Pompey The Great Quotes

When do you propose to land?’ ‘Not until after dinner. I am letting the canoes come alongside and gossip, so that Queen Puolani will know everything about us and what is afoot. She will not be caught unprepared – it is a dreadful thing to have a whole carriageful of people draw up at your door and leap out grinning, the house all ahoo, carpets taken up, a great washing going on, the children bawling, yourself confined to the head, having taken physic, and your wife gone to Pompey in hopes of a new cook.

Oh, Charmian, Where think’st thou he is now? Stands he or sits he? Or does he walk? Or is he on his horse? O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony! Do bravely, horse, for wott’st thou whom thou mov’st? The demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm And burgonet of men. He’s speaking now, Or murmuring “Where’s my serpent of old Nile?” For so he calls me. Now I feed myself With most delicious poison. Think on me, That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black And wrinkled deep in time. Broad-fronted Caesar, When thou wast here above the ground, I was A morsel for a monarch. And great Pompey Would stand and make his eyes grow in my brow. There would he anchor his aspect, and die With looking on his life.

No more light answers. Let our officers Have note what we purpose. I shall break The cause of our expedience to the Queen And get her leave to part. For not alone The death of Fulvia, with more urgent touches, Do strongly speak to us, but the letters too Of many our contriving friends in Rome Petition us at home. Sextus Pompeius Hath given the dare to Caesar and commands The empire of the sea. Our slippery people, Whose love is never linked to the deserver Till his deserts are past, begin to throw Pompey the Great and all his dignities Upon his son, who - high in name and power, Higher than both in blood and life - stands up For the main soldier; whose quality, going on, The sides o' th' world may danger. Much is breeding Which, like the courser's hair, hath yet but life And not a serpent's poison.

It is said of Pompey, that when he was to carry grain to Rome in time of dearth, he was in a great deal of danger by storms at sea, but, says he, ‘We must go on; it is necessary that Rome should be relieved, but it is not necessary that we should live.

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. You all do know this mantle: I remember The first time ever Caesar put it on; 'Twas on a summer's evening, in his tent, That day he overcame the Nervii: Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through: See what a rent the envious Casca made: Through this well-beloved Brutus stabb'd; And as he pluck'd his cursed steel away, Mark how the blood of Caesar follow'd it, As rushing out of doors, to be resolved If Brutus so unkindly knock'd, or no; For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel: Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him! This was the most unkindest cut of all; For when the noble Caesar saw him stab, Ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms, Quite vanquishi'd him: then burst his mighty heart; And, in his mantle muffling up his face, Even at the base of Pompey's statua, Which all the while ran blood, great Caesar fell.

For first, when Pompey made severe laws for punishing and laying great fines on those who had corrupted the people with gifts, Cato advised him to let alone what was already passed, and to provide for the future; for if he should look up past misdemeanors, it would be difficult to know where to stop; and if he would ordain new penalties, it would be unreasonable to punish men by a law, which at that time they had not the opportunity of breaking.

but does it serve any useful purpose to know that Pompey was the first to exhibit the slaughter of eighteen elephants in the Circus, pitting criminals against them in a mimic battle? He, a leader of the state and one who, according to report, was conspicuous among the leaders28 of old for the kindness of his heart, thought it a notable kind of spectacle to kill human beings after a new fashion. Do they fight to the death? That is not enough! Are they torn to pieces? That is not enough! Let them be crushed by animals of monstrous bulk! Better would it be that these things pass into oblivion lest hereafter some all-powerful man should learn them and be jealous of an act that was nowise human.29 O, what blindness does great prosperity cast upon our minds! When he was casting so many troops of wretched human beings to wild beasts born under a different sky, when he was proclaiming war between creatures so ill matched, when he was shedding so much blood before the eyes of the Roman people, who itself was soon to be forced to shed more. he then believed that he was beyond the power of Nature. But later this same man, betrayed by Alexandrine treachery, offered himself to the dagger of the vilest slave, and then at last discovered what an empty boast his surname30 was.

