Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, better known simply as Pompey or Pompey the Great (‘Magnus’ means ‘great’), was an ancient Roman general, politician, and the most famous rival of Julius Caesar.
Pompey was born in 106 BC to a very rich but not very distinguished family—his father had managed to become consul, but otherwise the Pompeia were rural nobodies, and Pompey was very much an outsider in the Roman political world. At the age of twenty-three, he illegally raised a private army made up of his father’s old clients and joined in the then-ongoing Roman civil war, siding with returning war hero Sulla. When the young Pompey met the middle-aged, famous and very powerful Sulla, he let the older man know that Pompey came as an equal ally rather than a subordinate, telling him: “More men worship the rising sun than the setting sun”.
That was how Pompey would spend most of his career—sharp enough to pick the right side, but never afraid to tear up the rules to achieve his purpose. In a blatant breach of the Roman constitution, he became consul at the age of thirty-five without having ever been a senator.
While he was a skilled commander in his own right, Pompey acquired a not entirely undeserved reputation for ‘finishing’ wars that had already been won by other, less famous Roman generals. For instance, while returning from Spain (where he had fought a long war against a renegade Roman warlord), he ran into the surviving followers of the already dead Spartacus. Pompey’s veteran soldiers easily defeated these remnants, and Pompey promptly claimed glory for having defeated the entire slave revolt, much to the anger of Marcus Crassus who actually did defeat Spartacus.
Regardless of his methods, and how much credit he did or did not steal, Pompey was incredibly popular in Rome, especially after a highly successful campaign against the pirates that plagued the Mediterranean and a war in the Near East that (amongst other things) firmly brought Judea under Roman domination. In his middle age, he was able to parlay his enormous clout and wealth into an alliance with two of his rivals – the ridiculously wealthy Marcus Crassus and the relatively poor but brilliant young aristocrat Julius Caesar. Between them, the three became unofficial rulers of Rome, dividing the best provinces between them. Caesar and Crassus both wanted and got wars so they could gain plunder and glory, while Pompey, Happily Married to Caesar’s teenage daughter Julia, settled down in Rome for an extended honeymoon.
Soon, cracks began to appear in the triumvirate. Crassus was spectacularly defeated and killed fighting the Parthians, while Caesar unexpectedly proved a superb general, conquering the Gauls and winning vast new territories for Rome. Jealous and afraid, Pompey would probably have split from Caesar anyway, but the death of poor Julia in childbirth weakened the bond between the two. In the civil war that followed, Pompey – the old rule breaker – was ironically leader of the conservative, republican faction trying to stop Caesar.
When it finally came down to a Caesar versus Pompey battle at Pharsalus, Greece in 48 BC, the younger man proved the better general. Pompey fled with his wife to Egypt expecting sanctuary; instead, he was betrayed and murdered by a palace cabal, who sent his head as a gift to Caesar.
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