Roman Republic

Pompey

Pompey the Great

Lifespan · 106 – 48 BCE

A brief orientation

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus was a Roman general of equestrian family whose career was characterised, from his early twenties, by extraordinary commands well outside the cursus honorum. He fought under Sulla, was awarded the cognomen Magnus before he had held a regular magistracy, swept piracy from the Mediterranean under the lex Gabinia (67 BCE), took on the long Mithridatic War and finished it (66–63 BCE), and returned from the East a richer and more famous man than Rome had previously seen. The settlement of the eastern provinces he negotiated formed a substantial part of Roman imperial administration for the next century.

The political weight

Pompey's standing was so unusual that even his ordinary requests — land for his veterans, ratification of his Eastern arrangements — could not be obtained through normal senatorial channels. The First Triumvirate of 60–53 BCE — the informal political alliance of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus — was the response: a private arrangement among three men whose combined weight could move what the senate would not. The Triumvirate was not a constitutional body; its effective operation was itself one of the most explicit signs of Republican institutional failure.

The civil war

After the death of Crassus at Carrhae in 53 and the breakdown of the working relationship with Caesar, Pompey returned to the senatorial faction and accepted the consulship sine collega — sole consul, a position normally restricted to dictators — to manage the political crisis. When Caesar refused to lay down his command and crossed the Rubicon in early 49, the open civil war began. Pompey led the senatorial forces, abandoned Italy for the East where his old networks were, was defeated at Pharsalus in 48 BCE, and was murdered shortly afterwards on landing in Egypt.

Why he matters for Virtue & Power

Pompey is the figure on whom the late Republic's most genuinely ambivalent reading sits. His career was, throughout, a sequence of extraordinary departures from constitutional norm — but he aligned himself, in the end, with the senate against Caesar's larger departure. Whether he was the defender of a still-living Republic or the man whose own career had hollowed it out so that the defence could not hold is the question the long literature has been turning over since Plutarch. See the essay Pompey versus Caesar.

Related reading

theme
Republic
The classical political form in which authority is shared, magistracies rotate, and the people are taken to be the ground of legitimacy — and the long inquiry into why it tends to be unstable.
theme
Decline
The classical and historical inquiry into how polities lose the institutions, habits and characters that once held them — and into whether the loss is reversible.
theme
Power
The classical and historical inquiry into authority, force, legitimacy and the conditions under which power becomes rule rather than mere compulsion.
theme
Honor
The classical and Roman inquiry into the social economy of standing and recognition — Greek timē, Roman dignitas — and the role it plays in shaping political action.
philosopher
Julius Caesar
The Roman general, statesman and writer whose decade-long Gallic command, civil war against Pompey, and brief dictatorship effectively ended the Roman Republic — and made him the single most-read figure of European political history.
philosopher
Cicero
The Roman statesman, orator and philosopher whose writings preserved the Greek philosophical inheritance for Latin Europe and whose career was the late Republic's last serious attempt to defend itself through political argument rather than through arms.
essay
Pompey versus Caesar
An interpretive reading of the civil war of 49–48 BCE — Pompey and Caesar as parallel late-Republican careers, the senate's eventual alignment with Pompey, and the long argument over whether the Republican cause at Pharsalus was the Republic itself.
book
Commentarii de Bello Gallico
Caesar's seven-book first-person account of the Gallic campaign of 58–51 BCE, published while the war was still in progress — at once a military dispatch, a literary masterpiece of Latin prose, and a political instrument intended to shape Roman public opinion about a command the Senate could not control.
book
Plutarch's Lives
Plutarch's Parallel Lives — paired Greek and Roman biographies, organised for comparison and for the study of character through what people did. The principal source through which later Europe learned to read the late Roman Republic.
essay
Caesar and the collapse of the Republic
An interpretive reading of Caesar's career as the convergence of forces the Republic had not, by the 50s BCE, managed to contain — and of the long argument over whether his crossing of the Rubicon caused the collapse or merely revealed it.
essay
Caesar as general and as statesman
An interpretive reading of Julius Caesar in two registers — as the commander of the Gallic campaign and as the political actor of the late Republic — and of why the assessment runs in opposite directions in each.