Page 36 of Agrippa

Caesar was reluctant to put to sea again. He even spoke of abandoning the operation altogether until the following year. I argued that we should press on. We had been unlucky, I said, not defeated.

Meanwhile, Sextus, hearing of our losses, had dispatched one of his commanders, Menas, with a small fleet of seven liburnians to reconnoitre our position and inflict such damage as he could. But unknown to Sextus, Menas had a grudge against his chief for failing to recognise his talents and promote him as he thought he deserved. After some token skirmishing, he sent word to Caesar that he would like to meet him.

We both remembered Menas very well – the treacherous captain of Sextus’s flagship, who had suggested cutting all our throats at dinner. He proposed a secret rendezvous on a tiny island in the Bay of Vibo. We feared a trap, but curiosity overcame us, although we made sure to take a bodyguard.

Menas came alone. He kneeled before Caesar and begged his pardon. As proof of his sincerity, he offered us the latest intelligence. Despite heavy losses in the storm, he said, Lepidus had managed to land ten of his twelve legions on Sicily. Statilius Taurus was in the toe of Italy, preparing to invade with another three. Sextus was hard pressed and anxious.

Hearing this, Caesar recovered his nerve, and as soon as our fleet was seaworthy, our expedition resumed.

We sailed first to Stromboli, a smouldering black rock rising sheer out of the calm blue Mediterranean. Its summit belched puffs of smoke as we drew closer, and that night, brilliant sheets of red and yellow flame shot from its summit, illuminating our ships with a hellish glare. The augurs declared that it showed the god of war was with us. Privately, I thought they might equally have deduced the opposite.

Here, Caesar and I parted company. Our plan was for him to head south-east with a small escort to join Taurus’s forces preparing to cross to Sicily, while I went south-west in search of the enemy’s fleet. My task was simple: to gain control of the sea.

We said goodbye on the middle deck. Neither of us was sure when or if we would see one another again.

I scoured the length of Sicily in the hope of seeking battle. First I seized the island of Hiera, just off the western tip, without opposition from the garrison. Then we turned and sailed for several days, hugging the northern coast, until at last we found Sextus’s fleet at the opposite end of the island, in the port of Mylae, close to where Caesar was intending to land.

I drew up our ships and blocked the entrance.

They had little choice except to come out and fight, which they did early the next morning, under the command of Sextus’s deputy, Papias. Sextus himself, I discovered later, was watching from a nearby promontory, using a mirror to flash signals to his fleet.

Papias had much more experience of naval action than I had. His crews were better sailors. His ships were faster and nimbler. But we had stronger vessels and carried more soldiers.

They came at us at full speed, head-on, confident and undefeated – one hundred and fifty liburnians under full sail, trumpets blaring, hammers beating time, oars flashing in the brilliant sunshine, spray rising from their prows.

They passed between us, close enough to slice off some banks of our oars, raking our decks with arrows, and then we put into effect the tactics we had spent so long practising: firing our grappling irons from our high towers, locking onto their hulls, dragging them to a halt and then winching them in for the kill. Marines crowded our decks. The gangplanks dropped with a thud.

The noise was terrific all along the line – shouts and screams and splintering wood as ships collided. My captain spotted the flagship of Papias heading towards us, and I gave the order to attack it first, just as I would have done if I had been fighting on land and had sighted the enemy’s commander. The hammers doubled their tempo. Our rowers put their backs into it. Seeing the danger, Papias tried to turn, but he left it too late. I braced myself and was almost knocked off my feet as we rammed into his vessel’s bow at full speed. Our bronze beak smashed its timbers and broke its keel. As water rushed into its hull, the ship began to list.

We disengaged and turned about. By the time we came alongside, their rowers were already leaping into the water. Many were drowning. I drew my sword and was first across the gangplank, at the head of twenty-five marines. I hacked my way through the melee, trying to find Papias, but he had escaped into a tender and was being rowed to a nearby ship.

Soon afterwards, Sextus gave the signal to disengage, and the Pompeian fleet turned with expert seamanship and headed back into harbour. I wanted to follow, but my captain insisted our triremes were too heavy to navigate the shoals.

We had lost five ships, the enemy thirty.

The day belonged to us, if not yet the war.

Rather than tie down our fleet continuing a blockade, I turned around and sailed it forty miles west, where I laid siege to the city of Tyndaris, an ancient walled fortress built high on a headland that commanded the whole of that part of the coast.

I sent a messenger to try to find Caesar in the east of the island, to inform him of my victory. It was a week before I received his reply.

As so often was his fate in war, he had suffered a series of setbacks. He had crossed from Italy with Taurus and his legions and taken the town of Tauromenium. But he had quickly found himself surrounded on three sides. He had gone back to his fleet as a precaution, only to be surprised by Sextus’s surviving ships, which had left Mylae and suddenly appeared on the horizon. Yet again he had been routed at sea. He had managed to escape by hiding his ensign and drifting unnoticed along the coast until he was able to scramble ashore near Syracuse, where mercifully he had found troops loyal to his cause.

He ordered me to send him as many soldiers as I could spare, of which I had plenty, as by now Tyndaris had fallen. Not long afterwards, he arrived at my headquarters with his army, together with Lepidus, whom he had met by chance while crossing the western slopes of Mount Etna.

Strange to relate, but Lepidus had emerged as the most successful general of the campaign. He had fought his way across the island with his ten African legions, gathering more recruits as he went, so that now he commanded an enormous force of a hundred thousand infantry and cavalry. Gone was the anxious figure I had last seen at Perusia. He was back in his full pomp – aristocrat, chief priest, triumvir, and former consul, proconsul and master of horse. He was easily old enough to be Caesar’s father, and proceeded to act as if he were, lecturing his young colleague – and me, to the extent that he deigned to notice me – on military tactics and how to mount a successful campaign.

Caesar was coolly polite to his face, and even managed to congratulate him, but privately he complained bitterly to me about this high-handed treatment.

– He only exists at all because Antony and I have allowed it! If we hadn’t destroyed Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, he would have been finished.

Still, the fact remained that Lepidus was now powerful, and faced with such overwhelming numbers, Sextus’s position was fast becoming hopeless. He had been driven back to a strip of territory along the north-eastern coast. One by one his garrisons were surrendering. Soon, all he would have left would be his fleet.

Rather than drag the fighting on into winter, at the beginning of September he sent a message to Caesar proposing that the war should be settled by one last naval battle at an appointed hour and place. He suggested the waters off Naulochus, a small harbour town a short distance from Mylae.

Caesar showed me the letter and asked me whether we could win.

I replied that I had beaten Sextus once and was confident I could do so again.