toward the newly taken ramparts.  There lay the dead, heaps upon heaps, the patrician dress proclaiming the proud lineage of the fallen; Claudii, Fabii, AEmilii, Furii, Cornelii, Sempronii, and a dozen more great gentes were represented—­scions of the most magnificent oligarchy the world has ever seen.  And this was their end!  Caesar passed his hand over his forehead and pressed his fingers upon his eyes.

“They would have it so,” he said, in quiet sadness, to the little knot of officers around him.  “After all that I had done for my country, I, Caius Caesar, would have been condemned by them like a criminal, if I had not appealed to my army.”

And so ended that day and that battle.  On the field and in the camp lay dead two hundred Caesarians and fifteen thousand Pompeians.  Twenty-four thousand prisoners had been taken, one hundred and eighty standards, nine eagles.  As for the Magnus, he had stripped off his general’s cloak and was riding with might and main for the seacoast, accompanied by thirty horsemen.

Chapter XXII

The End of the Magnus

I

The months had come and gone for Cornelia as well as for Quintus Drusus, albeit in a very different manner.  The war was raging upon land and sea.  The Pompeian fleet controlled all the water avenues; the Italian peninsula was held by the Caesarians.  Cornelia wrote several times to old Mamercus at Praeneste, enclosing a letter which she begged him to forward to her lover wherever he might be.  But no answer came.  Once she learned definitely that the ship had been captured.  For the other times she could imagine the same catastrophe.  Still she had her comfort.  Rumours of battles, of sieges, and arduous campaigning drifted over the Mediterranean.  Now it was that a few days more would see Caesar an outlaw without a man around him, and then Cornelia would believe none of it.  Now it was that Pompeius was in sore straits, and then she was all credulity.  Yet beside these tidings there were other stray bits of news very dear to her heart.  Caesar, so it was said, possessed a young aide-de-camp of great valour and ability, one Quintus Drusus, and the Imperator was already entrusting him with posts of danger and of responsibility.  He had behaved gallantly at Ilerda; he had won more laurels at the siege of Massilia.  At Dyrrachium he had gained yet more credit.  And on account of these tidings, it may easily be imagined that Cornelia was prepared to be very patient and to be willing to take the trying vicissitudes of her own life more lightly.