Hello and welcome back to this episode of epochs where once again I should be continuing

my narrative of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic. Now last time if you remember we

getting to the most juicy bit, the start of the actual civil war itself. In fact it has

basically kicked off at the end of last episode I talked about Caesar crossing the Rubicon.

So let's continue straight from there. In Plutarch's life of

Pompey, he says this. Quote, a few days later, Caesar entered and occupied Rome. He did what he

could to calm people's fears and behaved with great moderation to everyone, except in the case of

Metellus, one of the tribunes, who tried to prevent him taking money out of the public treasury.

Caesar badly needed money at this point.

Caesar threatened to have Mattelus put to death and followed up with the threat with language of even greater truculence.

It was much easier for him, he said, to do this than to say it.

I could order you killed quicker than it takes

to actually kill you. So with Mattelus overruled in this way, Caesar took what he wanted from

the treasury and then set out in pursuit of Pompey, since he wanted to drive him out of Italy

before his forces in Spain could come to join him. Meanwhile, Pompey had occupied Brondesium. He found plenty of

transports there and immediately put the consuls and 30 cohorts of soldiers on board the ships

and sent them across before him to Diracchium. He sent his father-in-law Scipio and his son

Naus to Syria to raise a fleet. He himself barricaded the gates and stationed the most likely armed

soldiers on the walls. He told the citizens of Brondesium to stay quiet in their houses

and then dig up all the ground inside the city, cutting trenches across the streets and filling them

with stakes sunk in the earth, all except for two streets, by which in the end he made

his way down to the sea. He spent two days in embarking the main body of his troops, in a quiet

...