To celebrate his victories Pompey summoned a meeting of the Senate to vote his father-in-law a further twenty days of public supplication, whereupon a scene ensued that I have never forgotten. One after another the senators rose to praise Caesar, Cicero dutifully among them, until at last there was no one left for Pompey to call except Cato. “Gentlemen,” said Cato, “yet again you have all taken leave of your senses. By Caesar’s own account he has slaughtered four hundred thousand men, women and children—people with whom we had no quarrel, with whom we were not at war, in a campaign not authorised by a vote either of this Senate or of the Roman people. I wish to lay two counter-proposals for you to consider: first, that far from holding celebrations, we should sacrifice to the gods that they do not turn their wrath for Caesar’s folly and madness upon Rome and the army; and second, that Caesar, having shown himself a war criminal, should be handed over to the tribes of Germany for them to determine his fate.” The shouts of rage that greeted this speech were like howls of pain: “Traitor!” “Gaul-lover!” “German!” Several senators jumped up and started shoving Cato this way and that, causing him to stumble backwards. But he was a strong and wiry man. He regained his balance and stood his ground, glaring at them like an eagle. A motion was proposed that he be taken directly by the lictors to the Carcer and imprisoned until such time as he apologised. Pompey, however, was too shrewd to permit his martyrdom. “Cato by his words has done himself more harm than any punishment we can inflict,” he declared. “Let him go free. It does not matter. He will stand forever condemned in the eyes of the Roman people for such treacherous sentiments.” I too felt that Cato had done himself great damage

The daemons are ‘between’ us and the gods not only locally and materially but qualitatively as well. Like the impassible gods, they are immortal: like mortal men, they are passible (xiii). Some of them, before they became daemons, lived in terrestrial bodies; were in fact men. That is why Pompey saw semidei Manes, demigod-ghosts, in the airy region. But this is not true of all daemons. Some, such as Sleep and Love, were never human. From this class an individual daemon (or genius, the standard Latin translation of daemon) is allotted to each human being as his ‘witness and guardian’ through life (xvi). It would detain us too long here to trace the steps whereby a man’s genius, from being an invisible, personal, and external attendant, became his true self, and then his cast of mind, and finally (among the Romantics) his literary or artistic gifts. To understand this process fully would be to grasp that great movement of internalisation, and that consequent aggrandisement of man and desiccation of the outer universe, in which the psychological history of the West has so largely consisted.25

Fame is of that force, as there is scarcely any great action wherein it hath not a great part, especially in the war. Mucianus undid Vitellius by a fame that he scattered, that Vitellius had in purpose to remove the legions of Syria into Germany, and the legions of Germany into Syria; whereupon the legions of Syria were infinitely inflamed. Julius Cæsar took Pompey unprovided, and laid asleep his industry and preparations by a fame that he cunningly gave out, how Cæsar’s own soldiers loved him not; and being wearied with the wars, and laden with the spoils of Gaul, would forsake him as soon as he came into Italy. Livia settled all things for the succession of her son Tiberius, by continually giving out that her husband Augustus was upon recovery and amendment; and it is a usual thing with the bashaws to conceal the death of the Grand Turk from the janizaries and men of war, to save the sacking of Constantinople, and other towns, as their manner is. Themistocles made Xerxes, king of Persia, post apace out of Græcia, by giving out that the Grecians had a purpose to break his bridge of ships which he had made athwart Hellespont.

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (the Great), better known in English as Pompey,

Meanwhile, the son of Pompey the Great celebrated his great victory.

The Roman Empire (63 BCE – 324 CE) Pompey, the Roman general, conquered Israel in 63 BC. Herod the Great was assigned to rule Israel. The rule of the Romans was seen as cruel and oppressive and the Jews revolted in 66 AD. The temple was destroyed

