How did Pompey die?

From Pharsalus to the sea

Pompey lost the civil war in a single day. In August 48 BC, at Pharsalus in central Greece, he faced Julius Caesar with far more infantry and cavalry: by Caesar’s count, 45,000 men against his own 22,000. Caesar won. A fourth line of veterans, hidden behind his right wing, broke Pompey’s cavalry, and then the whole army gave way. Pompey rode back to his camp and sat in his tent, stunned. When Caesar’s men stormed it, he threw off his general’s cloak and fled (how Caesar got there).

He reached the coast, took ship, and picked up his wife Cornelia and his younger son Sextus on the island of Lesbos. Where now? Parthia was considered and rejected. Egypt looked safer. Pompey had backed the late king, Ptolemy XII, when he lost his throne, and a Roman army had put him back on it. The new king, Ptolemy XIII, a boy of about thirteen, owed Pompey a debt, and Egypt had money, grain and ships.

Who killed Pompey

The boy did not decide. His regents did: the eunuch Pothinus, the general Achillas and the king’s tutor, Theodotus of Chios. Taking Pompey in would make Caesar their enemy; turning him away would make Pompey one. Theodotus offered a third way. Kill him, he said with a smile, since dead men do not bite.

Off Pelusium, at the eastern edge of the Nile delta, a small boat came out to Pompey’s ship. In it sat Achillas and two Romans in Egyptian service: Lucius Septimius, who had once served under Pompey, and a centurion named Salvius. Climbing down, Pompey quoted Sophocles to his wife: whoever goes to a tyrant becomes his slave, even if he goes as a free man. On the way in he read over a speech in Greek he had written for the king. As his freedman Philip helped him to his feet on the beach, Septimius ran him through from behind. Pompey drew his toga over his face and took the blows with only a groan. He was about 58.

From the ship Cornelia saw it all. Her cry carried to the shore as the ships raised anchor and fled. The killers cut off Pompey’s head and left the body naked on the sand. Philip stayed. With an old soldier who had fought under Pompey as a young man, he burned the body on a pyre built from the planks of a rotting fishing boat.

Did Caesar cry over Pompey?

Caesar reached Alexandria a few days later, still chasing his rival. He turned away from the man who brought him Pompey’s head as from someone accursed. When he was handed Pompey’s signet ring, carved with a lion holding a sword, he wept. Pompey’s ashes went to Cornelia, who buried them at his estate in the Alban Hills (what Caesar found in Egypt).

Were the tears real? Caesar was famous for sparing beaten enemies, and Pompey had once been his son-in-law. But the murder also removed his greatest problem without staining his own hands. The poet Lucan, writing about a century later, called the tears false. Neither Pothinus nor Achillas survived the war that followed in Alexandria, and years later Brutus, in Asia, caught Theodotus and had him put to death.

Why “the Great”

Pompey earned his name young. Born in 106 BC, he raised three legions of his own for Sulla at 23, and Sulla greeted him as Magnus, the Great, when he was about 25. Plutarch says his swept-back hair made people think of Alexander’s portraits. He celebrated triumphs over three continents, Africa, Europe and Asia, cleared the pirates from the whole Mediterranean in three months in 67 BC, and redrew the map of the East. In 63 BC he took Jerusalem and walked into the Holy of Holies, though Josephus says he touched none of the Temple’s treasures.

He married Caesar’s daughter Julia and built Rome’s first stone theater. Four years after Pharsalus, Caesar fell under the daggers at the foot of Pompey’s statue, in a hall beside that theater (how Caesar died).