Plutarch's life of Pompey the Great traces a Roman golden boy who won three triumphs before the legal age, cleared the Mediterranean of pirates in three months, and died stabbed on a fishing boat within sight of his own wife.
Plutarch's Pompey opens with the paradox that gives the whole Life its shape: Romans hated Pompey's grasping father Strabo but loved the son with an intensity that outlasted every reversal of fortune. From his early command of self-raised legions for Sulla at twenty-three, through the nickname "Magnus" earned in Africa, to a triumph celebrated before he had even entered the senate, Pompey rises by a combination of genuine military skill, personal charm, and a knack for arriving to finish wars other men had already fought and won. Plutarch narrates his suppression of Mediterranean piracy in forty days plus a further campaign against Cilicia, his takeover of Lucullus's unfinished war against Mithridates and Tigranes, and his settlement of the East, alongside the domestic costs of his rise: a divorce forced by Sulla, a father-in-law's suicide, and a string of political rivalries with Crassus, Lucullus, Cato, and finally Caesar.
The narrative unfolds less as steady ascent than as a life measured out in comparisons -- to Alexander, to Agamemnon, to the rising and the setting sun -- that mark Pompey as a man whose reputation always ran a step ahead of his judgment. Plutarch dwells on scenes that expose the gap between the two: Pompey weeping and flinging himself in his own soldiers' path to stop a mutiny, walking his war-horse before the censors to declare he had served every campaign under his own command, quarrelling with Lucullus over withered laurel wreaths, and hesitating at Pharsalus until his own cavalry's collapse undoes him before he can act. The civil war against Caesar occupies the Life's final movement: the flight from Italy, the defeat at Pharsalus, and the flight by sea through Mytilene (where his wife Cornelia's lament is rendered at length) to Egypt, where the boy-king Ptolemy's advisers murder him on a fishing boat as his family watches from a trireme just offshore.
Historically the Life matters because it is one of Plutarch's fullest accounts of the last generation of the Roman Republic, paired for contrast with his Life of Agesilaus and read alongside his Caesar, Crassus, Lucullus, Cato the Younger, and Cicero as parts of a single interlocking narrative of Rome's collapse into civil war. Pompey's career -- extraordinary commands voted by the people over senatorial objection, personal armies loyal to a general rather than to the state, and a rivalry with Caesar that neither man could resolve short of battle -- is Plutarch's case study in how a republic destroys itself through the very men it most rewards, and the Life's closing image, Caesar weeping over Pompey's signet ring while the murderers who sought his favor are put to death, is Plutarch's verdict on the whole transaction.
“The cause of the hatred toward the father was single: an insatiable desire for money. But the causes of the love felt for the son were many: moderation in his manner of living, diligent practice in arms, persuasiveness of speech, trustworthiness of character, and an agreeableness in meeting people, such that no one asked anything of him without least distress, nor did anyone render a service more gladly to one in need.”
— Pompey
“But Pompey was not cowed; instead he bade Sulla consider that more people worship the rising sun than the setting one — meaning that his own power was increasing, while Sulla's was waning and fading.”
— Pompey
“I ask you, Pompey Magnus, whether you have served all the campaigns required by law?" And Pompey answered in a loud voice, "All of them," he said, "I have served, and all of them under myself as commander.”
— Pompey
“For it is not beyond hope that a man who from such heights has fallen to this can rise again from this state to those former heights.”
— Pompey
“He, drawing his toga over his face with both hands, said nothing unworthy of himself and did nothing unworthy, but only groaned, and bore the blows steadfastly, having lived fifty-nine years, and dying one day after his birthday.”
— Pompey
The nickname arose after his lightning campaign in Africa against Domitius and King Iarbas, when he was still in his early twenties. Plutarch reports competing accounts of who first used it -- Pompey's own army in Libya, or Sulla greeting him -- but notes Pompey himself was cautious about adopting it formally, only writing 'Magnus Pompeius' in official letters once the name had become familiar and unresented.
Granted sweeping command over the entire sea and coastline under the Gabinian law, Pompey divided the Mediterranean into thirteen districts, assigned ships and commanders to each, and swept the western basin in forty days before cornering the main pirate force in Cilicia. Plutarch says the whole war, which had plagued Rome for years, was ended in not more than three months, and instead of executing the twenty thousand captured pirates, Pompey resettled many of them as farmers in depopulated towns like Soli and Dyme.
The Manilian law transferred Lucullus's nearly-finished war against Mithridates and Tigranes to Pompey, and Plutarch narrates a tense meeting between the two generals in Galatia where Lucullus accused Pompey of always swooping in to steal credit for other men's wars -- Sertorius's, Lepidus's, Spartacus's -- while Pompey mocked Lucullus for fighting mere 'stage-tragedies' rather than a real army.
When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, Pompey judged Rome indefensible amid the panic and contradictory reports flooding in, so he withdrew the senate and his forces to Brundisium and then across the Adriatic, planning to use his overwhelming naval strength and gather troops from the East. Plutarch records that even Cicero criticized the move as following Themistocles's strategy rather than Pericles's, though Pompey's own fleet and cavalry advantage briefly seemed to vindicate the retreat.
Pressured by his own officers and allied nobles who were eager for battle, Pompey abandoned his preferred strategy of starving Caesar out and met him on the plain of Pharsalus. Caesar's veteran troops broke Pompey's cavalry by aiming javelins at the young nobles' faces, and once the flank collapsed Pompey, in what Plutarch describes as a dazed, deranged state, simply walked back to his tent and abandoned the fight.
Fleeing to Egypt for refuge, Pompey was murdered on a small boat sent by King Ptolemy's advisers Pothinus, Theodotus, and Achillas, who reasoned that killing him would please Caesar without the risk of harboring him. Septimius, a former officer under Pompey, struck first; Pompey covered his face with his toga and died without a word of complaint, one day after his fifty-ninth birthday.
Cornelia awaited news at Mytilene believing the war already won, and when Pompey arrived in a single small boat she delivered a lament blaming her own fortune for his ruin, recalling that her first husband Publius had also died in a Roman disaster (at Carrhae against the Parthians). She was present on a nearby ship at Pelusium and watched her husband's murder from offshore.
Plutarch reports that when Caesar arrived in Egypt, he turned away from the man who brought him Pompey's severed head as though from a murderer, and wept upon receiving Pompey's signet ring, engraved with a lion holding a sword; he later had Pompey's killers Achillas and Pothinus put to death.
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