An oft-repeated tale recounts that a Christian mob destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria in 391 and burnt its books in the street. According to some versions, the repository in question was the original library in the Brucheium, while others state that it was a ‘daughter’ library located in the Serapeum. This tale has entered so deeply into the popular imagination that it even sometimes appears in otherwise respectable books of history. It is, however, a myth, originated in the late 18th century, when the great historian Edward Gibbon read an unwarranted meaning into a single sentence from the Christian chronicler Paul Orosius (fl. 414–17). The subtext of the legend is that the Christians of the fourth century were intensely hostile to the science, literature, and scholarship of classical culture, and that such matters were the special preserve of the pagans of Alexandria. This too is an 18th-century myth. The city’s scholarly and scientific class comprised Christians as well as pagans, and Christian scholars, rhetoricians, philosophers and scientists were active in Alexandria right up until the city fell to Arab Muslim invaders in 642. Regarding the library in the Brucheium – whose size, again, is impossible to determine – many ancient historians believed that it (or a large part of its collection) had already gone up in flames following Julius Caesar’s assault on the city in 48 or 47 BC, during his wars with Pompey. Some historians now also claim that, if any part of the original library remained, it vanished in 272, during the emperor Aurelian’s campaigns to reunite the empire. Whether either story is true, the Great Library of the Ptolemies no longer existed by the late fourth century. As for the ‘daughter’ library, it may have been situated within the enclosure of the Serapeum; there were, at any rate, library stacks in the temple. However, the Pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus (c.330–95) indicates that whatever library had once been there was long gone before the Serapeum’s demolition in 391. More importantly, none of the original accounts of the temple’s destruction mentions a library, not even the account written by the devout pagan Eunapius of Sardis (c.345–c.420), who despised Christians and who, as an erudite man, would have been enraged by the burning of precious texts. Later Medieval legend claimed that the actual final destruction of the ‘Library’ or libraries of Alexandria was the work of the Arab conquerors of the seventh century ad. Of this, however, no account exists that was written before the 12th century. Whatever the case, the scurrilous story of the Great Library’s destruction by Christians is untrue. It may tell us something about modern misconceptions regarding the past, but tells us nothing about Christian or pagan antiquity.

When good men come to bad ends,” Seneca would write, “when Socrates is forced to die in prison, Rutilius to live in exile, Pompey and Cicero to offer their necks to their own clients, and great Cato, the living image of all the virtues, by falling upon his sword to show that the end had come for himself and for the state at the same time, one cannot help being grieved that Fortune pays her rewards so unjustly.

Arriving home in Rome, flaunting Alexander the Great’s cloak (captured from Mithradates), Pompey, richer and more powerful than any Roman had ever been, was awarded an unprecedented third triumph for victories on a third continent and granted the agnomen Magnus – Great. The tri-triumphator launched a spectacular building programme. There was something of the modern politician about this man, described as ‘honest of face, shameless of heart’, but even self-righteous Cicero was dazzled by his ‘incredible godlike virtus’.

Then Pompey the Great arrived in Egypt for the first time in his long career.

it is a dreadful thing to have a whole carriageful of people draw up at your door and leap out grinning, the house all ahoo, carpets taken up, a great washing going on, the children bawling, yourself confined to the head, having taken physic, and your wife gone to Pompey in hopes of a new cook.

led with great success by Cnaeus Pompey himself,

For the memory of Alexander’s greatness had always served the Romans as a reproach. Even worse, it provided an inspiration to their foes. In the east the model of kingship established by Alexander had never lost its allure. For more than a century it had been neutered and systematically humiliated by Rome, yet it remained the only credible system of government that could be opposed to the republicanism of the new world conquerors. Hence its appeal to monarchs, such as Mithridates, who were not even Greek, and hence, most startling of all, its appeal to bandits and rebellious slaves. When the pirates had called themselves kings and affected the gilded sails and purple awnings of monarchy, this had not been mere vanity, but a deliberate act of propaganda, as public a statement as they could make of their opposition to the Republic. They knew that the message would be read correctly, for invariably, whenever the order of things had threatened to crack during the previous decades, rebellion had been signaled by a slave with a crown. Spartacus’s communism had been all the more unusual in that the leaders of previous slave revolts, virtually without exception, had aimed to raise thrones upon the corpses of their masters. Most, like the pirates, had merely adopted the trappings of monarchy, but there were some who had brought the fantastical worlds of romances to life and claimed to be the long-lost sons of kings. This, in a world ruled by a republic, was what revolution had come to mean. The royal pretensions of slaves fed naturally into the swirling undercurrents of the troubled age, the prophecies, which Mithridates’ propaganda had exploited so brilliantly, of the coming of a universal king, of a new world monarchy, and the doom of Rome. So when Pompey presented himself as the new Alexander, he was appropriating a dream shared by potentate and slave alike. If any Roman was qualified to appreciate this, it was Pompey himself. The conqueror of the pirates and the patron of Posidonius, he would have been perfectly aware of the menacing links between kingship and revolution, between the uppitiness of Oriental princelings and the resentments of the dispossessed

By the time of the Great Schism, Italy had descended back into gangster politics, as in the days of Caesar and Pompey.

