Imperium

command of limited duration in an individual theater, was clearly inadequate to the challenge.
    “Long before Ostia, I had been devoting much careful study to this problem,” declared Pompey, “and I believe this unique enemy demands a unique response. Now is our opportunity.” He clapped his hands and a pair of slaves carried in a large map of the Mediterranean, which they set up on a stand beside him. His audience leaned forward to get a better look, for they could see mysterious lines had been drawn vertically across both sea and land. “The basis of our strategy from now on must be to combine the military and the political spheres,” said Pompey. “We hit them with everything.” He took up a pointer and rapped it on the painted board. “I propose we divide the Mediterranean into fifteen zones, from the Pillars of Hercules here in the west to the waters of Egypt and Syria here in the east, each zone to have its own legate, whose task will be to scour his area clean of pirates and then to make treaties with the local rulers to ensure the brigands’ vessels never return to their waters. All captured pirates are to be handed over to Roman jurisdiction. Any ruler who refuses to cooperate will be regarded as Rome’s enemy. Those who are not with us are against us. These fifteen legates will all report to one supreme commander who will have absolute authority over all the mainland for a distance of fifty miles from the sea. I shall be that commander.”
    There was a long silence. It was Cicero who spoke first. “Your plan is certainly a bold one, Pompey, although some might consider it a disproportionate response to the loss of nineteen triremes. You do realize that such a concentration of power in a single pair of hands has never been proposed in the entire history of the republic?”
    “As a matter of fact, I do realize that,” replied Pompey. He tried to keep a straight face, but in the end he could not stop it breaking into a broad grin, and quickly everyone was laughing, apart from Cicero, who looked as if his world had just fallen apart—which in a sense it had, because this was, as he put it afterwards, a plan for the domination of the world by one man, nothing less, and he had few doubts where it would lead. “Perhaps I should have walked out there and then,” he mused to me later on the journey home. “That is what poor, honest Lucius would have urged me to do. Yet Pompey would still have gone ahead, either with me or without me, and all I would have done is earned his enmity, and that would have put paid to my chances of a praetorship. Everything I do now must be viewed through the prism of that election.”
    And so, of course, he stayed, as the discussion meandered on over the next few hours, from grand military strategy to grubby political tactics. The plan was for Gabinius to place a bill before the Roman people soon after he took office, which would be in about a week, setting up the special command and ordering that it be given to Pompey; then he and Cornelius would dare any of the other tribunes to veto it. (One must remember that in the days of the republic only an assembly of the people had the power to make laws; the Senate’s voice was influential, but not decisive; their task was to implement the people’s will.)
    “What do you say, Cicero?” asked Pompey. “You have been very quiet.”
    “I say that Rome is indeed fortunate,” replied Cicero carefully, “to have a man with such experience and global vision as yourself to call on in her hour of peril. But we must be realistic. There will be huge resistance to this proposal in the Senate. The aristocrats, in particular, will say that it is nothing more than a naked grab for power dressed up as patriotic necessity.”
    “I resent that,” said Pompey.
    “Well, you may resent it all you like, but you will still need to demonstrate that it is not the case,” retorted Cicero, who knew that the surest way to a great man’s confidence, curiously enough, is often to speak harshly back to him, thus conveying an appearance of disinterested candor. “They will also say that this commission to deal with the pirates is simply a stepping-stone to your true objective, which is to replace Lucullus as commander of the Eastern legions.” To that, the great man made no response other than a grunt—he could not, because that really was his true objective. “And finally, they will set about finding a tribune or two of their own, to veto