personal integrity, the mildness and equity of his administration of justice, helped, with his success in arms, to make his name favourably known in Asia and Greece, just as we are told that it was respected among the Sicilian Greeks in B.C. 82. “He was one,” says Cicero, “by whose valour the Roman people were more dreaded among foreign nations, by whose justice were more beloved.”
It was no wonder, then, that in the next occasion of the Greeks taking active part in military affairs (the civil war of B.C. 49–48) they were generally found on the side of Pompey rather than of Caesar. The former obtained recruits from Ionia, Macedonia, Boeotia, Athens, Sparta, and other parts of the Peloponnese, and many cities in Greece were occupied by his troops. Consequently while Caesar was person- ally engaged with Pompey in the early part of B.C. 48, his officers had to undertake a kind of conquest of Greece. It was accomplished apparently for the most part without bloodshed and with little serious resistance. Aetolia, Acarnania, and Amphilochia gave in their adherence at once, as did Delphi, Thebes, and Orchomenus. In Thessaly there was a division of opinion, for Pompey's father-in-law, Metellus Scipio, coming from Syria with troops, occupied Larisa and the line of the Via Egnatia, which the Romans had constructed from Apollonia on the west coast to Thessalonika on the east. The Peloponnesians blocked the Isthmus of Corinth against Caesar's legate, Fufius Calenus, and Athens closed her gates. But the Piraeus—now an open town—was occupied in Caesar's interest. After the
