When Crassus and Pompey returned from this campaign they did not, as the Senate wished and law required, disband or disarm their troops at the gates. Camping outside the walls, they asked permission to stand for the consulate without entering the city—again a violation of precedent; in addition Pompey demanded land for his soldiers and a triumph for himself. The Senate refused, hoping to play one general against the other. But Crassus and Pompey joined hands, made a sudden alliance with the populares and the business class, and by generous bribery won election as consuls for 70 B.C. The magnates entered the partnership for two immediate ends: to recapture power in the juries that tried them, and to replace Lucullus—who had ruled the Roman East with unprofitable integrity—by a man of their own class and views. In Pompey they recognized their man.
Pompey was now thirty-five, and already the veteran of many campaigns. Born of a rich equestrian family, he had won universal admiration by his courage and temperance, and his skill in every branch of sport and war. He had cleared Sicily and Africa of Sulla’s enemies, and by his victories and his pride had earned from the humorous dictator the cognomen Magnus, the Great. He had achieved a triumph almost before a beard.33 He was so handsome that the courtesan Flora declared she could never part from him without a bite.34 He was sensitive and shy, and blushed when he had to address a public gathering, but in battle he was in these days impetuously brave; in later life timidity and corpulence burdened his generalship, and he hesitated till lost. His mind had neither brilliance nor depth; his policies were made for him, not by him—first by the politicians of the populares, then by the Senatorial oligarchy. His great wealth lifted him above the coarser temptations of politics; amid the selfishness and corruption of his time he shone by his patriotism and his integrity; he seems to have sincerely sought the public good as well as his own. His outstanding fault was vanity. His early successes led him to overrate his abilities, and he wondered why Rome waited so long to make him in everything but name a king.
The two favorites of Sulla, now consuls together, devoted themselves to overthrowing the Sullan constitution. Pompey and Crassus paid their debt to the populares by passing a bill that restored all the power of the tribunes. They consolidated their alliance with business by directing Lucullus to give the publicans full charge of tax collections in the East; and they supported legislation that required juries to be drawn equally from the Senate, the equestrian class, and the tribunes of the Treasury. Crassus had to wait fifteen years for his reward—the privilege of drinking gold in Asia; Pompey received his in 67, when the Assembly voted him almost limitless authority to proceed against the pirates of Cilicia. Once Rhodes had kept the Aegean free of such marauders; but Rhodes, humiliated and impoverished by Rome and Delos, could no longer maintain the fleet required for such a service; and the landed aristocracy that controlled the Senate had no keen interest in making the channels of maritime commerce secure. Merchants and plebs felt the results more sharply: trade became almost impossible in the Aegean, even in the central Mediterranean; and imports of grain fell so rapidly that the price of wheat at Rome rose to twenty sesterces per modius, or three dollars a peck. The pirates flaunted their success with gilded masts, purple sails, and silver-plated oars on their thousand ships; they took and held 400 coastal towns, plundered temples in Samothrace, Samos, Epidaurus, Argos, Leucas, and Actium, kidnaped Roman officials, and assailed even the shores of Apulia and Etruria.
To meet this situation Pompey’s friend Gabinius proposed a bill giving him for three years absolute control of all Roman fleets, and all persons within fifty miles of any Mediterranean shore. Every senator but Caesar opposed this extraordinary measure, but the Assembly passed it with enthusiasm, voted Pompey an army of 125,000 men and a navy of 500 vessels, and ordered the Treasury to place 144,000,000 sesterces at his disposal. In effect the bill deposed the Senate, ended the Sullan restoration, and established a provisional monarchy as a prelude and lesson to Caesar. The outcome strengthened the precedent. The very day after Pompey’s appointment the price of wheat began to fall. Within three months he accomplished his task-captured the pirate ships, took their strongholds, executed their leaders—and yet without abusing his unusual authority. Commerce took heart and sailed again, and a river of cereals flowed into Rome.
While Pompey was still in Cilicia, his friend Manilius offered the Assembly a bill transferring to him full command of the armies and provinces then (66) under Lucullus, and prolonging the powers conferred upon him by the Gabinian Law. The Senate resisted, but the merchants and moneylenders gave strong support to the proposal. Pompey, they hoped, would be less lenient than Lucullus to their Asiatic debtors; he would restore the tax collections to the publicans; he would conquer not only Bithynia and Pontus, but Cappadocia, Syria, and Judea; and these rich fields would be thrown open to Roman trade and finance under the protection of Roman arms. A “new man,” Marcus Tullius Cicero, who had been elected praetor for that year with the aid of the business class, spoke “For the Manilian Law,” and attacked the Senatorial oligarchy with a rash eloquence unheard in Rome since the Gracchi, and with a candor shocking in a politician:
The whole system of credit and finance which is carried on here at Rome is inextricably bound up with the revenues of the Asiatic provinces. If these revenues are destroyed, our system of credit will crash. … If some lose their entire fortunes they will drag many more down with them. Save the state from such a calamity. . . . Prosecute with all your energies the war against Mithridates, by which the glory of the Roman name, the safety of our allies, our most valuable revenues, and the fortunes of innumerable citizens will be effectively preserved.35
The measure was readily passed by the Assembly. The plebs cared little for the fortunes of the financiers; but it rejoiced in having found, through the issuance of extraordinary powers to a general, a means of annulling the Sullan legislation and deposing its ancient enemy, the Senate. From that moment the days of the Republic were numbered. The Roman revolution, helped by the oratory of its greatest foe, had taken another step toward Caesar.