Imperium

consequent semipaternal attachment to Frugi. Nevertheless, I do remember Cicero snapping back that whatever Pompey’s faults, no one disputed that he was a brilliant soldier, and that once he had been awarded his special command and had raised his troops and put to sea, he had wiped out the pirate threat in only forty-nine days. And I also recall her crushing retort, that if the pirates really had been swept from the sea in seven weeks, perhaps they had not been quite the menace that Cicero and his friends had made them out to be in the first place! At that point, I managed to slip out of the room and retreat to my little cubicle, so the rest was lost to me. But the mood in the house during the following days was as fragile as Neopolitan glass.
    “You see how hard-pressed I am?” Cicero complained to me the next morning, rubbing his forehead with his knuckles. “There is no respite for me anywhere, either in my business or my leisure.”
    As for Terentia, she became increasingly preoccupied with her supposed barrenness and took to praying daily at the Temple of the Good Goddess on the Aventine Hill, where harmless snakes roamed freely in the precincts to encourage fertility and no man was allowed to set eyes upon the inner sanctum. I also heard from her maid that she had set up a small shrine to Juno in her bedroom.
    Secretly, I believe Cicero shared Terentia’s opinion of Pompey. There was something suspicious as well as glorious about the speed of his victory (“organized at the end of winter,” as Cicero put it, “started at the beginning of spring, and finished by the middle of the summer”) which made one wonder whether the whole enterprise could not have been handled perfectly well by a commander appointed in the normal way. Still, there was no denying his success. The pirates had been rolled up like a carpet, driven from the waters of Sicily and Africa eastward, through the Illyrian Sea to Achaia, and then purged from the whole of Greece. Finally, they had been trapped by Pompey himself in their last great stronghold, Coracesium, in Cilicia, and in a huge battle on sea and land, ten thousand had been killed and four hundred vessels destroyed. Another twenty thousand had been captured. But rather than have them crucified as no doubt Crassus would have done, Pompey had ordered the pirates to be resettled inland with their wives and families, in the depopulated towns of Greece and Asia Minor—one of which he renamed, with characteristic modesty, Pompeiopolis. All this he did without reference to the Senate.
    Cicero followed his patron’s fantastic progress with mixed feelings (“‘Pompeiopolis!’ Dear gods, the vulgarity of it!”), not least because he knew that the more swollen with success Pompey became, the longer the shadow he would cast over his own career. Meticulous planning and overwhelming numerical superiority: these were Pompey’s favorite tactics, both on the battlefield and in Rome, and as soon as phase one of his campaign—the destruction of the pirates—was completed, phase two began in the Forum, when Gabinius started agitating to have the command of the Eastern legions stripped from Lucullus and awarded to Pompey. He used the same trick as before, employing his powers as tribune to summon witnesses to the rostra, who gave the people a sorry picture of the war against Mithradates. Some of the legions, unpaid for years, had simply refused to leave their winter camp. The poverty of these ordinary fighting men Gabinius contrasted with the immense wealth of their aristocratic commander, who had shipped back so much booty from the campaign that he had bought an entire hill just outside the gates of Rome and was building a great palace there, with all the state rooms named after the gods. Gabinius subpoened Lucullus’s architects and had them brought to the rostra, where he forced them to show to the people all their plans and models. Lucullus’s name from that time on became a synonym for outrageous luxury, and the angry citizens burned his effigy in the Forum.
    In December, Gabinius and Cornelius stood down as tribunes, and a new creature of Pompey’s, the tribune-elect, Caius Manilius, took over the safeguarding of his interests in the popular assemblies. He immediately proposed a law granting command of the war against Mithradates to Pompey, along with the government of the provinces of Asia, Cilicia, and Bithynia—the latter two held by Lucullus. Any thin hopes that Cicero