Fall of the Roman Republic (Penguin Classics) by Plutarch

Author:Plutarch
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780140449341
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2006-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

26. So for the time being the assembly was adjourned. When the day came for voting on the law, Pompey went quietly out of the city into the country. There he was informed that the law had been passed and he came back into the city by night so as to avoid the envy that would be occasioned by crowds of people coming out to meet him and congratulate him. When it was day he appeared in public and offered a sacrifice. An assembly was held for him and at this he arranged to have given him still greater powers than those which had been voted to him already. In fact his forces were practically doubled. Five hundred ships were manned for him and an army was raised consisting of 120,000 regular infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Twenty-four men who had been in command of armies or held the office of praetor were chosen by him out of the senate to act as his lieutenants, and in addition he had two quaestors. There was now a sudden drop in all the prices of foodstuffs and this enabled the delighted people to say that the very name of Pompey had put an end to the war.

Pompey, however, went on with his task. He divided the Mediterranean and the adjacent coasts into thirteen separate areas each of which was entrusted to a commander with a fixed number of ships.57 This dispersal of his forces throughout the sea enabled him to surround entire fleets of pirate ships which he hunted down and brought into harbour. Others managed to slip off on their own or in small detachments and from all directions hurried back as it were to their hive in Cilicia. Pompey with his sixty best ships proposed to sail against them himself. But he did not set out against them until he had entirely cleared of pirates the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Libyan Sea and the seas about Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily. All this was done in the space of forty days and was the result of his own tireless energy and the enthusiastic support which he received from his subordinate officers.

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