The hopes of his opponents as to an extensive desertion were thwarted as ignominiously as the former attempts to break up his army like that of Lucullus.( 4) Labienus himself appeared in the camp of Pompeius with a band doubtless of Celtic and German horsemen but without a single legionary.

Indeed the soldiers, as if they would show that the war was quite as much their matter as that of their general, settled among themselves that they would give credit for the pay, which Caesar had promised to double for them at the outbreak of the civil war, to their commander up to its termination, and would meanwhile support their poorer comrades from the general means; besides, every subaltern officer equipped and paid a trooper out of his own purse.
Field of Caesar's Power Upper Italy While Caesar thus had the one thing which was needful-- unlimited political and military authority and a trustworthy army ready for the fight--his power extended, comparatively speaking, over only a very limited space.

It was based essentially on the province of Upper Italy.

This region was not merely the most populous of all the districts of Italy, but also devoted to the cause of the democracy as its own.

The feeling which prevailed there is shown by the conduct of a division of recruits from Opitergium (Oderzo in the delegation of Treviso), which not long after the outbreak of the war in the Illyrian waters, surrounded on a wretched raft by the war-vessels of the enemy, allowed themselves to be shot at during the whole day down to sunset without surrendering, and, such of them as had escaped the missiles, put themselves to death with their own hands during the following night.