Sublime

There were also historical figures before Pompey whose prominence had come into conflict with the traditional power structure of the state. Marius and Sulla are obvious examples. But more than a hundred years before them, despite, or because of, his series of tremendous victories, Scipio Africanus had spent the end of his life in virtual exile, aft

Pompey the Great

It was only when Scipio Aemilianus had cut the town off from the sea, and so from its access to supplies, that after two years of siege operations the Romans managed to starve the enemy into submission and storm the place.

In 133 BCE, the votes for the next year’s tribunes were slowly being delivered on the Capitoline Hill when the posse invaded. A battle followed, in which Tiberius was bludgeoned to death with a chair leg. The man behind the lynch mob was his cousin Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio, an ex-consul and the head of one of the main groups of Roman

CHAPTER ONE · CICERO’S FINEST HOUR SPQR: 63 BCE

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

Cicero versus Catiline

Cicero versus Catiline