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Pompey the Great (106 B.C.-48 B.C.).
DISCovering World History. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003.
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Pompey the Great
106 B.C.-48 B.C.
Born: September 29, 106 B.C. in Alba, Italy
Died: September 28, 48 B.C. in Pelusium, Egypt
Nationality: Roman (ancient).
Occupation: General.
Table of Contents:Biographical Essay | Further Readings
Translated by Horace White, Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library), 1958-1962
Roman general
Biographical Essay:
Roman general, who cleared the Mediterranean Sea of pirates, conquered many eastern lands, and became the
most important rival of Julius Caesar, against whom he fought, and lost, a Roman Civil War.
Pompey was born into a family of military and political importance in Rome. His father, Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo,
served as quaestor (treasurer) in 104 b.c., praetor (second highest magistrate) in 92 b.c., and consul (chief
magistrate) in 89. But it was in warfare, rather than civil administration, that both father and son would achieve their
greatest recognition. Pompey's mother Lucilia, daughter of Gaius Lucilius Hirrus, was niece of the poet Gaius
Lucilius. Pompey, however, never attained any distinction in literature.
As he grew into a handsome young man, it was said that Pompey bore a physical resemblance to Alexander the
Great, a coincidence that foreshadowed his later travels in the Macedonian conqueror's footsteps at least partway
through the East, earning him recognition as the "Roman Alexander." Also like his famous predecessor, Pompey
became a warrior as a young man. At 17, he joined his father Strabo on the battlefield, having just put on the toga
virilis, the garment that symbolized Roman manhood.
When the Italian allies rebelled, forming a league that waged the Social War against Rome's hegemony (dominance)
with initial success, Pompey's father raised an army and led it into the hostile territory of the Marsi, the most
prominent members of the anti-Roman coalition. Breaking through their forces, Strabo besieged the city of Asculum,
eventually defeating the rebel leader Vidacilius and capturing the town. Pompey accompanied him throughout the
campaign and fought at his side. In 89 b.c., the year of his consulate, Strabo was granted the privilege of a triumph,
the Roman custom of a parade by a victorious general through the streets of Rome. When he died suddenly two
years later, reportedly as the result of lightning that struck his tent, Pompey inherited the family estates in Picenum, a
district on the Adriatic coast of Italy. He also inherited the military and political support his father had enjoyed there,
unpopular though Strabo may have been with most Romans in the capital city.
None of Rome's leading politicians expected much of the dour general's precocious son. Pompey had been most
noticed for his dalliance with a courtesan named Flora, who had become remarkably devoted to him. The months
after his father's death were difficult: the bodyguard of Cinna, a leader of the popular party, ransacked his house, and
Pompey was put on trial for keeping some of the money recovered in the capture of Asculum that rightfully belonged
in the public treasury. Though he won a verdict of innocent, rumor said that it was because Pompey had made friends
with the judge, Publius Antistius, whose daughter Antistia he married soon after the verdict.
In 83 b.c., Pompey entered the violent political arena on the side of Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, the conservative
champion of the optimates, the party of the rich senatorial class. Sulla had invaded Italy after a campaign in the East
and was engaged in a bitter struggle with the populares (popular) party, formerly led by Marius and Cinna. Pompey
raised troops in Picenum, defeated three military units of the populares, and was rewarded by Sulla with imperium, or
high-ranking command. In the following year, he defeated Sulla's rivals in Sicily and North Africa for which Sulla
allowed him to celebrate a triumph. Sulla also granted him the title Magnus (the Great), which he attached to his
name and would later pass on to his sons.
To cement his alliance with the great conservative leader, Pompey married Sulla's stepdaughter, Aemilia, a union for
which he'd had to divorce Antistia. (In those days, marriages were the means of cementing political alliances.) But
when his new wife Aemilia died soon afterwards, Pompey married Mucia, a relative of Sulla's most prominent
supporters. Though the marriage was to be marked by ill feeling and infidelity and eventually terminated by divorce, it
lasted 17 years, during which time Mucia became the mother of Pompey's three surviving children: Pompey Junior,
Sextus, and Pompeia.
In 79 b.c., Sulla retired due to illness and died the following year. Thus the way was open for Pompey to maneuver
for the position of most powerful man in Rome. He first defeated Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who wanted to repeal the
antidemocratic constitution that Sulla had imposed on Rome, and drove him out of Italy. Then Pompey reluctantly
became embroiled in a long, ultimately successful war in Spain in which he saved Sulla's old ally Metellus Pius from
destruction by the popular general, Sertorius. On his return from Spain, Pompey helped Marcus Licinius Crassus mop
up the last remnants of a slave uprising headed by Spartacus, the Thracian gladiator, and contrived to share the glory
of that victory. At the end of 71 b.c., Pompey was granted his second triumph and served as consul with Crassus as
his colleague the following year.
