Pompey the Great

Gnaeus Pompeius was born in 106 BCE in Picenum, a region on the Adriatic side of central Italy where his family held vast estates and commanded the loyalty of thousands of tenants and veterans ^[1]. His father, Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, was a hard and widely disliked commander who nonetheless reached the consulship in 89 BCE and gave his son an early education in war rather than in the law courts. The younger Pompey served on his father's staff during the Social War, the conflict between Rome and its Italian allies, and saw combat while still in his teens ^[2].

Strabo died in 87 BCE, reportedly during an epidemic that swept his camp, and the seventeen-year-old Pompey inherited both the family fortune and its private army of clients ^[1]. The inheritance came with liabilities. Pompey was prosecuted over property his father had allegedly taken from the sack of Asculum, and he defended himself in court with a poise that impressed observers. The presiding judge, Publius Antistius, was impressed enough to offer his daughter Antistia in marriage, and Pompey was acquitted ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Pompey the Great must begin with this unusual start: he never climbed the conventional ladder of junior magistracies. While other ambitious Romans served as quaestors and aediles, Pompey built his career on the soldiers his family name could raise in Picenum, a resource that would carry him past every constitutional barrier in his path ^[3].

Rome in the 80s BCE was torn between the followers of Gaius Marius and those of Lucius Cornelius Sulla. When Sulla returned from the East in 83 BCE to fight the Marian government, Pompey, then twenty-three, raised three legions from his Picentine clients on his own initiative and marched them to join the Sullan cause ^[1]. Sulla, struck by the young man's audacity, is said to have greeted him with the title imperator, an honor normally reserved for victorious magistrates ^[2].

Sulla put his new lieutenant to work. Pompey suppressed Marian resistance in Sicily and then crossed to Africa, where he defeated the remaining opposition in a short, decisive campaign around 81 BCE. His severity toward defeated enemies in these years earned him the hostile nickname adulescentulus carnifex, the young butcher, from his critics ^[3]. Yet his soldiers hailed him as Magnus, the Great, a name Sulla eventually confirmed, whether in admiration or irony ^[2].

Pompey then demanded a triumph, the ceremonial parade through Rome granted to victorious generals. He was a private citizen who had held no elected office, and no precedent supported the request. Sulla resisted, then yielded, and Pompey celebrated his first triumph while still in his twenties ^[1]. The pattern of his career was set: extraordinary commands, extracted from a reluctant establishment by a mix of indispensability and veiled threat.

During the 70s BCE he fought the rebel general Quintus Sertorius in Hispania, a grinding war that tested him more than any previous opponent. Sertorius was assassinated by his own officer Perperna in 73 BCE, and Pompey finished the war, defeating and executing Perperna ^[4]. Returning to Italy in 71 BCE, his army destroyed a band of fugitives from the slave rebellion of Spartacus, allowing Pompey to claim a share of credit for a war that Marcus Licinius Crassus had largely won, a slight Crassus never forgot ^[3]. In 70 BCE the two men, uneasy partners, held the consulship together, Pompey serving in Rome's highest office without ever having sat in the Senate ^[1].

The greatest of Pompey the Great achievements came in the following decade, and the first was a matter of policing rather than conquest. Piracy had grown into a plague across the Mediterranean, choking grain shipments and even raiding the Italian coast. In 67 BCE the tribune Aulus Gabinius carried a law granting Pompey sweeping command over the whole sea and its coasts for three years, with enormous resources in ships, money, and legates ^[1]. Pompey divided the Mediterranean into sectors, swept it from west to east, and broke pirate power in a campaign traditionally reckoned at about three months, resettling many surrendered pirates as farmers rather than executing them ^[4].

A year later the Manilian law transferred to him the war against Mithridates VI of Pontus, the king who had fought Rome intermittently for over two decades. Pompey defeated Mithridates in 66 BCE and drove him from his kingdom; the old king eventually died in the Crimea in 63 BCE ^[2]. Pompey then marched through the Caucasus region, campaigning against Armenia, Iberia, and Albania, before turning south into Syria, where he deposed the last Seleucid claimant and annexed the country as a Roman province in 64 BCE ^[5].

In 63 BCE he intervened in a dynastic quarrel in Judea, besieged Jerusalem, and captured the Temple Mount after a three-month siege. Ancient sources report that he entered the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctuary of the Temple, but took nothing from it ^[5]. His eastern settlement reorganized a vast arc of territory into provinces and client kingdoms, roughly doubling Rome's public revenues according to ancient estimates, and it endured in its essentials for generations ^[2].

He returned to Italy in 62 BCE and, to widespread surprise, dismissed his army at Brundisium instead of marching on Rome. His third triumph, celebrated in 61 BCE over two days, advertised victories across three continents ^[1]. Among Pompey the Great facts often repeated in antiquity was the boast, recorded by later writers, that he had found Asia a frontier province and left it at the heart of the empire ^[4].

Pompey married five times, and his marriages track the shifting alliances of the late Republic. He divorced his first wife Antistia at Sulla's insistence in order to marry Aemilia, Sulla's stepdaughter, who died soon afterward in childbirth ^[2]. His third wife, Mucia, bore him three children, including his sons Gnaeus and Sextus, before he divorced her on his return from the East amid rumors of her infidelity ^[3].

