Pompey

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Pompey the Great to English speakers, was the most successful Roman general of his generation, who cleared the Mediterranean of pirates, finished the long war with Mithridates of Pontus and redrew the map of the eastern Mediterranean. For years the foremost man in Rome, he first allied with Julius Caesar and then fought him in the civil war that destroyed the republic, dying a fugitive in Egypt in 48 BCE.

Pompey was born on 29 September 106 BCE into a senatorial family from Picenum, in eastern Italy, and served under his father in the Social War as a teenager. In 83 BCE he raised troops on his own initiative to support Sulla, who was returning from the east to fight his enemies in Italy. Pompey then crushed Sulla's opponents in Sicily and Africa and celebrated a triumph in 81 BCE, aged about 25, his early success letting him bypass the usual ladder of offices. Sulla gave him the name Magnus, "the Great", reportedly with a nod to Pompey's admiration for Alexander; his enemies called him the "teenage butcher".

After Sulla's death Pompey put down the revolt of Lepidus, then spent 76 to 71 BCE fighting the rebel general Sertorius in Spain. Returning to Italy, he helped mop up the remains of Spartacus's slave army and claimed a share of the credit, which rivals resented. He and Crassus were elected consuls for 70 BCE.

Pirate fleets based largely in Cilicia had become so bold that they raided Rome's port at Ostia. In 67 BCE a law proposed by the tribune Gabinius gave Pompey extraordinary powers over the whole Mediterranean coast. Dividing the sea among his officers, he cleared the western waters in 40 days and finished the campaign in about three months.

A second law in 66 BCE gave him command against Mithridates VI of Pontus, whom he defeated that year. Pompey then marched through Armenia, the Caucasus and Syria. He annexed what remained of the Seleucid kingdom as the province of Syria in 64 BCE, and in 63 BCE intervened in a Judean civil war, besieging the Temple in Jerusalem for three months and entering its innermost sanctuary, an act Jews regarded as desecration. His settlement created new provinces and client kingdoms, and, by his own claim, raised Rome's annual revenues from 200 million to 340 million sesterces.

Pompey returned in 62 BCE, disbanded his army and celebrated a third triumph, but the senate refused to ratify his eastern arrangements or give land to his veterans. He therefore joined Caesar and Crassus in the informal alliance later called the First Triumvirate, which secured Caesar the consulship of 59 BCE; Pompey married Caesar's daughter Julia. He was consul again with Crassus in 55 BCE and that year inaugurated the Theatre of Pompey, one of ancient Rome's most famous buildings.

Julia's death in 54 BCE and Crassus's death in battle against the Parthians in 53 BCE removed the links between the two men. Amid street violence in 52 BCE Pompey was made sole consul, and he drew closer to the conservative senators who feared Caesar. When the senate declared Caesar a public enemy in January 49 BCE, Caesar crossed the Rubicon into Italy.

Unable to hold Italy, Pompey shipped his army across the Adriatic to Greece and built up superior forces. He beat off Caesar at Dyrrhachium in 48 BCE, but at Pharsalus in Thessaly on 9 August his larger army, about 38,000 legionaries against 22,000, collapsed after Caesar's men routed his cavalry. Pompey fled to Egypt, hoping for help from the young king Ptolemy XIII. On 28 September 48 BCE, as he stepped ashore at Pelusium, he was killed by a Roman officer in Egyptian service, apparently on the orders of the king's advisers, who hoped to win Caesar's favour.

Our 100 BCE map shows the Roman Republic before his eastern conquests, beside the shrunken Seleucid Empire he would abolish and the Ptolemaic Kingdom where he died. See also Julius Caesar, Cicero, Spartacus and the Battle of Pharsalus.