It was not long before it became clear that Pompey was not, after all, a doctrinaire follower of Sulla's conservative
program, but an opportunist looking for the most expedient route to power. With new allies from the popular side, he
worked to dismantle the Sullan constitution and reestablish the traditional ancestral constitution of the Roman
Republic, with elements including the tribunes (officers whose duty it was to protect the rights of common citizens).
Though such actions caused a rift with Crassus, a well-to-do citizen named Gaius Aurelius is said to have reconciled
the two by telling them that "Jupiter had appeared to him in a dream and had instructed him to tell the consuls that
they must not lay down their office until they had made friends with each other." This, at least for a time, they did.
Pompey Wins Stunning Military Victories
Pompey's most stunning series of military victories began in 67 b.c. with the extraordinary command granted to him
against the pirates. He was given the power to requisition all of Rome's naval power, and all the resources of the
coastlands, to rid the sea of them. So confident were the Romans of his success that the price of grain fell the
moment he was appointed, as the pirates had been interfering with food shipments from Egypt and elsewhere; now
the sea-lanes were to be opened. It took him only three months to sweep the Mediterranean free of the troublesome
raiders. The crucial battle was fought off the shores of Cilicia (southern Turkey), where Pompey won at sea and
pursued the pirates on land, capturing 90 warships and taking more than 20,000 prisoners.
At the time, the Roman general Lucius Lucinius Lucullus was facing defeat by the charismatic King Mithridates VI of
Pontus, who managed to pose as a defender both of Greek and Iranian culture as he threatened the Romans over a
wide area of the Near East. Lucullus' own troops were at the point of mutiny when Pompey was sent to replace him.
The RomanRoman in the East was soon in good shape, and Pompey won brilliant victories in Asia Minor, Armenia,
and the Caucasus region. Mithridates fled to the north side of the Black Sea, but Pompey captured his palace at
Caenum and many secret documents, including love letters and a book in which the king had recorded his own
dreams.
Pompey's explorations added to Roman botanical, geographical, and medical knowledge. After Tigranes I of Armenia
became a Roman vassal, Pompey turned his attention southward, marching all the way from the Black Sea to
Antioch in Syria, which he reached in 64 b.c. This area, the remnant of the kingdom of the Seleucids (the successors
of Alexander the Great), he turned into a new Roman province of Syria. The next year, he annexed Palestine.
Jerusalem resisted him, but Pompey captured the city after a three-month siege and replaced Aristobulus II, the high
priest and Maccabean king of Judaea, with his brother John Hyrcanus II. Having heard about the unusual God
worshipped by the Jews, Pompey marched into the Holy of Holies in the Temple, only to discover to his astonishment
that it was an empty room containing no image. This was a terrible offense to Jewish religious sensibilities. Leaving
Jerusalem, Pompey led his army toward another hostile center, the Nabataean citadel of Petra, but was interrupted
by the welcome news that Mithridates had died. Settling matters in the East, he prepared to return to Rome.
The third triumph of Pompey, celebrating his eastern victories, was held on his 45th birthday in 61 b.c. It lasted more
than two days and proved to be the most memorable in Rome's history. He had by then captured 1,000 fortified
places and established 39 new cities—more even than Alexander the Great. With the plunder from the conquered
lands carried on floats in the great parade, it would seem that Pompey's popularity should have reached its zenith. It
did not. Scandal had surfaced in his absence, and he had to divorce his wife Mucia. This made enemies of her family,
the powerful Metelli. Even Rome's common citizens seemed to turn against him, and he had to look for allies.
In 60 b.c., Pompey found the power he sought in a new coalition, the famous First Triumvirate, with Crassus and
Julius Caesar. Caesar was elected consul for the following year and then went to Gaul as governor and conqueror,
but in the division of responsibility between the three men, Pompey had authority over most of the Empire. To cement
the bond between the leading men, Pompey married Caesar's daughter, Julia. But Pompey wanted to mend his
fences in Rome while Caesar was out of the city, so he sought reconciliation with the senate and its influential
member, Marcus Tullius Cicero. The senate granted him supervision of Rome's grain supply, and once again the
markets were filled with inexpensive wheat and barley.
