Chapter XII #4
The noise was terrific all along the line – shouts and screams and splintering wood as ships collided.
My captain spotted the flagship of Papias heading towards us, and I gave the order to attack it first, just as I would have done if I had been fighting on land and had sighted the enemy’s commander.
The hammers doubled their tempo. Our rowers put their backs into it.
Seeing the danger, Papias tried to turn, but he left it too late.
I braced myself and was almost knocked off my feet as we rammed into his vessel’s bow at full speed.
Our bronze beak smashed its timbers and broke its keel.
As water rushed into its hull, the ship began to list.
We disengaged and turned about. By the time we came alongside, their rowers were already leaping into the water.
Many were drowning. I drew my sword and was first across the gangplank, at the head of twenty-five marines.
I hacked my way through the melee, trying to find Papias, but he had escaped into a tender and was being rowed to a nearby ship.
Soon afterwards, Sextus gave the signal to disengage, and the Pompeian fleet turned with expert seamanship and headed back into harbour. I wanted to follow, but my captain insisted our triremes were too heavy to navigate the shoals.
We had lost five ships, the enemy thirty.
The day belonged to us, if not yet the war.
Rather than tie down our fleet continuing a blockade, I turned around and sailed it forty miles west, where I laid siege to the city of Tyndaris, an ancient walled fortress built high on a headland that commanded the whole of that part of the coast.
I sent a messenger to try to find Caesar in the east of the island, to inform him of my victory. It was a week before I received his reply.
As so often was his fate in war, he had suffered a series of setbacks.
He had crossed from Italy with Taurus and his legions and taken the town of Tauromenium.
But he had quickly found himself surrounded on three sides.
He had gone back to his fleet as a precaution, only to be surprised by Sextus’s surviving ships, which had left Mylae and suddenly appeared on the horizon.
Yet again he had been routed at sea. He had managed to escape by hiding his ensign and drifting unnoticed along the coast until he was able to scramble ashore near Syracuse, where mercifully he had found troops loyal to his cause.
He ordered me to send him as many soldiers as I could spare, of which I had plenty, as by now Tyndaris had fallen. Not long afterwards, he arrived at my headquarters with his army, together with Lepidus, whom he had met by chance while crossing the western slopes of Mount Etna.
Strange to relate, but Lepidus had emerged as the most successful general of the campaign.
He had fought his way across the island with his ten African legions, gathering more recruits as he went, so that now he commanded an enormous force of a hundred thousand infantry and cavalry.
Gone was the anxious figure I had last seen at Perusia.
He was back in his full pomp – aristocrat, chief priest, triumvir, and former consul, proconsul and master of horse.
He was easily old enough to be Caesar’s father, and proceeded to act as if he were, lecturing his young colleague – and me, to the extent that he deigned to notice me – on military tactics and how to mount a successful campaign.
Caesar was coolly polite to his face, and even managed to congratulate him, but privately he complained bitterly to me about this high-handed treatment.
– He only exists at all because Antony and I have allowed it! If we hadn’t destroyed Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, he would have been finished.
Still, the fact remained that Lepidus was now powerful, and faced with such overwhelming numbers, Sextus’s position was fast becoming hopeless.
He had been driven back to a strip of territory along the north-eastern coast. One by one his garrisons were surrendering.
Soon, all he would have left would be his fleet.
Rather than drag the fighting on into winter, at the beginning of September he sent a message to Caesar proposing that the war should be settled by one last naval battle at an appointed hour and place. He suggested the waters off Naulochus, a small harbour town a short distance from Mylae.
Caesar showed me the letter and asked me whether we could win.
I replied that I had beaten Sextus once and was confident I could do so again.
The Battle of Naulochus, as it became known, took place a few days later.
Both sides mustered all the naval forces at their disposal, roughly three hundred ships apiece.
I slept well aboard my flagship the night before the engagement. We might be beaten – in war one never knows; too much depends on chance – but I had at least the confidence of knowing I had done all I could to prepare.
It was the strangest battle I ever fought, arranged like a spectacle in the Circus Maximus.
Thousands of infantry, ours and theirs, separated by only a stretch of sandy beach, were lined up on the shore to watch.
Once again, Sextus chose to remain on land and communicate with his commanders from a wooden tower using signals flashed by a mirror.
Caesar and Lepidus watched from a tent in the dunes but left the tactics to me.
I sailed our fleet past them along the coast, flags flying, trumpets sounding. The sea was calm, with a breeze blowing off the mountains. The enemy slipped anchor and came out to meet us.
Just as before, they charged us at full speed and attempted to disable us by shattering our protruding oars and hurling every kind of missile – arrows, javelins, and balls of burning pitch shot from catapults, which stuck to our decks and started innumerable small fires.
But they could only do this once, otherwise as soon as the ships crashed into one another, they risked being set ablaze themselves.
After their first pass, while our sailors were busy smothering the fires with blankets, they tacked and turned.
That was when our marines in their towers released their catapults and unleashed the harpaxes.
They flashed across the blueness of the sky, trailing their chains and cables, and thudded into the enemy’s hulls.
I had feared the enemy might have learned their lesson and devised countermeasures – scythes mounted at the end of long poles, for example, would have enabled them to cut the ropes that were attached to the chains.
But this they did not do. Instead, once hooked, they attempted to escape by trying to row backwards.
The lines tautened and rose dripping from the surface of the sea.
Their oarsmen certainly were strong, and their desperation lent them extra power.
However, each of our triremes had one hundred and twenty rowers, whilst their liburnians carried only sixty, so that in this deadly tug of war, we were invariably the victors.
We winched them in, and close combat began.
Caesar said to me afterwards that these were some of the longest moments of his life, as it was impossible from the shore to make out who was winning.
It was equally hard to tell where I was, in the thick of battle, as they jumped onto our ships as well as we onto theirs, and both sides shouted to one another in Latin and quickly learned their enemy’s watchwords.
I was tricked myself and let a man pass who suddenly turned and would have stabbed me if I hadn’t realised my mistake in time and thrust my sword into his stomach.
The decks were slippery with blood, the sea so thick with bodies it appeared as though one could have walked across them.