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Updated: June 27, 2025
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.
In the second part of Goethe's Faust, there is a grand and striking scene, where in the classical Walpurgis Night, on the Pharsalian Plains, the mocking Mephistopheles sits down between the solemn antique Sphinxes, and boldly questions them, and reads their riddles.
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.
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.
The whole left wing was intrusted to the command of Parmenio, who had round his person the Pharsalian regiment of cavalry, which was the strongest and best of all the Thessalian horse regiments. The centre of the second line was occupied by a body of phalangite infantry, formed of companies which were drafted for this purpose from each of the brigades of their phalanx.
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.
In fact Pharnaces king of the Bosporus pushed his officiousness so far, that on the news of the Pharsalian battle he took possession not only of the town of Phanagoria which several years before had been declared free by Pompeius, and of the dominions of the Colchian princes confirmed by him, but even of the kingdom of Little Armenia which Pompeius had conferred on king Deiotarus.
"Who is there, I ask," he says, "who alleges Ligarius to have been in fault because he was in Africa? He does so who himself was most anxious to be there, and now complains that he was refused admittance by Ligarius, he who was in arms against Cæsar. What was your sword doing, Tubero, in that Pharsalian army? Whom did you seek to kill then? What was the meaning of your weapon?
All his wine, the great weight of silver, the costly furniture and rich dresses, in a few days where were they all? A Charybdis do I call him? He swallowed them all like an entire ocean!" Then he accuses him of cowardice and cruelty in the Pharsalian wars, and compares him most injuriously with Dolabella. "Do you remember how Dolabella fought for you in Spain, when you were getting drunk at Narbo?
Brutus doth also bear witness of another experiment of this nature, who willing, through this exploratory way by lot, to learn what the event and issue should be of the Pharsalian battle wherein he perished, he casually encountered on this verse, said of Patroclus in the Sixteenth of the Iliads Alla me moir oloe, kai Letous ektanen uios. Fate, and Latona's son have shot me dead.
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