Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [46]
Discipline was severe, ranging from food rationing and pay deductions to public floggings and execution for desertion. The worst penalty, for mutiny or collective cowardice before the enemy by a group of troops (usually a cohort), was decimation. One in ten men was chosen at random and the remainder clubbed them to death. This brutal punishment could be effective, but, as when Antony had applied it at Brundisium, was more likely to impose sullen and temporary obedience than to restore morale.
More constructively, much attention was paid to fostering an esprit de corps. Every century carried its standard (a pole with insignia or emblems at its top), and a legion was represented by a silver eagle, carried by the aquilifer, a special standard-bearer in a lionskin headdress. These standards embodied a collective pride and honor, and the loss of a legionary eagle was an irretrievable disgrace. In the confusion of battle the standard helped to orient soldiers by showing them where their military unit was.
Today hand-to-hand fighting is relatively rare, but, after a preliminary phase of javelin throwing and sometimes archery, it was how battles were won and lost in the ancient world. It is hard to imagine the noise, crush, smells, blood, and terror of an ancient battle. Even then, it was recognized as being a particularly demanding experience. A line of soldiers at close quarters to the enemy would fight for only about fifteen minutes; the line would then retire and have its place taken by soldiers in the rear. The dead and wounded were dragged back and replaced by fresh men.
Octavian reached Hirtius north of Arretium, and their legions moved on in the direction of Mutina. Their aim was to break the siege and relieve the proconsul, Decimus Brutus, now dangerously short of provisions.
Despite this progress on the military front, Octavian was in a gloomy frame of mind. First and foremost, a propraetor was junior to a consul, and when he and Hirtius met he was clearly the subordinate officer: Hirtius divided command of the army between them, but insisted on having control of the two Macedonian legions. Octavian bit his lip and complied.
He was also irritated by the continuing efforts on the part of certain senators and the consuls to negotiate a settlement with Antony. He needed a war with a victorious outcome, for if Antony and the republican faction were reconciled, he would once again be isolated. That said, he did not want Antony destroyed: he could envision a time when the two men might need to combine against the Senate and Brutus and Cassius. The Senate had recently awarded the province of Syria to the tyrannicide Cassius. It was looking very much as though there was a conscious plan to build up the republican party and ruin the Caesarians. Appian summed up Octavian’s feelings: “He reflected on the way they [the Senate] had treated him like a boy, offering a statue [equestrian, in the Forum] and a front row at the theatre and calling him Propraetor, but in fact taking his army away from him.”
Octavian’s blood baptism was approaching. Mark Antony was encamped just outside Mutina, around which he had constructed a rampart. In the first week or so of April, news filtered north that the consul Pansa would soon (and at last) be arriving with four newly recruited legions, marching up from Bononia (today’s Bologna) to Mutina. It occurred to Antony that it would be a good idea to attack these raw, barely trained soldiers on the road, before they joined Hirtius and Octavian.
It simultaneously occurred to Hirtius that that was exactly what Antony might do. So, under cover of night, the consul sent the Martian legion (one of those that had defected from Antony) and Octavian’s Praetorian Guard, an elite body of about five hundred men, to