Pompey

• 1. Introduction

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  Pompey the Great was born on the 29th of September 106 BC in Picenum, and he died on the 28th of September 48 BC, one day short of his 58th birthday, murdered on a beach in Egypt by a former colleague. In between those two dates, he cleared the Mediterranean of pirates in three months, ended a decades-long war in the East, and stood as the most famous soldier in the Roman world. Then Julius Caesar took all of it away. What made a man so celebrated fall so far, so fast? And what does it mean that his enemies called him both "the Great" and the "teenage butcher" - sometimes the same people, sometimes the same breath?

• 2. The Butcher's Son

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  Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, Pompey's father, was the first of his branch of the family to achieve senatorial status in Rome. He had served as consul in 89 BC and earned a reputation for three things: greed, political duplicity, and military ruthlessness. The son who would surpass him in all three dimensions of Roman ambition was born into this particular inheritance. Pompey began his military career in the Social War of 91-87 BC, serving under his father before he was old enough to hold any public office. When Strabo died in 87 BC, sources disagree on whether disease or his own mutinous soldiers killed him. Before his death, he faced accusations of embezzlement, and his legal heir Pompey was put on trial for those alleged crimes. He was acquitted, supposedly after agreeing to marry the daughter of the judge, a woman named Antistia. This acquittal was his first negotiation with Roman power, and he would spend the rest of his life improving the technique.

• 3. Sulla's Prodigy

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  In the spring of 83 BC, Sulla landed at Brundisium after years fighting in the East, intent on taking back Rome from his political enemies. Pompey had not waited for an invitation. In the year before Sulla's return, he had raised and equipped a full legion from among his father's old clients and veterans in Picenum - at his own initiative, at his own expense. When Sulla saw him approach with that legion, he greeted the young man with the title imperator, meaning "victorious general", an honor not lightly given. Within months, Pompey was commanding cavalry against the consul Gaius Papirius Carbo in Cisalpine Gaul, then routing government forces along the Via Flaminia, then ambushing a relief column trying to reach the besieged city of Praeneste. After Sulla secured the dictatorship in late 82 BC, he pressed Pompey to divorce Antistia and marry his stepdaughter Aemilia. Plutarch records that Aemilia was already pregnant by her former husband when they married, and that she died in childbirth soon after. That remarriage was Sulla's way of binding his most effective young general closer to him. Pompey accepted.

• 4. Teenage Butcher

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  Sicily and Africa were where Pompey earned the nickname his opponents would never let him forget. After Sulla's victory, surviving Marians had fled to Sicily, where the propraetor Marcus Perperna was sheltering them, and Pompey landed with a large force. Perperna abandoned the island without a fight. The Marian naval commander Carbo was captured and executed, a decision Pompey justified by citing Carbo's alleged crimes against Roman citizens. His opponents took a different view. The nickname adulescentulus carnifex, meaning "young butcher" or "teenage butcher", stuck to him from this point forward. In Africa, he defeated and killed Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus at the Battle of Utica, then subdued Numidia and executed its king Hiarbas. It was during this African campaign that his own soldiers began calling him Magnus, the Great, after Alexander the Great, a figure the Romans widely admired. Pompey adopted the cognomen formally. On returning to Rome, he demanded a triumph, an unprecedented honor for someone so young, and refused to disband his army until Sulla agreed. The dictator, clearly uncomfortable with the demand, tried to soften its impact by awarding simultaneous triumphs to two other generals. Pompey got his triumph anyway.

• 5. The Pirate War

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  By 68 BC, pirates based principally in Cilicia had grown bold enough to raid Ostia, Rome's own port, and to kidnap two Roman senators. The outrage was sufficient to force the Senate's hand, even though granting a single man the powers needed to suppress them terrified the optimates. The tribune Aulus Gabinius proposed the Lex Gabinia in 67 BC, giving Pompey proconsular authority for three years in any province within 50 miles of the Mediterranean. The Senate opposed it. The people passed it anyway. Pompey divided the Mediterranean into zones, assigned fifteen legates to patrol specific areas, and secured the grain route to Rome first. He won control of the western Mediterranean in 40 days. His fleets then drove the pirates back to their strongholds in Cilicia, and at the Battle of Korakesion he defeated them decisively. The war lasted three months in total. Most pirates surrendered without fighting, a fact Pompey attributed to his reputation for clemency. Rather than mass executions, he resettled many of his opponents in cities devastated during earlier wars, including Soli in Cilicia, which he renamed Pompeiopolis in his own honor, and Dyme in Greece. These communities would retain strong attachments to both Rome and Pompey for generations.

