At Corfinium Cæsar came up with and besieged Lucius Domitius, who had been sent to be his successor in the command of Gaul but who did not have all of his 4000 men with him. The inhabitants of Corfinium captured him at the gates, as he was trying to escape, and brought him to Cæsar."If we may believe Lucan," says Combes-Dounous, "the soldiers of Domitius themselves delivered him to Cæsar:" Ecce nefas belli, reseratis agmina portis Captivum traxere ducem.( ii. 506.) There is better authority for this statement than Lucan. Cæsar affirms it in his detailed account of the military operations around Corfinium. ( i. 23.) The latter received the soldiers of Domitius, who offered themselves to him, with kindness, in order to encourage others to join him, and he allowed Domitius to go unharmed wherever he liked, and to take his money with him.Cæsar says that he allowed Domitius to take this money although he knew that it had been given to him by Pompey for the pay of his troops. () He hoped perhaps that Domitius would stay with him on account of this beneficence, but he did not prevent him from joining Pompey. While these transactions were taking place so swiftly, Pompey hastened from Capua to Luceria and thence to Brundusium in order to cross the Adriatic to Epirus and complete his preparations for war there. He wrote letters to all the provinces and the commanders thereof, to princes, kings, and cities to send aid for carrying on the war with the greatest possible speed, and this they did zealously. Pompey's own army was in Spain ready to move wherever it might be needed. Pompey gave some of the legions he already had in Italy to the consuls to be moved from Brundusium to Epirus.

The consuls crossed safely to Dyrrachium,The modern Durazzo. which some persons, by reason of the following error, consider the same as Epidamnus. A barbarian king of the region, Epidamnus by name, built a city on the sea-coast and named it after himself. Dyrrachus, the son of his daughter and of Neptune (as is supposed), added a dockyard to it which he named Dyrrachium. When the brothers of this Dyrrachus made war against him, Hercules, who was returning from Erythea, formed an alliance with him for a part of his territory; wherefore the Dyrrachians claim Hercules as their founder because he had a share of their land, not that they repudiate Dyrrachus, but because they pride themselves on Hercules even more as a god. In the battle which took place it is said that Hercules killed Ionius, the son of Dyrrachus, by mistake, and that after performing the funeral rites he threw the body into the sea in order that it might bear his name.The Ionian sea of the Greeks was the southern part of the Adriatic lying between Greece and Italy. Strabo (v. I, 8) says that the Adriatic took its name from the town of Atria in Venetia. In another place (vii. 5, 10), he says: "The Ionian and the Adriatic have a common mouth, but there is this difference, that the first part of this sea was called the Ionian, and the interior portion, as far as the northern extremity, the Adriatic, but now the whole is called by the latter name. Theopompus says that the former of these names was derived from a man who ruled this region and was a native of Issa, and that the latter was derived from the river Adria." This river is the modern Tartaro. At a later period the Briges, returning from Phrygia, took possession of the city and the surrounding country. They were supplanted by the Taulantii, an Illyrian tribe, who were displaced in their turn by the Liburnians, another Illyrian tribe, who were in the habit of making piratical expeditions against their neighbors, with very swift ships. Hence the Romans call swift ships liburnicœ, because these were the first ones they came in conflict with. The people who had been expelled from Dyrrachium by the Liburnians procured the aid of the Corcyreans, who then ruled the sea, and drove out the Liburnians. The Corcyreans mingled their own colonists with them and thus it came to be considered a Greek port; but the Corcyreans changed its name, because they considered it unpropitious, and called it Epidamnus from the town just above it, and Thucydides gives it that name also. Nevertheless, the former name prevailed finally and it is now called Dyrrachium.

A portion of Pompey's forces had crossed to Dyrrachium with the consuls. Pompey led the remainder to Brundusium, where he awaited the return of the ships that had carried the others over. Here Cæsar advanced against him, and he defended himself by walls and dug trenches in the cityCæsar says that " Pompey, either alarmed at Cæsar's works, or because he had decided from the beginning to leave Italy, began to prepare for his departure as soon as his ships should return, and in order the more effectually to delay Cæsar's onset, lest the soldiers should break in while he was on the point of embarking, he blocked up the gates, built walls in the streets and avenues, dug ditches across the ways and drove sharpened stakes and branches of trees in them." ( i. 27.) until his fleet came back. Then he took his departure in the early evening, leaving the bravest of his troops on the walls. These also sailed away after nightfall, with a favorable wind. Thus Pompey and his whole army abandoned Italy and passed over to Epirus. Cæsar, seeing the general drift of public opinion toward Pompey, was at a loss which way to turn or from what point to begin the war. As he had apprehensions of Pompey's army in Spain, which was large and well disciplined by long service (lest while he was pursuing Pompey it should fall upon his rear), he decided to march to Spain and destroy that army first. He now divided his forces into five parts, one of which he left at Brundusium, another at Hydrus,The modern Otranto. and another at Tarentum to guard Italy. Another he sent under command of Quintus Valerius to take possession of the grain-producing island of Sardinia, which he did. He sent Asinius Pollio to Sicily, which was then under the command of Cato. When Cato asked him whether he had brought the order of the Senate, or that of the people, to take possession of a government that had been assigned to another, Pollio replied, "The master of Italy has sent me on this business." Cato answered that in order to spare the lives of those under his command he would not make resistance there. He then sailed away to Corcyra and from Corcyra to Pompey.Asinius Pollio wrote a history of the civil wars from the year 60 to the battle of Philippi, which is lost. It is the subject of eulogy in one of the Odes of Horace (Lib. ii. Carm. I). Mendelssohn and G. Thouret are of the opinion that both Appian and Plutarch drew from some Greek author who drew from Pollio. Appian refers to Pollio's history in Sec. 82 infra.