When the Roman Republic was at its height in the mid-first century B.C., when Pompey the Great solidified his conquests in the East, Julius Caesar conquered and annexed Gaul in the West, Roman armies dominated the Mediterranean world, and riches were pouring into the city, neither the leaders nor the people of Rome thought that the structure of their society was about to fall apart. They did not know that two decades of civil war was upon them, that their political system would be uprooted, and their previously guaranteed civil liberties, property rights, and freedoms were to be lost. The United States is now viewed as the dominant world power, the wealthiest nation on earth with the strongest economy, with military installations and naval patrols around the world, and with astounding technological capabilities. Yet, recent challenges and troubling developments have raised the question of whether what happened to the Roman Republic will happen to ours." - Rome and America: The Great Republics

Sit here, deliberating in cold debates, If we should sacrifice our lives to honour, Or wear them out in servitude and chains. Rouse up, for shame! our brothers of Pharsalia Point at their wounds, and cry aloud—To battle! 40 Great Pompey’s shade2 complains that we are slow, And Scipio’s ghost walks unrevenged amongst us!

like that. Many of the mighty cities of North Africa like El Djem in what is now Tunisia were left to decay in peace. Even today they have massive ruins. El Djem has its vast Roman amphitheatre. Orange, in southern France, has a Roman theatre and an aqueduct. Athens has a vast Roman temple of Zeus and a library built by the emperor Hadrian (AD 117–138), who passed this way on his travels (see Chapter 17). Baalbek in the Lebanon has two colossal temples, and one of them – the temple of Bacchus – is still practically intact. Rome itself remained home to some of the most enormous ruins: The Colosseum, the city’s biggest amphitheatre, is still largely in one piece (see Chapter 8); the ruins of the imperial palaces still cluster across the Palatine Hill, and the baths of Caracalla look like a giant’s cave complex. The Aurelian walls of Rome, built in the 270s (see Chapter 19 for information on the emperor Aurelian), still surround most of Rome. The survival of Roman books Roman writers were all hugely influential in different ways, but it’s thanks to the survival of their texts that we know what we do about the Roman world. Consider these examples: Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero) (106–43 BC): Cicero was a great orator, lawyer, and statesman. Well aware of his importance, he published his speeches, treatises on government (De Re Publica), duty (De Officiis), the nature of gods (De Deorum Natura), and also a vast collection of his private correspondence. A great deal survives and he had a huge influence on thought and literature in early modern times. Caesar (Gaius Julius Caesar) (100–44 BC): Caesar wrote his own account of his war in Gaul (Bellum Gallicum), and also part of his civil war with Pompey (Bellum Civile). The texts are famous for sounding objective (though they aren’t at all), and for their spare, terse style, but are exceptional historical resources for the time. To find out more about Julius Caesar, go to Chapter 14. Catullus

For after the powers of the tribunes, in the consulate of Cneius Pompey and Marcus Crassus, had been fully restored, certain young men, of an ardent age and temper, having obtained that high office, began to stir up the populace by inveighing against the senate, and proceeded, in course of time, by means of largesses and promises, to inflame them more and more; by which methods they became popular and powerful. On the other hand, the most of the nobility opposed their proceedings to the utmost; under pretense, indeed, of supporting the senate, but in reality for their own aggrandizement. For, to state the truth in few words, whatever parties, during that period, disturbed the republic under plausible pretexts, some, as if to defend the rights of the people, others, to make the authority of the senate as great as possible, all, though affecting concern for the public good, contended every one for his own interest. In such contests there was neither moderation nor limit; each party made a merciless use of its successes.