His fourth marriage, in 59 BCE, was to Julia, the daughter of Julius Caesar, and it sealed the political compact between the two men. By most ancient accounts the marriage grew into genuine affection despite the gap in age, and contemporaries believed Julia's death in childbirth in 54 BCE removed a real restraint on the coming conflict between her husband and her father ^[1]. Pompey's final wife was Cornelia Metella, the young, cultured widow of Crassus's son Publius, whom he married in 52 BCE; she was with him on his last voyage to Egypt ^[2].

Unlike many Roman commanders, Pompey cultivated an image of personal restraint. Ancient writers noted his relatively modest style of living and his loyalty to his wives while married. He spent lavishly in public instead, completing in 55 BCE the first permanent stone theatre in Rome, a huge complex on the Campus Martius that included a temple, porticoes, gardens, and a meeting hall for the Senate ^[6]. That hall, the Curia of Pompey, would later acquire grim fame as the place where Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE ^[6].

For all his victories, Pompey struggled in the arena of civilian politics. On his return from the East the Senate, led by men such as Cato the Younger and Lucullus, stalled the ratification of his eastern settlement and the land grants he had promised his veterans ^[1]. Frustrated, in 60 BCE he joined Caesar and Crassus in the informal alliance that modern historians call the First Triumvirate. Caesar, as consul in 59 BCE, forced through the legislation Pompey needed, and the marriage to Julia bound the partnership ^[3].

The alliance was renewed at Luca in 56 BCE. Pompey and Crassus shared a second joint consulship in 55 BCE, after which Pompey received the Spanish provinces for five years, governing them through legates while he remained near Rome, an unprecedented arrangement ^[2]. The deaths of Julia in 54 BCE and of Crassus, killed fighting the Parthians at Carrhae in 53 BCE, dissolved the ties holding him to Caesar ^[1].

Rome itself was sliding into gang violence. After the politician Clodius was murdered in 52 BCE and rioters burned the Senate house, Pompey was appointed sole consul to restore order, an office without precedent that he handled with restraint, taking a colleague later in the year ^[2]. Gradually he moved toward the senatorial conservatives who had once obstructed him. When the Senate demanded in January 49 BCE that Caesar give up his command in Gaul, and Caesar answered by crossing the Rubicon with his army, the Republic's two greatest generals were at war ^[3].

Caesar's advance through Italy in early 49 BCE was faster than anyone had expected. Pompey, judging that Italy could not be held with the raw troops available, abandoned Rome and then the peninsula, ferrying his forces across the Adriatic from Brundisium to Greece ^[1]. The withdrawal was strategically defensible, since Pompey controlled the sea and the resources of the East, but it stunned opinion at Rome and ceded Italy without a major battle ^[4].

Through 48 BCE the two armies maneuvered in the western Balkans. At Dyrrhachium, Pompey inflicted a sharp defeat on Caesar's outnumbered and hungry troops, breaking his blockade lines, but he declined to press the pursuit to destruction, a caution for which Caesar reportedly mocked him ^[2]. Under pressure from impatient senators in his camp, Pompey then accepted a pitched battle on the plain of Pharsalus in Thessaly on 9 August 48 BCE by the Roman calendar. His larger army was routed when Caesar's reserve broke the cavalry attack on which Pompey's plan depended ^[1].

Pompey escaped the field and sailed east with Cornelia and his younger son, seeking refuge and support from the boy king Ptolemy XIII of Egypt, whose father had owed him much. The king's advisers, calculating that a defeated Pompey was a dangerous guest and that Caesar's favor mattered more, decided otherwise. On 28 September 48 BCE, as Pompey stepped from a small boat onto the shore near Pelusium, he was stabbed to death by Roman officers in Egyptian service while his wife watched from the ship ^[2]. His head was cut off and later presented to Caesar, who by most ancient accounts turned away in grief and had the killers punished ^[4]. Pompey died one day short of his fifty-eighth birthday, according to the biographer Plutarch ^[2].

Any Pompey the Great biography has to reckon with a double reputation: the most successful Roman general of his generation, and the loser of the war that decided the Republic's fate. His eastern settlement outlived him by centuries. The provinces he organized, including Syria, and the client kingdoms he arranged framed Roman policy in the East long into the imperial period ^[5]. His three triumphs, over Africa, Europe, and Asia, made him the first Roman to celebrate victories on three continents, a distinction ancient writers stressed ^[4].

His sons carried on the fight. Gnaeus was defeated and killed after the battle of Munda in 45 BCE, while Sextus Pompeius held out for years as a sea commander, troubling Caesar's heirs until his death in 35 BCE ^[3]. Pompey's theatre remained one of the landmarks of Rome for centuries, and the irony that Caesar fell at the foot of Pompey's statue in Pompey's own building was not lost on the ancients ^[6].

Historians ancient and modern have puzzled over the man himself. Plutarch paired his life with that of Agesilaus of Sparta and portrayed a commander of genuine gifts undone by vanity and indecision at the end ^[2]. Modern scholars such as Robin Seager have read his career as a series of extraordinary commands that quietly dismantled the constitutional norms he claimed to defend, preparing the ground for the autocracy of his rival ^[3]. Whether cast as the Republic's last champion or as one of its gravediggers, Pompey remains essential to understanding how Rome's free institutions collapsed into one-man rule ^[1].