Pompey Cel Mare !

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“People worship the rising sun, not the setting sun.”

When Pompey had uttered those words against Sulla, his peers gasped at his audacity. Fortunately, the dictator merely laughed. Eleven years on from his death, and Pompey’s star was continuing to shine. Now one of his tribunes proposed a bill to grant him sweeping new powers to rid the Mediterranean of pirates, assigning him a dozen lieutenants, more than 200 ships, as many oarsmen and marines as he needed, and the power to collect as much tax from the provinces and money from the treasuries as he’d need. Unsurprisingly, the senators opposed the bill and attempted to kill Pompey, which outrages the people, who attacked the Senate in turn. Despite the scheming of the Optimates to prevent such an appointment – which granted the powers of a monarch to a man who had made a mockery of the Cursus honorum – nobody had the resolve or the courage to openly oppose the bill, and it was passed.

Pompey appeared to be reluctantly accepting the commission in public, while in private ensuring further concessions to double the size of his fleet. His forces divided across the Mediterranean and began forcing every pirate fleet they found to port. When they fled to Cilicia, he attacked the coast of Asia Minor with 60 ships. He then cleared the Tyrrhenian Sea, Corsica, Sicily, Sardinia and the Libyan coast in 40 days. The Consul Piso was nearly stripped of his office when it was found he was sabotaging Pompey’s equipment, as his successes in the Mediterranean made the people even more enamoured with him. When a number of pirates surrendered to him without a fight, he settled some 20,000 of them in land recently depleted by the war with Tigranes II. Pompey’s campaign saw around 70 ships captured, some 300 surrendered, around 10,000 pirates killed in battle and 120 towns and fortresses captured. The Mediterranean now truly was “Mare Nostrum” (Our Sea).

While Pompey had been campaigning in the Mediterranean, Lucullus was marching his army back west. His troops had protested at marching over 1,000 miles into Armenia, for little reward. Surrounding the proconsul, they threw their empty purses at his feet and complained bitterly that he was the only one being enriched by the war. The Roman retreat allowed Mithridates VI to sneak back to Pontus and re-establish his control, routing Lucullus’ adjutant at Zela, killing around 7,000 legionaries. Lucullus’ younger brother-in-law, in the pay of Pompey, began spreading dissent amongst the troops, and they refused to march back into Pontus, so instead the Proconsul made for Galatia, their absence seeing Mithridates rebuild his forces and Tigranes recapturing his lost lands. With his troops mutinous and a new enemy on the rise, the time was ripe for Pompey to claim the prize of the war with Mithridates.

A new law was proposed in Rome, that Pompey should assume command of the war against Mithridates in addition to his command of the sea. The outraged senators protested further, the Optimates seeing this as the road to tyranny to invest so much power in the hands of one man. Pompey had few advocates, though Caesar spoke in support of him, and the increasingly successful orator Cicero back him too. Throughout this time, Crassus was effectively the patron of Caesar, his financial clout funding Caesar’s ambition to the various political offices while benefiting from his illustrious privilege in return, and creating a partnership similar to that betwixt Caesar’s grandfather and Gaius Marius years earlier. Despite opposition, the bill passed and Pompey set sell for Asia Minor to end the war with Mithridates.