José Antonio Páez

In both English and Spanish America the price of imperial expansion had been de facto colonial autonomy.37 When Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy Virginia planter, led a rebellion against the governor in 1676 (accusing him of being soft on the Pamunkey people) and burned down the colony’s capital at Jamestown, there was little or nothing that London could

Simón Bolívar, their liberator, suggested an answer as early as 1815: there would never be, he acknowledged, a United States of Latin America.86 One reason was geography. It might be easier to rule an empire from its seaports than from its interior, but this didn’t prepare a nation to rule itself: the internal barriers of climate, topography, habit

What eventually did stop Pompey was a rival, in the shape of Julius Caesar, a member of an old patrician family, with a political programme in the radical tradition of the Gracchi and eventually with ambitions that led directly to one-man rule.

In 60 BCE, two years after he had returned to Rome, Pompey was frustrated that the senate had not yet formally ratified his eastern settlement, instead procrastinating by confirming it piece by piece, not en bloc. And, as any general then had to do, he was looking for land on which to settle his ex-soldiers.

It was part of the early myth of Venice that her policies were not directed by individuals but by some sort of corporate awareness of the eternal needs of the Republic. Niccolò Piccinino is said to have remarked on one occasion that he would like to serve Venice ‘because while princes are mortal, the Republic will never die’.

Pompey was a radical and ambitious rule breaker who had already flouted most of the conventions of Roman politics that traditionalists were increasingly trying to insist on. The son of a ‘new man’, he had risen to military prominence by exploiting the disruption of the 80s BCE. When still in his twenties, he had put together three legions from amon