The first emperor

Pompey has a good claim to be called the first Roman emperor. True, he has usually gone down in history as the man who finally supported the cause of the Republic against the increasingly independent power of Caesar, and so as an opponent of imperial rule. But his treatment in the East and the honours showered upon him (or which he contrived) closely prefigured many of the defining elements of the Roman emperor’s image and status. It was almost as if the forms and symbols of imperial rule that, a few decades later under Julius Caesar and even more his great-nephew, the emperor Augustus, became standard in Italy and Rome had their prototypes in Roman rule abroad.

Julius Caesar, for example, was the first living person whose head featured on a coin minted in Rome. Up to that point, Roman small change had paraded only images of long-dead heroes, and the innovation was a blatant sign of Caesar’s personal power, followed by all later Roman rulers. But a decade earlier, communities in the East had produced coins showing Pompey’s head. This honour went along with other extravagant compliments and even various forms of religious cult. A group of ‘Pompey worshippers’ (Pompeiastae) are known on the island of Delos. New cities took his name: Pompeiopolis, or ‘Pompeytown’; Magnopolis, or ‘City of the Great’. He was hailed as ‘equal to a god’, ‘saviour’ and even just ‘god’. And at Mytilene on Lesbos a month in the calendar was renamed after him – just as, in Rome, months were later renamed after Julius Caesar and Augustus.

There were precedents for many of these accolades, individually. The kings who followed Alexander the Great, in territories from Macedon to Egypt, had often had their power expressed in more or less divine terms. Ancient polytheistic religions treated the boundary between gods and humans more flexibly and constructively than modern monotheisms. Earlier Roman commanders in the eastern Mediterranean had occasionally been honoured with religious festivals established in their names, and Cicero implies in a letter to Atticus from Cilicia that he had turned down the offer of a temple. Nonetheless, as a package, Pompey’s honours were on a wholly new scale. It is hard to imagine how, after this kind of elevation in the East and after the independent power he had exercised in reorganising vast tracts of land, Pompey could have returned to Rome to become an ordinary senator, just one among many. On the surface, that is just what he did. There was no march on the city in the style of Sulla. But underneath there were hints of change back in Rome too.

Pompey’s vast building scheme of theatre, gardens, porticoes and meeting rooms, all lined with famous works of sculpture, was a decidedly imperial innovation. It was far more extensive than the individual temples commonly erected by earlier generals in thanks for the help of the gods on the battlefield had ever been. Dedicated in 55 BCE, it was the first of a series of massive architectural developments that were a hallmark of later emperors, who tried to leave their stamp, in gleaming marble, on the Roman cityscape, and that form our image of ancient Rome today. There are also signs that even in Rome Pompey was presented, much like later emperors, in godlike terms. This was already a theme in Cicero’s speech of 66 BCE which repeatedly refers to Pompey’s talents as ‘divine’ or ‘endowed by the gods’, singling out his ‘incredibilis ac divina virtus’ (‘his unbelievable and godlike virtus’). Quite how literally to take the word divina is unclear, but in the Roman world it never became the completely dead metaphor that ‘divine’ often is now. At the very least, there was something a bit more than human about Pompey. That is strongly implied too by an honour voted to him on the proposal of two tribunes in 63 BCE, in anticipation of his return from the East: Pompey was to be allowed to wear the dress of a triumphing general whenever he attended the circus races.

44. A recent attempt to reconstruct the theatre that was the centrepiece of Pompey’s building scheme, with its elaborate stage backdrop, and an auditorium that seated, according to one ancient estimate, 40,000 spectators, almost as many as the Colosseum. At the back of the auditorium was a small temple of Venus Victrix (‘Giver of Victory’), pointing to the support of the gods for Pompey and to the military victory that financed the construction.

This was much more significant than it may sound and certainly more than a matter of dress code. For the special costume traditionally worn by the successful general in his triumphal procession was identical to the costume worn by the statue of the god Jupiter in his temple on the Capitoline Hill. It was as if military victory allowed the general literally to step into a god’s shoes, just for the day – which explains why the slave standing behind him in the chariot was supposed to have whispered in his ear, over and over again, ‘Remember you’re (just) a man.’ To allow Pompey to dress up in triumphal regalia on other occasions was tantamount to giving him divine status outside that strictly defined ritual context. It must have seemed a risky step to take, for Pompey is said to have tried his new privilege only once – and that, as one Roman writer sharply observed some seventy years later, ‘was once too often’.

How to balance individual achievement and celebrity with the notional equality of the elite and the principles of shared power had been a major dilemma throughout the Roman Republic. Many mythical stories of early Rome pose the problem of dashing heroes who step out of line to take on the enemy single-handedly. Did they deserve punishment for disobedience or honour for bringing victory to Rome? There were also historical figures before Pompey whose prominence had come into conflict with the traditional power structure of the state. Marius and Sulla are obvious examples. But more than a hundred years before them, despite, or because of, his series of tremendous victories, Scipio Africanus had spent the end of his life in virtual exile, after various attempts through the Roman courts to cut him down to size: hence his burial in southern Italy and not in the grand Scipio family tomb in Rome. There were even stories that he claimed divine inspiration and used to spend the night in the Temple of Jupiter to take advantage of his special relationship with the god. But by the middle of the first century BCE, the stakes were so much bigger, the size of Rome’s operations and obligations so much greater and the resources of cash and manpower available so much larger that the rise of men such as Pompey was more or less unstoppable.

What eventually did stop Pompey was a rival, in the shape of Julius Caesar, a member of an old patrician family, with a political programme in the radical tradition of the Gracchi and eventually with ambitions that led directly to one-man rule. But first the two men were part of a notorious three-cornered alliance.