the Liberators' force. For weeks before the first battle, Antony offered engagement repeatedly. Each time, the Liberators refused to leave their fortified position.

• 4. The October Draw

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  The 3rd of October brought the general battle that neither side had entirely planned. For weeks, Antony had been quietly cutting a passage through the marshes south of Cassius's position, building a causeway over them. Cassius discovered the work and sent troops south to construct a wall that would cut off Antony's extended wing. That counter triggered the fight.

  Brutus's soldiers did not wait for orders. Provoked by the triumvirs' army, they charged Octavian's lines before the signal to attack had been given. The signal was to be a spoken watchword: "Liberty." It was never used. Octavian's troops broke and fled. The assault was led by Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, and Brutus's men captured Octavian's camp. Three of Octavian's legions had their standards taken, a clear mark of a rout. Octavian himself was not in his tent. His couch was pierced and cut to pieces. Most ancient historians say he had been warned in a dream to leave. Pliny says more plainly that he went into hiding in the marsh.

  South of the road, Antony had broken through. He stormed Cassius's fortifications, demolished the palisade, filled in the defensive ditch, and took Cassius's camp. The battlefield stretched for miles, and clouds of dust made it impossible to assess what had happened elsewhere. Cassius climbed a hill to look for Brutus's position, but the dust blocked his view. Believing he had suffered a crushing defeat, he ordered his freedman Pindarus to kill him. Pindarus did so. Brutus later mourned over Cassius's body, calling him "the last of the Romans." He chose not to hold a public funeral, worried that visible grief would weaken his army's morale.

  Cassius's casualties numbered 8,000; Octavian's were roughly twice that, around 16,000. The battle was essentially a draw. Brutus's advancing soldiers had also squandered their own success. Instead of pressing the advantage, they stopped to loot and gather treasure. That pause let Octavian's troops reform their line. In his later reign as emperor, one of Octavian's most common battle cries traced directly to this failure: "Complete the battle once begun!"

  On the same day as the first battle, the Republican fleet intercepted and destroyed the triumvirs' reinforcements at sea. Two legions and additional supplies under Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus were lost. The regions of Macedonia and Thessaly could not supply the triumvirs' army for long, and without those reinforcements, a slow supply crisis had begun.

• 5. Twenty-Three October

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  Over the three weeks between engagements, Antony moved methodically. He advanced his forces south of Brutus's army and fortified a hill close to Cassius's former camp, which Brutus had left unguarded. To avoid being outflanked, Brutus had to stretch his line further south and then east. He built a series of fortified posts parallel to the Via Egnatia. He was slowly losing the commanding position the Liberators had spent months securing.

  Brutus still wanted to avoid open battle. His naval superiority was real and working in his favor. But officers and soldiers were exhausted by delay. There was a real fear that troops would desert if the Liberators appeared to have lost the initiative. Eastern allies and mercenaries were already starting to leave. On the afternoon of the 23rd of October, Brutus was forced to give the order to attack. He described the situation with bitter clarity: "I seem to carry on war like Pompey the Great, not so much commanding as commanded."

  Cassius Dio records that neither side needed missile weapons in the second battle. Both armies advanced directly to close combat, forgoing "the usual manoeuvres and tactics of battles" and fighting sword to sword. Both ancient accounts emphasize that the slaughter was terrible.

  Plutarch gives Brutus the better of the fight at the western end of his line. He drove the triumvirs' left wing back, and the Republican cavalry pursued the retreating enemy into disorder. But the eastern flank of Brutus's line had been drawn too thin because the line had been extended so far. The triumvirs broke through there, then swung left to strike Brutus from the flank and rear. Appian describes the pressure as the triumvirs' legions pushing the enemy's line "as though they were turning round a very heavy machine." Brutus's three reserve lines, retreating step by step, became entangled with each other. Octavian's soldiers reached the gates of Brutus's camp before the routing army could. Brutus escaped into the nearby hills with the equivalent of only four legions. Seeing that surrender was inevitable, he took his own life.

• 6. What Remained

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  Plutarch reports that Antony covered Brutus's body with a purple garment after the battle. The act was one of respect from a man who had not been Brutus's friend. Antony remembered one thing: when Brutus had agreed to join the plot against Caesar, his one condition had been that Antony's life be spared.

  Marcus Porcius Cato, the son of Cato the Younger, was among those who died in the battle or by suicide afterward. Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus, the father of the woman who would later become Octavian's wife, also died. The son of the great orator Hortensius fell as well. Some surviving nobles chose to surrender, and they chose their captor carefully. Lucius Calpurnius Bibulus and Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus both entered Antony's service. The ancient sources note that the survivors among the nobles were unwilling to deal with the young and merciless Octavian.

  Roughly 14,000 soldiers from the Liberators' army were enrolled into the triumvirs' forces. Other veterans were discharged and sent back to Italy. Some remained at Philippi itself, which was refounded as a Roman colony with a new name: Colonia Victrix Philippensium, the Colony of the Victors of Philippi.

  Octavian returned to Italy carrying a difficult task: finding enough land to settle a large number of veterans. Sextus Pompey still controlled Sicily, and Domitius Ahenobarbus still commanded the Republican fleet. The Republican cause was not entirely extinguished. But the battle had definitively broken what remained of Republican resistance.

  Shakespeare drew on the events at Philippi for Acts IV and V of Julius Caesar, merging both October battles into a single day's events. A fictionalised account appeared in the sixth episode of the second season of the HBO series Rome. In that version, both commanders fell in battle rather than dying by their own hands.

  Writing as emperor decades later, Augustus described both engagements in one sentence: "I sent into exile the murderers of my father, punishing their crimes with lawful tribunals; and afterwards, when they made war upon the Republic, I twice defeated them in battle." For his partner in that victory, the battle carried a different kind of weight. The Battle of Philippi marked the highest point of Antony's career. At that moment, he was the most famous Roman general in the world and the senior partner of the Second Triumvirate.