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Updated: May 9, 2025
There the fragments of the army scattered at Pharsalus, the troops that had garrisoned Dyrrhachium, Corcyra, and the Peloponnesus, the remains of the Illyrian fleet, gradually congregated; there the second commander-in-chief Metellus Scipio, the two sons of Pompeius, Gnaeus and Sextus, the political leader of the republicans Marcus Cato, the able officers Labienus, Afranius, Petreius, Octavius and others met.
But from this very position Labienus entered into communication with the opposite party, resorted at the beginning of hostilities in 705 to the headquarters of Pompeius instead of those of Caesar, and fought through the whole civil strife with unparalleled bitterness against his old friend and master in war.
"Antony was so captivated by her that, while Fulvia, his wife, maintained his quarrels in Rome against Cæsar by actual force of arms, and the Parthian troops, commanded by Labienus the King's generals having made him commander-in-chief were assembled in Mesopotamia, and ready to enter Syria, he could yet suffer himself to be carried away by her to Alexandria, there to keep holiday, like a boy, in play and diversion, squandering and fooling away in enjoyments that most costly, as Antiphon says, of all valuables, time.
Labienus having learnt that Cæsar was in a tight place, owing to a check at Clermont and the defection of the Eduans, by a masterly piece of engineering recrossed the Seine by night at the Point du Jour, where the double viaduct of the girdle railway crosses to-day, and when the Gauls awoke in the morning they beheld the bannered host of the Roman legions in battle array on the plain of Grenelle beneath.
If this took place, he saw that it would be attended with great danger to the Province to have warlike men, enemies of the Roman people, bordering upon an open and very fertile tract of country. For these reasons he appointed Titus Labienus, his lieutenant, to the command of the fortification which he had made.
The staff of Caesar the elite of the democracy of the capital contained, along with not a few useless young men of rank, some able officers, such as Publius Crassus the younger son of the old political ally of Caesar, and Titus Labienus, who followed the chief of the democracy as a faithful adjutant from the Forum to the battle-field.
But they did not confine themselves to words. Marcus Bibulus, Titus Labienus, and others of this coterie carried out their theory in practice, and caused such officers or soldiers of Caesar's army as fell into their hands to be executed en masse; which, as may well be conceived, did not tend to make Caesar's troops fight with less energy.
But after Correus had met his death in a skirmish with the Roman foragers, the resistance here too was broken; the victor proposed tolerable conditions, to which the Bellovaci along with their confederates submitted. The Treveri were reduced to obedience by Labienus, and incidentally the territory of the outlawed Eburones was once more traversed and laid waste.
When the civil war began and Labienus left him, he told all his officers who had served under Pompey that they were free to follow if they wished. Not another man forsook him. Suetonius says that he was rapacious, that he plundered tribes in Spain who were allies of Rome, that he pillaged shrines and temples in Gaul, and destroyed cities merely for spoil.
Under these scandalous conditions, Scipio, Labienus, Cato, Afranius, Petreius, Faustus Sylla, the son of the Dictator, Lucius Caesar, and the rest of the irreconcilables, made Africa their new centre of operations. Here they gathered to themselves the inheritors of the Syllan traditions, and made raids on the Italian coasts and into Sicily and Sardinia.
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