Pompey the Great Born: Rome's Supreme Commander

Pompey the Great conquered vast territories from Spain to Syria, reorganizing the eastern Mediterranean under Roman authority and earning three triumphs before the age of forty-five. Born Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus in 106 BC, he entered Roman politics as a military prodigy, raising private legions to support the dictator Sulla during the civil wars of the 80s BC. His campaigns against Marian holdouts in Sicily and North Africa earned his first triumph at twenty-five, an honor traditionally reserved for senior magistrates who had held the consulship. He cleared the Mediterranean of pirates in a single summer campaign in 67 BC, securing the grain supply that fed Rome's million inhabitants, and then conquered the Seleucid remnants in Syria, reorganized the eastern provinces, and captured Jerusalem in 63 BC, walking into the Temple's Holy of Holies and shocking the Jewish world. His eastern settlement created the administrative framework that Rome used to govern the region for the next four centuries. His alliance with Julius Caesar and Marcus Crassus in the First Triumvirate briefly stabilized the collapsing Republic, with Pompey marrying Caesar's daughter Julia to seal the arrangement. Julia's death in 54 BC and Crassus's death at Carrhae in 53 BC destroyed the balance that had kept the triumvirs from fighting each other. The civil war between Pompey and Caesar that followed was a contest between the two most powerful men in the Roman world. Pompey lost the decisive battle at Pharsalus in 48 BC and fled to Egypt, where Ptolemy XIII's advisors murdered him on the beach as he stepped ashore. Caesar reportedly wept when presented with his rival's severed head.