Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo

Born around 135 BCE into an ambitious municipal family from Picenum, Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo rose by talent, calculation, and relentless opportunism. He married well, built a network among Italy’s local elites, and sired a son, Pompeius Magnus, who would one day overshadow him. But in his own time Strabo was formidable: a tough, unsentimental commander whose soldiers respected his results and whose enemies feared his appetite for plunder and power. By the late 90s he had climbed the cursus honorum and was well placed when Italy erupted in 90 BCE.

In the northeastern theater Strabo became Rome’s indispensable man. As consul in 89 BCE he turned on Asculum—the city whose riot had helped ignite the wider revolt—and methodically squeezed it. Siege lines clamped around its walls; the rhythm of rams, the hiss of slingshot, and the smoke of sapping fires marked months of pressure. The city fell to him in 89. Strabo knew that victory required more than sacking a rebel stronghold; it demanded incentives. He famously granted citizenship to the Turma Salluitana, Iberian cavalry who distinguished themselves under his command—a grant recorded on the Bronze of Ascoli, a rare surviving voice from the war. In the north he also sponsored the lex Pompeia, conferring Latin rights on communities in Transpadana to bind them to Rome as the peninsula convulsed. These measures complemented the lex Iulia and lex Plautia Papiria, accelerating defections in 88 as the rebel coalition frayed.

Strabo’s strengths came with costs. Roman writers call him harsh, avaricious, and two-faced, a man who kept one eye on the battlefield and the other on his own advantage. His soldiers sometimes resented his hoarding of booty; senators distrusted his independence. Yet he delivered. He combined the slow violence of sieges with the soft power of status, leveraging citizenship and Latin rights as tools of war. In a conflict where Rome’s enemy spoke the same language and fought in the same maniples, he understood that victory would be won as much with laws and tablets as with ladders and swords.

The end of the Social War bled into civil war. Strabo lived to 87 BCE, when amid the factional struggle in Rome he camped outside the city, bargaining between sides before a sudden illness—rumored to be plague or a fatal bolt of lightning—killed him. His legacy in this timeline is clear. The fall of Asculum, the Ascoli bronze, and the lex Pompeia show a commander who converted battlefield success into political consolidation. If the Social War asked whether Rome could crush its own allies and survive the cost of granting their demand, Strabo’s answer was pragmatic: crush where you must, and grant when it helps you win.