In 49 BC, the river was crossed, and there was no turning back.
Pompey the Great, once Caesar’s closest political ally, now stood against him, backed by the Senate’s most powerful men. Pompey was a celebrated general, respected, wealthy, and backed by Rome’s elite. Caesar was the people's champion, the war hero from Gaul, leading an army fiercely loyal to him alone. The stage was set for Rome’s bloodiest family feud.
Rome Abandoned
Rather than risk a siege, Pompey and the Senate fled Rome for Greece, hoping to gather forces from the eastern provinces. Caesar entered the city unopposed not as a conqueror but as a liberator. He promised peace and order. But peace was impossible now.
With lightning speed, Caesar secured Spain, crushed Pompeian loyalists, and then turned his sights on the east.
The Battle of Pharsalus
The final clash came in 48 BC on the dusty plains of Pharsalus, in modern-day Greece. Pompey’s army was larger, better supplied, and rested. Caesar’s men were battle-hardened, outnumbered, but led by a man who had faced impossible odds before.
As dawn broke, the air thick with tension, Caesar ordered an unexpected maneuver: he held his cavalry in reserve and targeted Pompey’s horsemen, the pride of his forces. The plan worked. Pompey's cavalry scattered, his lines collapsed, and the battle was over. Pompey fled, his dreams of victory shattered.
The Fall of Pompey
Pompey sought refuge in Egypt, where he hoped for sanctuary. Instead, betrayal met him at the shore. Fearing Caesar’s wrath, the young Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII (brother to Cleopatra) ordered Pompey’s assassination.
The once-great general, who had walked among Rome’s heroes, was stabbed on the beach and left to die, a king’s gift to a greater conqueror. When Caesar arrived days later, the Egyptians presented Pompey’s severed head.
Caesar did not rejoice, he wept. Enemies they were, but Pompey had once been a friend, a partner in shaping Rome.
Caesar and Cleopatra
But Egypt held more surprises. Caught in a dynastic struggle between the young Ptolemy XIII and his sister, the brilliant and charismatic Cleopatra VII, Caesar chose a side and perhaps a queen.
Cleopatra, seeing in Caesar a path to power, allied herself with him politically, personally, and perhaps romantically. Their union would soon bear fruit: a child named Caesarion, a symbol of their unlikely alliance. But Rome was still waiting.
A Dictator in All But Name
Caesar returned home victorious. The civil war was not yet fully over, but his grip on Rome was tightening. He was now dictator, a title meant to be temporary. But nothing about Caesar’s ambitions was temporary.
He reformed the calendar, redistributed land, and pardoned many of his enemies. But power makes men nervous and in the shadows of the Senate, conspirators began to whisper.
Next Time: Julius Caesar Part Four | The Ides of March
Surrounded by daggers hidden in togas, Caesar walks unknowingly into his final day. Betrayed not by strangers, but by those he called friends.