Pompey the Great

Pompey the Great was born in 106 BCE at Picenum, son of Pompeius Strabo, a competent but unloved general. From youth he breathed camp dust and political ambition. He raised private troops during the civil wars and threw his weight behind Sulla, earning early triumphs that vaulted him past the cursus honorum. The Senate conferred on him the extraordinary surname Magnus, “the Great,” a compliment he wore with deliberate ease. By the 70s BCE he was the Republic’s rising star, a commander whose victories outpaced his years and whose confidence filled the Forum like a brass fanfare.

In 71 BCE, Pompey was returning from Hispania, where he had extinguished the embers of Sertorius’s long rebellion. As Crassus hemmed in Spartacus’s army and won the decisive battle near the Silarus, thousands of rebels fled north along the roads. Pompey’s column met them in the open; trained legions cut them down in cold, efficient slaughter, the steel flash of pila and short swords doing what hunger and fear had begun. He wrote to the Senate that while Crassus had beaten the slaves, he had ended the war by preventing their escape. It was a politically lethal line: Crassus crucified 6,000 along the Appian Way and received only an ovation, while Pompey basked in the glow of finishing stroke and soon shared the consulship with his rival.

Pompey prized image as much as victory. He was brave in the field, brisk in command, and careful to be seen as Rome’s savior. The claim of credit against Spartacus was not mere vanity; it was calculation in a city where honors bred power. Yet he could be magnanimous, pragmatic, and skillful in administration. In the decade that followed, he swept the Mediterranean of pirates in a matter of months and then dismantled Mithridates VI’s power, reorganizing the East with a statesman’s eye. These were his natural gifts: wide command, clean execution, and the ability to win both wars and the stories told about them.

The Servile War episode sharpened lines that would define the age. Pompey and Crassus learned to cooperate as consuls in 70 BCE, but distrust simmered. Later, Pompey joined Caesar and Crassus in the First Triumvirate, then drifted toward the optimates as Caesar’s star rose. Civil war followed; after Pharsalus in 48 BCE, Pompey fled to Egypt, where he was murdered on a lonely shore, greeted by a perfumed betrayal instead of fanfare. His brief moment of “mopping up” Spartacus’s fugitives mattered less militarily than politically. It burnished a reputation that would carry him to the apex of Roman power—and into the shadow where the Republic finally fractured.