Cæsar hastened to Rome. He found the people shuddering with recollection of the horrors of Marius and Sulla and he cheered them with the prospect and promise of clemency. In proof of his kindness to his enemies, he said that he had taken Lucius Domitius prisoner and allowed him to go away unharmed with his money. Nevertheless, he broke the bolts of the public treasury, and when Metellus, one of the tribunes, tried to prevent him from entering, threatened him with death. He took away money hitherto untouched, which, they say, had been deposited there long ago, at the time of the Gallic invasion, with a public curse upon anybody who should take it out except in case of a war with the Gauls. Cæsar said that he had subjugated the Gauls completely and thus released the commonwealth from the curse. He then placed Æmilius Lepidus in charge of the city, and the tribune, Mark Antony, in charge of Italy and of the army guarding it. Outside of Italy he chose Curio to take command of Sicily in place of Cato,The preceding section says that Asinius Pollio was sent to take command of Sicily. Cæsar himself says (i. 30) that he sent Curio to Sicily with three legions and ordered him, when he had recovered that island, to transport his army immediately to Africa. He adds that Cato was energetically preparing for war by land and sea, but that when he was advised of Curio's approach he fled from his province. and Quintus Valerius for Sardinia. He sent Gaius Antonius to Illyria and intrusted Cisalpine Gaul to Licinius Crassus. He ordered the building of two fleets with all speed, one in the Adriatic and the other in the Tyrrhenian sea, and appointed Hortensius and Dolabella their admirals while they were still under construction.

Having prevailed so far as to make Italy inaccessible to Pompey, Cæsar went to Spain, where he encountered Petreius and Afranius, Pompey's lieutenants, and was worsted by them at first and afterward had an indecisive engagement with them near the town of Ilerda.The modern Lerida. He pitched his camp on some high ground and obtained his supplies by means of a bridge across the river Sicoris.The modern Segre. Suddenly a freshet of melting snow carried away his bridge and cut off a great number of his men on the opposite side. These were destroyed by the forces of Petreius. Cæsar himself, with the rest of his army, suffered very severely from the difficulty of the place, from hunger, from the weather, and from the enemy, his situation being in no wise different from that of a siege. Finally, on the approach of summer, Afranius and Petreius withdrew to the interior of Spain to recruit more soldiers, but Cæsar continually anticipated them, blocked their passage, and prevented their advance. He also surrounded one of their divisions that had been sent forward to capture his camp. They raised their shields over their heads in token of surrender, but Cæsar neither captured nor slaughtered them, but allowed them to go back to Afranius unharmed, after his usual manner of winning the favor of his enemies. Whence it came to pass that there was continual intercourse between the camps and talk of reconciliation among the rank and file.

To Afranius and some of the other officers it now seemed best to abandon Spain to Cæsar, provided they could go unharmed to Pompey. Petreius opposed this and ran through the camp killing those of Cæsar's men whom he found holding communication with his own. He even slew with his own hand one of his officers who tried to restrain him. Moved by these acts of severity on the part of Petreius, the minds of the soldiers were still more attracted to the clemency of Cæsar. Soon afterward Cæsar managed to cut off the enemy's access to water, and Petreius was compelled by necessity to come with Afranius to a conference with Cæsar between the two armies. Here it was agreed that they should abandon Spain to Cæsar, and that he should conduct them unharmed to the other side of the river VarusThe modern Var. It rises in the Maritime Alps and empties into the Mediterranean near Nice. and allow them to proceed thence to Pompey. Arrived at this stream, Cæsar called a meeting of all those who were from Rome or Italy and addressed them as follows: " My enemies (for by still using this term I shall make my meaning clearer to you), I did not destroy those of you who surrendered to me when you had been sent to seize my camp, nor the rest of your army when I had cut you off from water, although Petreius had previously slaughtered those of my men who were intercepted on the other side of the river Sicoris. If there is any gratitude among you for these favors tell them to all of Pompey's soldiers." After speaking thus he dismissed them uninjured, and he appointed Quintus Cassius governor of Spain. So much for the operations of Cæsar.This is a very meagre account of the Ilerda campaign. That of Plutarch is still more so. A detailed narrative of it is given by Cæsar himself (i. 37-87), showing how he manœuvred the enemy into a surrender without coming to a general engagement.