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After the defeat at Dyrrachium the cause of Julius seemed lost, but the Pharsalian battle again placed him uppermost, unless the East rose in behalf of Pompey. Both seemed to be favourites of Fortune. The question now was to which the goddess would prove most faithful.
Their blood I'll offer as a sacrifice, T' appease the ghost of their departed vice. I already see Pharsalian armies slain, The funeral piles of Thessaly and Spain: Egypt and Libya's groans methinks I hear, The dismal sound of arms now strikes my ear, An Actian sea-fight, and retreating fear.
The older men, however, stopped the persons running up and down the town and making for the stands of arms; and Thucydides the Pharsalian, proxenus of the city, came forward and threw himself in the way of the rival factions, and appealed to them not to ruin the state, while the enemy was still at hand waiting for his opportunity, and so at length succeeded in quieting them and in keeping their hands off each other.
The latter had gone from the Pharsalian battlefield to Lesbos, whence he brought away his wife and his second son Sextus, and had sailed onward round Asia Minor to Cilicia and thence to Cyprus.
After the defeat at Dyrrachium the cause of Julius seemed lost, but the Pharsalian battle again placed him uppermost, unless the East rose in behalf of Pompey. Both seemed to be favourites of Fortune. The question now was to which the goddess would prove most faithful.
On the Italian and Sicilian coasts the Pompeian squadrons despatched thither after the victories of Dyrrhachium had achieved not unimportant successes against the ports of Brundisium, Messana and Vibo, and at Messana especially had burnt the whole fleet in course of being fitted out for Caesar; but the ships that were thus active, mostly from Asia Minor and Syria, were recalled by their communities in consequence of the Pharsalian battle, so that the expedition came to an end of itself.
Calvinus had been obliged to despatch to Egypt two out of the three legions left behind with him and formed out of the Pharsalian prisoners of war; he filled up the gap by one legion hastily gathered from the Romans domiciled in Pontus and two legions of Deiotarus exercised after the Roman manner, and advanced into Lesser Armenia.
The absence of Caesar, the troublesome temper of his legions, the ferment in Spain and Italy gradually raised men's spirits, and the recollection of the Pharsalian defeat began to give way to fresh hopes of victory. The time lost by Caesar in Egypt nowhere revenged itself more severely than here.
As for instance, how one who was a practicer of the five games of skill, * having with a dart or javelin unawares against his will struck and killed Epitimus the Pharsalian, his father spent a whole day with Protagoras in a serious dispute, whether the javelin, or the man that threw it, or the masters of the games who appointed these sports, were, according to the strictest and best reason, to be accounted the cause of this mischance.
At length, the orator touching upon the Pharsalian battle, he was so affected that his body trembled, and some of the papers he held dropped out of his hands. And thus he was overpowered, and acquitted Ligarius.
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