Pharsalus
About
Julius Caesar, badly outnumbered, crushed Pompey the Great's larger army by anticipating a cavalry flanking move and countering it with hidden reserve troops. Pompey's forces suffered roughly 6,000 dead against Caesar's few hundred. Pompey fled to Egypt, where he was murdered on arrival. The battle effectively decided the Roman civil war and Caesar's path to dictatorship.
What happened here
A Roman army fights the way it camps: in lines, by drill, on ground chosen if possible. The legions form up in cohorts with gaps that let ranks rotate, throw a volley of heavy javelins at close range, and then close with the short sword, pushing behind the shield. Auxiliaries hold the flanks and do most of the cavalry work and most of the skirmishing. Battles are short and decided by whether one line breaks, and the killing happens in the pursuit rather than the fighting. The camp is dug and palisaded every night regardless. Afterwards the dead are stripped and the field is looted for days; the ground is remembered locally long after the campaign is a paragraph in someone's history.
Sources
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