After some mopping-up operations, Pompey marched south to deal with a civil war in Palestine and visited the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. He dreamed of advancing Roman arms to the Red Sea, but when the news of Mithridates’ death reached him he moved from military to organizational matters. His task was to reorder the eastern empire in such a way that its long-term security was assured. His settlement of the eastern provinces was so well judged that it was to remain in place mostly unchanged until the next century. A chain of directly governed Roman provinces was established along the Mediterranean seaboard, stretching from Pontus in the Black Sea to Syria in the south. Their eastern frontiers were protected by a series of quasi-independent kingdoms which were allowed to manage their internal affairs without interference but whose foreign policy was in Roman hands.
Pompey was only forty-four years old, but it must have seemed to him that there was little left in life for him to do. AS soon as he landed at Brundisium he disbanded his forces, much to everyone’s relief. The sight of the famous general traveling unarmed and in the company of only a few friends, “as if he were coming back from a foreign holiday” (as Plutarch put it), made a huge impression on public opinion. On his leisurely journey along the Via Appia to Rome, where he arrived in February, large crowds came out to watch him pass by.
He felt no need to establish a military autocracy, as some had feared, for he was self-evidently the first man in Rome. But the Senate, envious of his preeminence, could not see that he was at heart a conservative and had no desire for monarchical powers. In any case, if he did ever come under threat, he knew that he had the public support, as well as the financial resources, to raise a new army.
Pompey had two main aims in mind. The first was to persuade the Senate to ratify his eastern settlement, and the second was to arrange for a land-distribution law, which would grant farms to his veterans. His attempted deployment of Metellus Nepos showed that he foresaw trouble and, without making his views entirely clear, he positioned himself alongside the populares in order to gain leverage over the Senate.
Cicero saw an opening. AS a distinguished backbencher in the Senate, he had influence rather than power, but he was still in a position to guide change. His aim as ever was to get the constitution to work better. This could be achieved only by persuading the different interest groups—the aristocracy with its stranglehold over the Senate, the equites with their commercial concerns and the People (and that meant, to all intents and purposes, the urban masses)—to work together more cooperatively. At present things were badly out of balance. The populares were constantly on the attack and the optimates refused, blindly, to have anything to do with them.
If Cicero could only find a way of drawing Pompey towards the conservative cause and detaching him from the radicals, the ship of state might return to an even keel. This would mean gaining the general’s confidence. The going was more difficult than he expected. Cicero sent Pompey a long self-congratulatory letter about his Consulship during the general’s journey home but received only a perfunctory reply. Cicero’s boastfulness irritated Pompey and, more to the point, he knew that the orator had no real power base.
Cicero saw he was making little progress and began to lose heart. On January 25 he gave Atticus a telling description of Pompey’s character: “He professes the highest regard for me and makes a parade of warm affection, praising on the surface while below it, well, not so far below that it’s difficult to see, he’s jealous. Awkward, tortuous, politically paltry, shabby, timid, disingenuous—but I shall go into more detail on another occasion.”
In fact, Pompey was privately considering a rapprochement with the Senate. He hinted at his intentions by divorcing his wife, Mucia. Whatever personal reasons there were for this (Plutarch tells us that she was widely whispered to have been unfaithful), it was a political act; for the two Metelli, her half-brothers, were prominent populares. To make sure that everyone understood the message that he was thinking of shifting his ground in the direction of the optimates, Pompey opened negotiations for the hand of Cato’s niece. However, the Senate’s unyielding and self-appointed conscience dismissed the idea out of hand, calling the offer a kind of bribery. This left Pompey awkwardly placed, having abandoned one faction and been rebuffed by the other. His return to civilian life was off to a bad start.
“Life out of uniform can have the dangerous effect of weakening the reputation of famous generals,” Plutarch noted in his biography of Pompey. “They are poorly adapted to the equality of democratic politics. Such men claim the same precedence in civilian life that they enjoy on the battlefield.… So when people find a man with a brilliant military record playing an active part in public life they undermine and humiliate him. But if he renounces and withdraws from politics, they maintain his reputation and ability and no longer envy him.”
The trouble was that Pompey was a poor political tactician and an uninspiring public speaker. He found the grubby business of politicking in the Forum distasteful and embarrassing. He tended not to express his intentions clearly and was criticized for being misleading or even hypocritical. Proud of his achievements, he wanted to receive without having to ask and had no real idea how to handle the Senate. Crassus remained jealous of him and did little to be helpful. Only Caesar seemed happy to give him any assistance, but his Praetorship was now over and he would soon be leaving for a governorship in Spain. He was as ever hugely in debt and creditors delayed his departure. He remarked dryly: “I need 25 million sesterces just to own nothing.”
Soon after his arrival in Rome in early February 61, Pompey addressed a meeting of the Senate. He commented politely but noncommittally on the sacrilege scandal and said in general terms that he approved of the Senate’s decrees. He was given a poor reception. Cicero said the speech was a “frost.” AS for his own contribution to the debate, he was of the opinion that he had given a vintage performance, which, he confessed wryly to Atticus, contained more than a degree of self-parody.
I brought the house down. And why not, on such a theme—the dignity of our order, concord between Senate and equites, unison of Italy, remnants of the conspiracy in their death throes, reduced price of grain, internal peace? You should know by now how I can boom away on such topics. I think you must have caught the reverberations in Epirus [Atticus was on his estate there], and for that reason I won’t dwell on the subject.
For the time being Pompey proceeded with caution. He decided to leave his bid to secure ratification of his provincial settlement and land for his soldiers until the following year. In an effort to improve his chances, he laid out large sums of money to ensure the election as Consul of his supporter, Lucius Afranius, an unimpressive man who was known for little more than being a good dancer. (This probably meant that he performed publicly on the stage, an unrespectable activity for an upper-class Roman citizen.)
In the autumn of 61 Pompey finally celebrated his Triumph. A Triumph was a victory procession awarded to generals after important campaigns. It was the most splendid ceremony in the Roman calendar. Pompey was celebrating not just victory over Mithridates and his campaigns in Armenia, Syria and Arabia, but also his subjugation of the Mediterranean pirates, and two days were set aside: September 28 and, his birthday, September 29.
Temporary stands were set up in the Forum and at the city’s racecourses. Crowds of people, all wearing white clothes, filled them and any other vantage point they could find along the processional route. All the temples were opened to the public and were filled with flowers and incense. Lictors and other attendants did their best to hold onlookers back and keep the streets open and clear.