Pompey the Great by Lee Frantanuono

Pompey the Great: The Roman Alexander

by Lee Fratantuono

Pen & Sword Books 2024

Classics professor Lee Frantanuono opens his new book Pompey the Great: The Roman Alexander by citing his formative reading of Peter Greenhalgh's 2-volume Pompey biography from half a century ago, Roman Alexander and Republican Prince, and then as now, the titling provokes confusion as to why Greenhalgh would do it and why Frantanuono would do it again. Why this itch to equate Gnaeus Pompeius, born in 106 BC, with Alexander of Macedon, born in 356 BC? True, both had domineering fathers and took to soldiering while young, and true, both became for a short time rulers over their homelands. But aren't there far more differences than similarities? Alexander was handsome; Pompey was pudgy. Alexander conducted full-scale warfare in the East; Pompey's victories there were largely the result of bribery and subterfuge. Alexander was a political naif; Pompey proved to be every bit as adept at politics as the thoroughly political creatures he affected to despise. Again, it's true that both come to us through history trailing that title, “The Great,” but even here, the comparison largely fails, since Pompey bestowed the title on himself and insisted that others use it.

So why this apparently persistent urge to imply that Pompey was somehow the Roman equivalent of Alexander? Greenhalgh and Frantanuono are hardly the first historians to feel that urge: Plutarch felt it, and Frantanuono ably dissects the reasons and the reasoning that applied 2000 years ago. What might have begun as familiar ribbing of young Pompey's egomania certainly must have felt more grounded as the young man moved out into the world and started enjoying military success, particularly against the Mediterranean pirates and also against King Mithridates of Pontus (also a “Great,” but who's counting?), but the echo feels devaluing, somehow. It seems to want to draw attention away from Pompey's very real historical distinctiveness, which is an odd thing for a Pompey biographer to do.

Fortunately, although Alexander the Great hovers over Pompey the Great: The Roman Alexander like an unwanted dinner guest, Frantanuono concentrates on that historical distinctiveness, and he builds from the ground up, founding his book on the ancient sources (his book's End Notes are a full feast of citation, evaluation, and speculation, and his “select” Bibliography will certainly be enough to satisfy the subsequently curious, touching on everything from John Carter's magnificent edition of The Civil Wars of Julius Caesar to the inevitable Ronald Syme's The Roman Revolution to Kathryn Welch's excellent 2012 study Magnus Pius. And despite his book's title, Frantanuono spends a pleasing amount of his time on Pompey's political rather than military maneuvering.

Some of the book's writing is lazy. Things look fine “on paper” or happen at a “fever pitch” more often than should, and there's a sloppiness to the editing here that ought not to be true of an obviously significant work. Frantanuono is good at clarifying the tangle of Pompey's life in Roman politics, but simply copyediting failures can make the reading experience choppy:

Now in fairness, the legion had been borrowed, not given; it was always supposed to be turned back to Pompey. The men in it were loyal to Rome first and foremost; they were not supposed to be partisans of either Pompey or Caesar. Such are the idealistic fantasies that fall before [sic] rude awakening. No one could expect the legion to be demanded back now without some sense of Caesar's part that he was being mistreated or at [sic] mistrusted. On the other hand, it was not 'his' legion. Caesar's consistent position would have been that he planned to surrender it when he was finished. Pompey was now being pressured to agree with the senate position that it must come back now.

Frantanuono sees Pompey's greatest significance in these political realms, specifically in their halting transformation into an autocracy:

Our investigation seeks to explore how despite his sorry end with defeat in the Battle of Pharsalus and ignominious assassination the next month in Egypt, Pompey's principal legacy was to provide a blueprint for how to fix the recurring problems that had turned the first century BC into a seemingly interminable cycle of civil conflicts for Rome. Pompey emerges as nothing less than a proto-Augustus, a true princeps who provided the model for another princeps.

(No idea what that “our” is referencing; no co-author is listed for the book – could Frantanuono be pregnant?)

Greenhalgh attempted to divide his two volumes in terms of operative realms, the first mainly military and the second mainly political. Pompey the Great: The Roman Alexander is likewise billed as the first half of a pairing, with Frantanuono declaring his intention to devote the next book not to Pompey, who's as dead as Hector at the conclusion of this volume, but rather to Pompey Junior, Sextus Pompey, who hasn't had a full-dress popular-audience biography since Moses Hadas tried and failed to make him interesting almost a century ago. This plan is so quixotic it's downright charming, and if Frantanuono actually goes through with it, he's to be commended.

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News