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Meanwhile Pompey’s cavalry swept away that of Cæsar, and was advancing to attack the rear, when they received, unexpectedly, the charge of the cohorts which Cæsar had posted there, The cavalry broke, and fled to the mountains. The six cohorts then turned upon the slingers and archers, who had covered the attack of the cavalry, defeated them, and fell upon the rear of Pompey’s left.
They sleep, and they rise up, and they find themselves, now in Europe, now in Asia; they see visions of great cities and wild regions; they are in the marts of commerce, or amid the islands of the South; they gaze on Pompey’s Pillar, or on the Andes; and nothing which meets them carries them forward or backward, to any idea beyond itself.
The first was a man of little ability; the latter was a man whose powers will soon be seen. The committee decreed the independence of Paraguay. Two years later a new convention was held, which dissolved the committee and elected two consuls, Yegros and Francia, to govern the country. Two chairs were made for them, resembling the curule chairs of Rome, and called Cæsar’s and Pompey’s chairs.
All dainties that were known in those days ministered to his feast; oysters from Baiæ; pheasants—a rarity but lately introduced, since Pompey’s conquests in the east—had been brought all the way from Phasis upon the southern shores of the Black Sea; and woodcock from the valleys of Ionia, and the watery plains of Troas, to load the tables of the luxurious masters of the world. Livers of geese, forced to an unnatural size by cramming the unhappy bird with figs; and turbot fricasseed in cream, and peacocks stuffed with truffles, were on the board of Catiline that day, as on the boards of many another noble Roman; and the wines by which these rare dainties were diluted, differed but little, as wisest critics say, from the madeiras and the sherries of the nineteenth century. For so true is it, that under the sun there is nothing new, that in the foix gras of Strasburg, in the turbot
Pompey’s ring was engraved with three trophies, indicating his victories in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Many used merely fanciful or emblematic devices; thus Mæcenas had a frog upon his ring. Others wore the portraits of their ancestors or friends. Publius Lentulus had that of his grandfather.
That given in Pompey’s honor, after the Mithridatic war, had lasted but ten. At this time he made a renewed compact with Pompey and Crassus, by which Pompey was to have the two Spains for his province, Crassus that of Syria, and he himself should have a prolonged government in Gaul for five years more.
The steep bank of the river Enipeus covered the right of Pompey’s line and the left of Cæsar’s. The infantry of the former numbered forty-five thousand; that of the latter, twenty-two thousand, but they were veterans. Pompey was also superior in cavalry, having seven thousand, while Cæsar had only one thousand.
With these, which formed the strength of Pompey’s force, he proposed to outflank the right of Cæsar, extended on the plain. To guard against this movement, Cæsar withdrew six cohorts from his third line, and formed them into a fourth in the rear of his cavalry on the right. The battle commenced by a furious assault on the lines of Pompey by Cæsar’s veterans, who were received with courage.
On the fifteenth day of March, B.C. 44, the Ides of March, the day for which the Senate was convened for his final departure for the East, he was stabbed in the senate-house, and he fell, pierced with wounds, at the foot of Pompey’s statue, in his fifty-sixth year, and anarchy, and new wars again commenced.
He then advanced north to seize Dyrhachiuim, where Pompey’s stores were deposited, but Pompey reached the town before him, and both armies encamped on the banks of the river Apsus, the one on the left and the other on the right bank.
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