Pompey the Great

Just four years after his prosecution of Verres, in 66 BCE Cicero addressed the Roman people in a public meeting on the security of the empire. Now a praetor, and with his eyes on the consulship, he was speaking in support of a proposal by a tribune to put Pompey in command of the long-running, on-and-off war against the same King Mithradates whom the Romans had been fighting, with mixed success, for more than twenty years. Pompey’s powers were to include almost complete control over a large swathe of the eastern Mediterranean for an unlimited period, with more than 40,000 troops at his disposal, and the right to make peace or war and to arrange treaties more or less independently.

43. The head of Mithradates VI on one of his silver coins. The sweeping hair, tossed back, is reminiscent – no doubt intentionally – of the distinctive hairstyle of Alexander the Great. In Mithradates’ conflict with Pompey ‘the Great’, two new, would-be Alexanders were fighting each other.

Cicero may have been genuinely convinced that Mithradates was a real threat to Rome’s security and that Pompey was the only man for the job. From the heartland of his kingdom on the Black Sea the king had certainly scored occasional terrifying victories over Roman interests across the eastern Mediterranean, including in 88 BCE a notorious, and highly mythologised, massacre of tens of thousands of Romans and Italians on a single day. Exploiting what must have been a widespread hatred of Roman presence and offering added incentives (any slave who murdered a Roman master was to be freed), he coordinated simultaneous attacks on Roman residents in towns on the west coast of what is now Turkey, from Pergamum in the north to Caunos, the ‘fig capital’ of the Aegean, in the south, killing – in highly inflated Roman estimates – somewhere between 80,000 and 150,000 men, women and children. If even nearly on that scale, this was a cold, calculating and genocidal massacre, but it is hard to resist the feeling that by the 60s BCE, after the campaigns of Sulla in the 80s BCE, Mithradates might have been disruptive rather than dangerous and that he had become a convenient enemy in Roman political circles: a bogeyman to justify potentially lucrative campaigns and a stick with which to beat one’s rivals for their inactivity. Cicero also more or less admitted to having been leaned on by commercial interests in Rome, anxious about the effect of prolonged instability, real or imaginary, in the East on their private profits as much as on the finances of the state. The boundary between the two was carefully blurred.

In making the case for this special command, Cicero pointed to Pompey’s lightning success the previous year in clearing the Mediterranean of pirates, also thanks to sweeping powers voted by a popular assembly. Pirates in the ancient world were both an endemic menace and a usefully unspecific figure of fear, not far different from the modern ‘terrorist’ – including anything from the navy of a rogue state to small-time human traffickers. Pompey got rid of them within three months (suggesting they may have been an easier target than they were painted) and followed up his success with a resettlement policy, unusually enlightened for either the ancient or the modern world. He gave the ex-pirates smallholdings at a safe distance from the coast, where they could make an honest livelihood. Even if some fared no better than Sulla’s veterans, one of those who did take well to his new life makes a lyrical cameo appearance in Virgil’s poem on farming, the Georgics, written in the late 30s BCE. The old man is living peacefully near Tarentum in southern Italy, now an expert on horticulture and beekeeping. His piracy days are long behind him; instead ‘planting herbs scattered among the bushes and white lilies all around, vervain and slender poppies, in his spirit he equalled the riches of kings’.

Cicero’s underlying argument, however, was that new problems called for new solutions. The danger Mithradates posed to Rome’s commercial revenues, its taxation income and the lives of Romans based in the East demanded a change of approach. As the empire had expanded over the past two centuries, all kinds of adjustments had already been made in Rome’s traditional system of office holding to cope with the demands of overseas government and to add to the available manpower. The number of praetors, for example, had increased to eight by the time of Sulla; and there was now a regular system by which elected officials went to provincial posts abroad for a year or two (as proconsuls or propraetors, ‘in place of consuls or praetors’) after they had completed a year’s duties in Rome. Yet these offices remained piecemeal and short term when what Rome needed in the face of an enemy such as Mithradates was the best general, with a lengthy command, over the whole of the area that might be affected by the war, with the money and soldiers to do the job, not hampered by the normal controls.

There was predictable opposition. Pompey was a radical and ambitious rule breaker who had already flouted most of the conventions of Roman politics that traditionalists were increasingly trying to insist on. The son of a ‘new man’, he had risen to military prominence by exploiting the disruption of the 80s BCE. When still in his twenties, he had put together three legions from among his clients and henchmen to fight on behalf of Sulla and was soon awarded a triumph for chasing down Sulla’s rivals and assorted enemy princelings in Africa. It was then that he gained the nickname adulescentulus carnifex: ‘kid butcher’ rather than enfant terrible. He had held no elected office whatsoever when he was given, by the senate, a long-term command in Spain to deal with a Roman general who had ‘gone native’ with a large army, another hazard of a far-flung empire. Successful again, he ended up a consul for 70 BCE, at the age of just thirty-five and bypassing all the junior posts, flagrantly at odds with Sulla’s recent rulings on office holding. So ignorant was he of what went on in the senate, which as consul he had to chair, that he resorted to asking a learned friend to write him a handbook of senatorial procedure.

A few hints of the objections made to this new command can be gleaned from Cicero’s speech. His enormous emphasis, for example, on the immediate danger posed by Mithradates (‘letters arrive every day telling how villages in our provinces are being burnt’) strongly suggests that some people did claim at the time that it was being blown out of all proportion as an excuse to give vast new powers to Pompey. The objectors did not win the day, though they must have come to feel that their fears were not unfounded. Over the next four years, under the terms of his new command, Pompey set about redrawing the map of the eastern part of the Roman Empire, from the Black Sea in the north to Syria and Judaea in the south. In practice, he cannot have done this alone; he must have had the help of hundreds of friends, junior officers, slaves and advisors. But this particular rewriting of geography was always at the time ascribed to Pompey himself.

His power was partly the result of military operations. Mithradates was quickly driven out of Asia Minor, to his territories in the Crimea, where he was later ousted in a coup by one of his sons and killed himself; and there was a successful Roman siege of the fortress at Jerusalem, where two rivals were contesting the high priesthood and kingship. But more of this power came from a judicious mixture of diplomacy, bullying and well-placed displays of Roman force. Months of Pompey’s time were devoted to turning the central part of Mithradates’ kingdom into a directly governed Roman province, adjusting the boundaries of other provinces, founding dozens of new cities and ensuring that many of the local monarchs and dynasts had been downsized and made obedient in the old style.

In the triumph he celebrated in 61 BCE, after his return to Rome and on his forty-fifth birthday (no doubt a planned coincidence), Pompey is said to have worn a cloak that once belonged to Alexander the Great. Where on earth he had come across this fake, or piece of fancy dress, is impossible to know – and he did not deceive many shrewd Roman observers, who were no less sceptical about the authenticity of the fabric than we are. But it was presumably intended to match not only the name (‘the Great’) that he had borrowed from Alexander but also the ambitions of far-flung imperial conquest. Some Romans were impressed, others decidedly dubious about the display. Pliny the Elder, writing just over a hundred years later, singled out for disapproval a portrait head of Pompey that the general himself had commissioned, made entirely of pearl: ‘the defeat of austerity and the triumph of luxury’. But there was a bigger point. This celebration was the most powerful expression yet of the Roman Empire in territorial terms, and even of Roman ambition for world conquest. One of the trophies carried in the procession, probably in the shape of a large globe, had an inscription attached to it declaring that ‘this is a trophy of the whole world’. And a list of Pompey’s achievements displayed in a Roman temple included the telling if over-optimistic boast that he ‘extended the frontiers of the empire to the limits of the earth’.