The career of Pompey, sometimes known as Pompeius Magnus, or Pompey the Great by later authors, has not often aroused the highest of images of the ideal Roman ruler. He had the misfortune of having to face Julius Caesar, and be defeated by him. The praises were showered on the latter, who brooked no equal. Caesar has been remembered since as the de facto founder of Rome’s imperial age, when rule by an autocrat became the pattern of government.
This being very true, it is nonetheless important not to forget the hugely significant contributions of the man he had to supersede through civil war. Pompey’s end was ignominious, murdered in Egypt whither he had fled in wake of his defeat at the crucial battle of Pharsalus (48 BC). Yet a closer and more objective examination of his many military victories and services to Rome, forming one of the most extravagant political careers in Roman history, reveals Pompey as a figure, without whom, the Roman Empire could not have come into existence.
Military Victories: Early Successes under Sulla
In all Pompey was responsible for many of the late Republic’s military victories, which lay the founding-stones for the future Empire.
His earliest triumphs, in the 80s and 70s BC involved the extinguishing of the last embers of the civil war between the factions of Sulla and Marius. Soon after the victory of the former he was sent to Africa, and then Sicily to quell the Marian resistance there, and after the death of Sulla (who had assumed, ominously, the dictatorship) in 78 BC Pompey was involved in the much longer and tiring war in Spain against Quintus Sertorius, a Marian whose wily and stubborn rebellion only ended in his assassination. Pompey, who claimed victory after much other (admittedly unsuccessful efforts) by predecessors, similarly stole the glory from Crassus by stamping out the great gladiatorial rebellion of Spartacus.
Pompey’s greatest moments were yet to be, however. After a promising consulship in 70 BC he was assigned a war (the fruits of the lex Gabinia) against the pirates, who at that time menaced much of the trade and mobility across the Mediterranean. With an almost unbelievable speed he crushed these buccaneer enemies of Rome in a matter of months, traversing the whole expanse of the Mediterranean in an unparalleled display of Rome’s dominance and mastery of the region.
Expanding imperial horizons in the East, consolidating his renown at Rome
Proceeding from this the lex Manilia granted him the command of the war against the Hannibal of the late Republic (although he can hardly compare for the damage he inflicted on it), Mithradates Eupator, the king of Pontus. As in his earlier wars, Pompey seems to have merely claimed the last shares of the great prize, ending finally the efforts of those before him; yet in his victory over the great Pontic king he opened the imperial horizons of Rome into a realm it had never conceived its involvement in before. Pompey subdued Mithradates’ ally, king Tigranes of Armenia, and advanced to subjugate Syria, the remnant of the Seleucid Empire, and Judaea, famously besieging and capturing Jerusalem, then in the midst of civil strife. He did not establish direct Roman provincial control over the whole region, but maintained the weakened kingdoms there as client states.
From his return to Rome at the end of the 60s (when he narrowly missed another chance to save the Republic, when the Catilinarian conspiracy was exposed and incapacitated in 63), to the period of the civil war, Pompey maintained his prominence in the senatorial circles within Italy. He was involved in the recall of Cicero from exile, and appointed sole consul in 52 to repress the disturbances occasioned by the death of Clodius. Pompey became the Senate’s most admired figure, along with Caesar. When an electoral and factional crisis emerged in 49, the rising tensions between the two triggered the civil war which ended in Pompey’s demise. It was an ignominious end for an otherwise unorthodox, but highly adventurous and successful career.
Let it not detract from the considerable legacy he left to the Republic, in terms of establishing the political boundaries and stability across its territories.
Pompey, Predecessor of the Roman Emperor?
Part of the legacy Pompey left to the later late Republic, and probably quite unintentionally and as a result of contingency and circumstance, was the tradition of one-man rule. Sulla, as mentioned above, had become dictator in the 80s after defeating Marius, who himself had had consecutive consulships in the late 2nd century when defending Rome from the Cimbri. With Pompey, who would enjoy a long and prosperous senatorial career, several new precedents were set that bridged this period of Sulla and Marius, when concentrated power was simply too novel to be sustainable, and that of Caesar, when it was becoming realised as a distinct future possibility, if not even necessity.
The first was an heterodoxical career. Pompey’s political career does not match up well with the standings set by Sulla, who had sought to regulate the careers of senators by imposing age limits on various magistracies, and he forged a career of promotion through military triumph and political association. His friendship with Sulla allowed him not only to gain a prominent role in the civil war without any legitimate office, but even gain two triumphs before the proper eligible age, for victories over Marian enemies. By the time Pompey first became consul in 70, he was already a seasoned general and conqueror. The significance of the army and military as a vehicle to rapid political prominence, a considerable factor in the imperial period, may be seen to have found its first flourishing period in Pompey’s career.
Secondly, Pompey found himself at various occasions in possession of power which was substantially autocratic. The Republican system had divided imperium, or command, between two consuls and praetors, while a dictator could be temporarily invoked in a time of crisis, who possessed absolute command and authority. Pompey first had an extraordinary command against the pirates in 67 BC, and more or less wielded sole command in the east against Mithradates, and in his eastern conquests. At Rome, he was called on to be a sole consul in 52, when chaos reigned and orderly elections were impossible. Pompey had also exercised, for almost the first time in Roman history, proconsular imperium (command given to an ex-consul of a territorial province) over Spain from Rome. This last most foreshadows the future role of Augustus, and the Roman Emperors, who were in essence the wielders of immense and encompassing proconsular imperium over the whole Empire. In all, chaotic conditions in Rome had necessitated an autocratic figure, and Pompey was, fortuitously for him, the man chosen at those moments. Not a small amount of the envy originating thereby was the cause of the eventual war between him and Caesar.
Pompey the Great: Laying the Foundations of Imperial Rome
Without much doubt, great destinies were made and ruined in the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. It was a war that would make the victor the unchallenged ruler of Rome and its territories, whatever the Republic, at the time, was prepared to call such a ruler. At least, the geographical extent of Rome’s empire had been largely confirmed. Caesar had spent a decade subduing Gaul, by far his most lasting territorial legacy to the Rome, and later Augustus would do the same with Egypt. But the subjugation of the Hellenistic world, the humbling of the pirates, had been achieved by Pompey, not to mention the many smaller conflicts which had threatened the empire.
Pompey, it is true, would have commanded all these territories, had he defeated Caesar, and not vie-versa. One can only guess what sort of autocrat Pompey would have made. One suspects, a weak one; he was far too conservative in spirit. Yet he had a rapport with the Senate which Caesar hadn’t had, and could only impose through force. It was a reputation built up over years of political activity, without too much personal gain in reward. Pompey had been sole consul, and the holder of imperium, only because of crisis and expediency. It was this crucially important relationship with the senatorial class that revelaed the possibility of an autocratic individual in the Roman world. Sulla had demonstrated it in the 80s – but Rome was too green to the idea then. Pompey warmed the senate to it. In some sense, it was this which Augustus might well have learnt, when he played out the same dynamic which led to the foundation of Rome’s first imperial dynasty.
Marcus Chin - I write about various things, and in the main out of that simple human emotion - interest and, correspondingly, passion. Knowledge stems ...
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