to escape and instead became entangled. The Greek marines disembarked to finish off isolated groups of Persians who had struggled to shore. Herodotus has Greek ship losses at 40, but Persian losses at 200 sunk and more captured. Whether these figures are precise or not, the Persian defeat was real enough.
According to Aeschylus, who served at Salamis, Xerxes ‘shrieked aloud’ at the sight of the disaster, ‘rent his clothes’ and ordered a retreat. Salamis was a decisive battle, entirely against the odds, and it demonstrated how sea power, properly exploited, could, in the right geographical circumstances, compensate for any weakness on land. Fortunately for the Greeks, Themistocles turned out to be a strategic genius. A smaller Persian army returned in 479 BCE, but was shattered at the Battle of Plataea, while the Persian fleet was finished off the same year at Mycale. Even more than Marathon, the victory at Salamis saved Greece and opened the way to the extraordinary flowering of classical Greek culture that followed.
1 August 47 BCE
Every schoolchild knows the phrase made famous by Julius Caesar: ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ – ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’. However, the battle at which he is supposed to have uttered the immortal words is all but unknown. At the town of Zela (now Zile in modern-day northern Turkey), Caesar’s legions faced a very much larger enemy on the very site where, 20 years earlier, a Roman army had been comprehensively beaten. The Battle of Zela was a much riskier venture than Caesar’s brief epigram suggests, but in the end it was indeed a short, sharp victory for the Roman side.
The battle was prompted by events during the civil war that had raged between Caesar and Pompey (his erstwhile colleague in the First Triumvirate). The war ended with Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus and his subsequent murder in 48 BCE on the orders of Ptolemy XIII, one of two claimants to the throne of Egypt. Caesar arrived in Alexandria shortly after Pompey’s death and began a notorious affair with Cleopatra VII, the other claimant to the throne. After summoning Roman reinforcements and allies from the garrisons of the Middle East, Caesar defeated Ptolemy, and Cleopatra became queen (as co-ruler with her younger brother Ptolemy XIV). With Egypt secure as an ally, Caesar left with just 1,000 men to settle affairs in the Roman provinces in the Middle East and Anatolia, where some of the local rulers had supported Pompey. One province in particular took his attention. While the civil war distracted Roman commanders, Pharnaces II, who had been installed by Pompey as king of the Crimea, arrived in Anatolia to claim back the kingdom of Pontus, taken from his family by the Romans a few years after the first Battle of Zela. Pharnaces defeated Caesar’s local commander Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus, seized the region, castrated and enslaved all Roman citizens and murdered Roman tax collectors. This was a challenge Caesar could not allow to go unpunished.
As Caesar approached, Pharnaces tried to buy him off with the offer of his daughter and a heavy golden crown in return for the right to rule his ancestral lands, but Caesar was not to be appeased. The details of the battle that followed are scanty. The number of men on each side is at best an estimate: perhaps 20,000 with Pharnaces, while Caesar brought four badly depleted legions, one composed of local troops from neighbouring Galatia, whose ruler, Deiotarus, had been compelled to provide them as penance for supporting Pompey. It is likely that the seasoned troops with Caesar were greatly outnumbered. Pharnaces made camp on a hilltop at Zela, confident that he would repeat the victory over the Romans won by his father Mithridates in 67 BCE. Caesar was camped 8 kilometres (5 miles) away, but during the night of 31 July moved his force to the opposite side of the valley from Zela to await the probable battle. While Caesar’s troops began to fortify their hilltop, Pharnaces moved to catch them unprepared.
The chief account of the battle comes from The Alexandrian War, written by an anonymous Roman officer. According to this source, Pharnaces massed his forces together, including a cohort of scythed chariots, and set them off down the hill to cross the valley floor and rush up the far slope towards the Romans. Caesar thought this was simply a display, since no sane commander would send his troops and horses uphill to fight a battle, but the enemy rolled on until the chariots reached the surprised Roman line. Caesar hastily assembled his legions and showers of javelins blunted the impact of the first wave of chariots. Despite the confusion and the unequal numbers, the disciplined Roman army drove the enemy back, killing and capturing a great many, until they reached and occupied the camp at Zela. Pharnaces fled back to the Crimea where he was later killed in a fight with one of his governors. Caesar, it must be assumed, had the tactical skill and inspiration lacking in the two Roman commanders already defeated in Pontus, though too little is known of the battle to be certain of how the odds were overcome, save the tactical ineptitude of the tiring charge uphill against veteran Roman legionaries.
Caesar wrote to a correspondent in Rome after the battle that he had come and seen and conquered, a phrase borrowed, so it is thought, from the Greek philosopher Democritus. The campaign against Pharnaces completed the pacification of Asia Minor. Caesar sailed back to Italy, where he landed in September 47 BCE. Three years later he planned another major expedition to the east to punish the Parthians for the defeat of Crassus at Carrhae, hoping to take 16 legions and 10,000 archers and cavalry with him. Shortly before he was due to depart, on 15 March 44 BCE, he was stabbed to death in the Senate by a group of men alarmed by his appointment as ‘Perpetual Dictator’. Though Caesar fought back, these were odds even he could not overcome.
May 878
Anyone travelling along the railway line that links Exeter to London will notice shortly after Westbury a large white horse laid out in the chalk of a shallow hillside. It is said to commemorate the site of the Battle of Edington fought between the West Saxon King Alfred and the forces of the Danish leader Guthrum, though the truth of the story is elusive. The Saxon victory has always been seen as a defining moment in English history, when the future of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom was finally saved from the apparently irresistible encroachment of the Vikings. Little is known in detail about the battle itself (or if it even took place at Edington) but it came to symbolize the end of this stage of Viking conquest, a time when all the dice had seemed loaded in their favour.
The Viking Danes arrived with the so-called ‘Great Army’ of pagan warriors in 865, not to raid, as they had done repeatedly, but to seize a kingdom. A decade later the Danes had conquered Northumbria, East Anglia and the central English kingdom of Mercia. They had been blocked only by the English kingdom of Wessex in southern and southwestern England. The King of the West Saxons from 871 was Alfred, who came to the throne shortly after defeating the Danes in a major battle at Ashdown in January of that year. But Danish infiltration was difficult to resist. Alfred was forced to raise money to pay off the Danish leaders, an extortion characteristic of Viking warfare and a way of achieving wealth without having to conquer it. In 874, the Great Army divided, some to go north, some to maintain their rule in Mercia, and one part, under Guthrum, to move south. In 875, this Danish army set out from Cambridge to Wareham in Dorset, supported by a Danish fleet sailing along the coast. The fleet was lost in a storm and with it a potentially large Danish army. Guthrum occupied Exeter, where Alfred surrounded him and forced him to agree to leave the West Saxon kingdom. Hostages were exchanged as a sign of good faith, but almost all the chronicles from the time indicate that the good faith of pagans was not to be trusted.
The best accounts of what followed – the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, begun later in Alfred’s reign, and a short account of Alfred’s life written in 893 by the monk Asser – have clearly been embroidered in order to demonstrate that what followed was Alfred’s noble triumph over adversity. It is evident that Guthrum moved away to the Mercian city of Gloucester, but unlikely that he felt bound by any oaths he had made. In the early weeks of 878, the Danes co-ordinated a strike against Wessex, which was designed to bring the kingdom finally into the Danish sphere. The first coup was against Alfred, who was spending Christmas at his estates in Chippenham. Guthrum led a surprise attack and Alfred was fortunate enough to flee