In April 56 b.c., the three strong men met again, this time at Luca, and renewed the triumvirate. In the year 55 b.c.,
Caesar was to return to Gaul, and Crassus would receive Pompey's old command in the East. Pompey was allotted
Spain, but he never returned there, preferring to send legates to administer the provinces on his behalf while he
stayed at Rome and attempted to expand his power base. During this period, his great building project came to
fruition. The Theater of Pompey was inaugurated with elaborate displays of sports, musical contests, and wild-animal
fights including the slaughter of lions and elephants. The latter, however, was a debacle if Pompey had expected his
shows to add to his popularity. The elephants gained the crowd's sympathy when, wounded by javelins, they
defended themselves by snatching the shields of their attackers and trumpeting piteously.
Events moved toward an inevitable break between Pompey and Caesar. Julia died in 54 b.c., dissolving the marriage
bond between them, and Pompey would refuse to negotiate a new one. Crassus was killed on his eastern campaign
in the next year, which brought the triumvirate to an end. Increasingly, Pompey made common cause with the
extreme senatorial optimates, and in 52 b.c., they arranged to make him sole consul (though constitutionally there
were always two) and prolonged his military command for a period of five years. Pompey married Cornelia, daughter
of Metellus Scipio, thus mending his fences with the faction that had supported Sulla. At the end of 50 b.c., Pompey
accepted from the senate the appointment as commander in chief of the Republic's forces in Italy. This forced
Caesar's hand; if he wished to save any vestige of his power, he would have to fight Pompey.
Caesar Crosses the Rubicon, Defeats Pompey
The border between Caesar's legal province of Gaul and Italy proper, which was in Pompey's domain, was the small
river called the Rubicon. When Caesar crossed it in 49 b.c., he placed himself outside Roman law and challenged
both Pompey and the senate. Civil war had been declared. Instead of confronting Caesar in Italy, however, Pompey
took his army across the Adriatic Sea to Macedonia. Many senators followed. Caesar swiftly occupied Rome and took
the opportunity to capture those of Pompey's troops that were still in Spain. In the first clash of the two commanders,
Pompey repelled Caesar at Dyrrhachium on the Adriatic coast. But Caesar was far from giving up. On August 9, 48
b.c., the armies met again at Pharsalus, on the edge of the plain of Thessaly in Greece. The night before, Pompey
had dreamed that he was adorning the Temple of Venus in Rome—an inauspicious vision because Venus was
Caesar's mythological ancestor. Although his forces outnumbered Caesar's almost two to one, Pompey adopted
defensive tactics in the battle; Caesar's men seized the initiative, winning a decisive victory. As it turned out, Caesar
had won the war as well as the battle.
Pompey fled to the Aegean shore and took ship for Egypt, stopping on the way at Mytilene to pick up his wife
Cornelia and son Gnaeus. Though he had hoped to find support in Egypt, civil war was raging there too between the
young queen Cleopatra and her even younger brother, the boy-king Ptolemy XIII. Arriving off the coast near one of
the mouths of the Nile, at Pelusium, Pompey was ferried ashore in a small boat. He was then stabbed without
warning by Septimius, a centurion who had once served under him, another officer named Salvius, and Achillas, one
of the regents of Egypt for Ptolemy XIII.
Had the murderers hoped to gain favor with Caesar by killing Pompey, they were certainly disappointed. They gave
his head to Caesar, who was horrified and put Achillas and his colleague Pothinus to death. Caesar treated the head
of his adversary with the greatest honor and gave it a proper Roman cremation with incense, spices, and prayers.
After Caesar's death, the ashes of Pompey were taken to Cornelia for burial.
FURTHER READINGS
 Caesar, Julius. The Civil War. Translated by Jane F. Mitchell, Penguin, 1967.
 Cocceianus, Dio Cassius. Roman History. Translated by Earnest Cary, Harvard University Press
(Loeb Classical Library), 1955-1961.
 Marcus Annaeus Lucanus. Civil War (Pharsalia). Translated by P.F. Widdows, Indiana University
Press, 1988.
 Plutarch. Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives by Plutarch. Translated by Rex Warner, Penguin,
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1972.
Greenhalgh, Peter. Pompey: The Roman Alexander. University of Missouri Press, 1981.
———. Pompey: The Republican Prince. University of Missouri Press, 1982.
Holliday, Vivian L. Pompey in Cicero's Correspondence and Lucan's Civil War. Mouton, 1969.
Leach, John. Pompey the Great. Croom Helm, 1978.
Rawson, Beryl. The Politics of Friendship: Pompey and Cicero. Sydney University Press, 1978.
Seager, Robin. Pompey: A Political Biography. University of California Press, 1979.
Source Citation:
"Pompey the Great (106 B.C.-48 B.C.)." DISCovering World History. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student
Resource Center - Junior. Gale. Beaver Country Day School. 7 Jan. 2009
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