• 6. Master of the East

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  Lucius Licinius Lucullus had spent years fighting Mithridates VI of Pontus, the king who had invaded Bithynia after inheriting it as a bequest to Rome, and he had won many victories. By 69 BC, his troops were weary and mutinous, and senators were accusing him of prolonging the war for personal profit. In 66 BC, Pompey used the tribunate to pass the Lex Manilia, securing extensive powers throughout Asia Minor on top of those already granted by the Lex Gabinia. Lucullus, incensed at being replaced, called Pompey a "vulture" who profited from other men's work. The insult contained some truth, but Pompey moved swiftly. He outmaneuvered Mithridates at Lycus near the end of 66 BC, and the king escaped east with a small contingent to Colchis on the Black Sea, where he eventually died after a failed suicide attempt, reportedly because a lifetime habit of taking precautionary antidotes had made him immune to poison. His embalmed head was sent to Pompey by his own son Pharnaces II. Pompey spent 64 BC annexing the wealthy cities of Syria, incorporating them into a new Roman province. Then he marched south through Apamea, Damascus, and Jericho, intervening in a Hasmonean succession dispute. After besieging the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for three months and timing assaults to avoid Jewish Sabbath observance, he entered the Holy of Holies, a space only the high priest was permitted to enter and only once a year. He neither took its treasures nor damaged it, and ordered the Temple cleansed and worship resumed the following day. He installed Hyrcanus II as a client high priest and took Aristobulus and his sons to Rome as captives. When he paid his troops their bonuses before returning to Italy in 62 BC, the sum totalled around 16,000 talents. He claimed his reorganization of the East had raised annual Roman state income from 200 million to 340 million sesterces, plus an additional 480 million sesterces paid directly to the treasury.

• 7. The Triumvirate's Pivot

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  The Senate refused to ratify Pompey's eastern settlements. The optimates Cato the Younger and Metellus Celer led the opposition, and they also blocked a bill to distribute farmland to his veterans and to the landless urban poor. Metellus Celer had a particular motive: his sister Mucia had recently been divorced by Pompey under disputed circumstances. Pompey could not move the Senate on his own. The situation changed when Julius Caesar sought Pompey's endorsement for the consulship in 59 BC. The alliance also included Crassus, and Caesar's marriage to Pompey's daughter Julia gave it a personal seal. Caesar, once elected consul, secured the agrarian bill for Pompey's veterans, helped in part by those veterans filling the streets of Rome and allegedly intimidating senators. He also ratified Pompey's eastern settlements and passed the Lex Vatinia making himself governor of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum. The arrangement proved its limits after Julia died in childbirth in September 54 BC and Crassus and his son Publius died at Carrhae in May 53 BC. With those two bonds severed, Pompey moved toward the optimates. In 52 BC, as violence made normal consular elections impossible, he was elected sole consul at the proposal of the optimate Bibulus, supported by Cato himself. He then married Cornelia, widow of Publius Crassus. Laws passed during this consulship made Caesar's legal situation precarious: new statutes made prosecutions for electoral violence retrospective and required candidates to appear in Rome in person, a requirement that would strip Caesar of his army the moment he crossed the border.

• 8. Pharsalus and After

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  On the 1st of January 49 BC, Caesar sent an ultimatum to Rome demanding acceptance of his compromise or he would march to avenge his country's wrongs. On the 7th of January the Senate declared him a public enemy. Four days later, he crossed the Rubicon. Pompey's military position was stronger than it appeared on paper, but his political position was weaker. He was an advisor to the Senate rather than its commander, and required senatorial approval for his strategy. When he evacuated Rome and withdrew to Brundisium, senators and officials were ordered to accompany him; Cicero refused to help with recruitment, and Cato declined command of Sicily. Pompey transferred his forces across the Adriatic to Dyrrhachium and spent the following months building an army nearly twice Caesar's size while his navy destroyed two fleets being assembled against him. His strategy was attrition, the same approach that had worked in the Sertorian War: keep Caesar unable to supply his army and let starvation do the work. He came close. Caesar's forces were hungry and cut off when, in late July 48 BC, Pompey finally broke through Caesar's defensive lines near Dyrrhachium. He then made a decision his later critics never forgave him for. Instead of pressing the advantage and destroying Caesar's weakened force, he let them withdraw. Whether he was pressured by his allies or simply cautious by temperament remains disputed. At Pharsalus on the 9th of August, Pompey commanded approximately 38,000 men to Caesar's 22,000, with 7,000 cavalry to 1,000. His plan was to use that cavalry to outflank Caesar's left. Caesar had anticipated this and repulsed the charge. The Pompeian line collapsed. Pompey escaped to Mytilene, then sailed for Egypt with a small fleet, arriving at Pelusium on the 28th of September 48 BC, exactly one day before his 58th birthday. When he went ashore to greet an official delegation from Ptolemy XIII, he was killed by Lucius Septimius, a Roman officer who had previously served under him. His body was cremated by two servants on the beach. His head was kept as evidence. When it was eventually returned to his wife Cornelia, she buried it at his villa in the Alban Hills. Cicero, upon hearing of Pompey's death, wrote that his life had outlasted his power.