Even so, his insult had been the more wounding. Events were to confirm his boast that he had broken the backs of both Mithridates and Tigranes, and in Pompey’s eagerness to fix on his prey there was indeed something of the scavenger smelling blood upon the wind. For the last time Mithridates was swept from his kingdom. As usual he vanished into the mountains, but even though he evaded his pursuers yet again, all he had left to menace them now was a phantom, his name. Tigranes, recognising overwhelming force when he saw it, and having no wish to take to the mountains himself, hurried to accommodate himself to Pompey’s dispensation. Arriving at the Roman camp, he was forced to dismount and hand over his sword. Proceeding on foot to where Pompey was waiting, he removed his royal diadem, then knelt in his gold and purple to grovel in the dust. Before he could prostrate himself, however, Pompey had taken his hands and raised him back up to his feet. Mildly, he invited the King to sit by his side. Then, in a polite tone, he began to set out the peace settlement. Armenia was to become a Roman dependency. Tigranes was to hand over his son as a hostage. In return he would be permitted to retain his throne, but not much else. The wretched King hurriedly assented to the terms. To celebrate, Pompey then invited Tigranes to his field tent to dine. This was the very model of a Roman general’s behaviour: after the ruthless assertion of the Republic’s might, the gracious gifting of scraps from the table.
Pompey’s genius for posing had found its perfect stage in the East. Acutely conscious that the eye of history was upon him, the great man rarely did anything without angling his profile towards it. As Alexander had done, he had even brought a tame historian with him, to chronicle every act of heroism, every magnanimous deed. He fought campaigns as he handled kings, with half an eye to providing sensational copy. It was not enough to thrash recalcitrant Orientals. He had to tangle with poisonous snakes, hunt after Amazons, push eastwards towards the great ocean that encircled the world. And all the while, uninhibited by finicky cavils from the Senate, he could fuss with territories as though they were counters on a gaming board, rearranging them as he pleased, handing out crowns, abolishing thrones, the still-boyish master of the fate of millions.
Not that Pompey ever forgot that he was a magistrate of the Roman people. After all, a citizen was only as great as the glory he brought to the Republic. Pompey’s proudest boast would be that ‘he had found Asia on the rim of Rome’s possessions, and left it in the centre’.15 His humbling of kings, his disposal of kingdoms, his far-flung campaigns at the edge of the world, all had this achievement as their strategic goal. When Pompey raised Tigranes from the dust, he did so as the stern protector of the Republic’s interests. The scene would otherwise have lacked its heroic glow. The flummery of kingship was all very well for impressing barbarians, but its only true value was to serve as a backdrop to the free-born virtues of Rome. No wonder that Pompey’s apeing of Alexander, however much it might provoke the contemptuous snorts of rivals like Crassus, was so relished by the vast majority of his fellow citizens. They could instinctively recognise it for what it was: not a display of impatience with the Republic, but, on the contrary, an affirmation of its superior dignity and worth.
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 signalled by a slave with a crown. Spartacus’ communism had been all the more unique for the fact 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 that existed between kingship and revolution, between the uppitiness of Oriental princelings and the resentments of the dispossessed. Having stamped out the threat of piracy, it was now his aim to stamp out similar threats wherever they smouldered throughout the East. One realm in particular appeared to invite his intervention. For decades Syria had served as a breeding ground for anarchy and violent visions of apocalypse. During the first great slave revolt against Roman rule, in Sicily back in 135, the leader of the revolt had even called his followers ‘Syrians’ and himself ‘Antiochus’, the latter a title filled with resonance. Kings of that name had once ruled a great empire, a successor to that of Alexander himself, stretching at its height to the gates of India. Those glory days were long gone. Tolerated by the Republic precisely because it was weak, all that was left to the dynasty was its heartland of Syria. Even that, in 83, had been stolen by Tigranes, and it was only Lucullus, resuscitating what had appeared beyond all hope of resurrection, who had placed an Antiochus back on the Syrian throne. Pompey, glad of the chance to reverse anything that his predecessor had done, pointedly refused to recognise the new king. But personal spite, while it may have added relish to this decision, did not explain it. Antiochus was both too enfeebled and too dangerous to be permitted to survive. His kingdom was in chaos, a focal point for social revolution, while the glamour of his name continued to cast its hypnotic and subversive spell. If Syria were left as it was, a festering sore on the flank of Rome’s possessions, then there was the constant danger that its poison might infect a new Tigranes, a new generation of pirates or rebellious slaves. This, to Pompey, was intolerable. Accordingly, in the summer of 64, he occupied Antioch, the capital of Syria. Antiochus, the thirteenth king of that name to have held the throne, fled into the desert, where he was ignominiously murdered by an Arab chieftain. The wraith of his kingdom was dispatched to its grave at last.
In its place a new empire was rising. Rather than the Senate’s traditional isolationism, Pompey embodied a new doctrine. Wherever Roman business interests were threatened, the Republic would intervene – and, if need be, impose direct rule. What had once been a toehold in the East was now to be a great tract of provinces. Beyond them was to stretch an even broader crescent of client states. All were to be docile and obedient, and all were to pay a regular tribute. This, henceforward, was what the pax Romana was to mean. Pompey, who had won his proconsulship with the backing of the financial lobby, had no intention of repeating Lucullus’ error by treading on its toes. But while he was happy to identify himself with its interests, he was also careful not to appear its tool. The age of unbridled exploitation was over. Bureaucracy was no longer to be uninhibitedly laissez-faire. In the long run, as even the business lobby had come to recognise, this was a policy that promised just as many pickings as before. It was certainly in no one’s interest to kill off geese that were laying such splendid golden eggs.