by Mary Beard
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’.
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 comman
ders 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.
The Gang of Three
In 60 BCE, two years after he had returned to Rome, Pompey was frustrated that the senate had not yet formally ratified his eastern settlement, instead procrastinating by confirming it piece by piece, not en bloc. And, as any general then had to do, he was looking for land on which to settle his ex-soldiers. Marcus Licinius Crassus, who had finally led Roman troops to victory against Spartacus and was reputedly the richest man in Rome, had recently taken up the case of a struggling company of state contractors. They had bid far too much for the tax rights of the province of Asia, and Crassus was trying to get them permission to renegotiate the price. Julius Caesar, the least experienced, and least wealthy, of the three, wanted to secure election to the consulship of 59 BCE and a major military command to follow, not merely the policing duties against brigands in Italy that the senate had in mind for him. Mutual support seemed the best way to achieve these various aims. So, in an entirely unofficial deal, they pooled resources, power, contacts and ambition to get what they wanted in the short term – and in the longer.
For many ancient observers this was another milestone on the road to the breakdown of Republican government. The poet Horace, looking back from the other side of that breakdown, was only one of those who singled out the year 60 BCE, when he referred, according to traditional Roman dating, to ‘the civil war that began when Metellus was consul’. ‘Cato the Younger’ – the great grandson of ‘the Elder’ (p. 204) and one of Caesar’s most uncompromising enemies – argued that the city was overturned not when Caesar and Pompey fell out but when they became friends. The idea that the political process had been fixed behind the scenes seemed in some ways worse than the open violence of the previous decades. Cicero captured the point nicely when he observed that in Pompey’s notebook there was a list not only of past consuls but of future ones too.
It was not such a complete takeover as those comments imply. There were all kinds of strains, disagreements and rivalries between the three men, and if Pompey really did have a notebook with a list of the gang’s choice of future consuls, the electoral process sometimes got the better of them and someone quite different, not at all to their liking, was voted in. Nonetheless, they did pull off their immediate goals. Caesar was duly elected consul for 59 BCE and, among a series of measures that strongly resembled the programmes of earlier, radical tribunes, sponsored legislation on behalf of the other two. He also secured a military command for himself in southern Gaul, to which a vast area on the other side of the Alps was soon added.
For much of the 50s BCE, the machinations of members of the gang continued to be a major force in Roman politics, even though Caesar made only periodic visits to Italy and Crassus never returned from the campaign he led in 55 BCE against the Parthian Empire, centred in what is now Iran, which in many ways replaced Mithradates in Roman fears. It is partly Crassus’ early death that makes his role and importance within the trio difficult to assess. But the tragedy of his defeat and gory decapitation, and the humiliation of the capture of his army’s ceremonial standards, resonated for years. The decisive Parthian victory came in 53 BCE at the Battle of Carrhae, on what is now the border between Turkey and Syria. Crassus’ head was sent as a trophy to the Parthian king’s residence, where it was instantly reused as a prop, standing in for the head of the tragic Pentheus, decapita
ted by his mother, in a performance of Euripides’ play The Bacchae (interestingly part of the Parthian repertoire). The standards remained a proud piece of Parthian booty until the emperor Augustus, by some adept diplomacy dressed up as a military achievement, brought them back to Rome in 19 BCE.
45. A silver coin issued under Augustus celebrates the return by the Parthians of the Roman standards captured at the Battle of Carrhae. The Parthian who submissively offers back the standards is dressed in traditional Eastern trousers. The figure on the other side is, significantly, the goddess ‘Honour’. In reality, it was more a negotiated deal than a military victory by the Romans.