What if Pompey had defeated Caesar?

Great Debates
1

After Julius Caesar defeated Pompey the Great in civil war, he (quite unconstutionally) had the Senate appoint him Dictator in Perpetuity (Dictator perpetuo), strongly implying that he had no intention of stepping down and retiring to private life as Sulla (his predecessor in unconstitutional dictatorship) had done. Maybe he would have retired after all, if he had not been assassinated. At any rate, his nephew and adopted son Octavian – Augustus – after defeating Marc Antony, followed the precedent, clung to power for life, and established what amounted to a quasi-hereditary monarchy that ruled Rome until the Empire fell. The Republic was dead in all but form.

What if Pompey had won? Would he have done more or less the same, or would he have restored/preserved the Republic?

2

IIRC, Pompey was a puppet of the Cato/Cicero/et al group. Pompey came from rural origins and felt very insecure about his elevated station in life as the darling war hero. Caesar had the lineage, the looks, and the mind. I think Pompey would have done whatever his manipulators would have wanted him to do.

3

But, what would that have been?

4

The Republican forces didn’t have any real overarching goal, other than the republic itself. They just wanted to make sure Caesar didn’t seize power and declare himself king.

5

Cicero and Pompeius had saved the libera res publica once before when they fought against Catilina’s conspiracy; still, Cicero was banned by the Senate (Caesar was one of the driving forces) because of his involvement in the killing of Roman citizens and though he returned two years later, Pompeius and Caesar managed to keep him away from the center of power.

If Pompeius had won the confrontation with Caesar, Cicero, who was politically much more astute than Pompeius, might have regained his position and would have been a force for the republic that might have kept it intact long enough to change the course of history significantly.

At least, it’s hard to see how Marcus Antonius could have become the major power after Caesar’s assassination without Caesar’s victory in the civil war; it’s more likely that he would have been banned or killed, just like his friend.

And Octavian’s rapid rise might not have happened without Caesar’s help – and even if, the republic wouldn’t have been as weak as he found it.

And yet, given the number of attempts to finish the republic, it might not have lasted for long anyway. But Rome was still alive and very much kicking during that time, so it would have stayed the major power in the Mediterranean regardless of its type of government.

6

Pompey dressing?

7

What really stopped the civil wars wasn’t Caesar’s victory, but Octavian’s.

And so the Republic would have torn itself apart in some fashion until some other dictator assumed power. And since that person probably wouldn’t have the political skills of Octavian, they probably wouldn’t have lasted long until ousted by another leader, and another and another.

And without Octavian establishing the imperial system it’s likely that the various provinces of the Roman empire would have been lost and the Roman empire would have dissolved instead of lasting another 500/1500 years.

Octavian would a footnote to history. But the problem with the “great man” theory of history is that we can easily imagine one of these great men such as Octavian languishing in obscurity because his uncle lost a war. So what about all the other great men in history who never became famous because of Octavian?

It’s possible that some other person might have established a long-lasting system of order rather than the empire just collapsing into warring provinces.

8

Cicero’s origins were more modest than Pompey’s and he was more senstive about it.

Cato probably never would have been a leader. He was the eternal opposition figure. His role was to tell people like Sulla or Cataline or Crassus or Caesar or Pompey what they were doing wrong not to take over and do thing himself. He would never make the kinds of compromises that are necessary to work with people and get things done.

9

To answer the OP, I don’t think Pompey would have been able to found a long-term Empire like the Caesars did. Pompey himself wanted to rule and be admired but he didn’t have the drive to remake Roman society. And his sons, Gnaeus and Sextus, were no Octavians. A Pompeian dynasty probably would have died out in a few decades and Rome would be back where it had been - chaotic Republican rule waiting for another strong man to take over.

10

In hindsight, it’s easy to see that the republic wasn’t constructed in a way that ensured its survival; on the other hand, it’s also only hindsight that makes the switch to the principate seem inevitable. The republic had averted the transition into a dictatorship time and again – and had also failed to do so more than once.

But no one before Octavian had managed to establish a dynasty and if you consider how many of Augustus’ potential heirs died or proved to be unfit for the role, it’s not unthinkable that the senate could have regained its power and avoided dynastic rule; after all, officially, the republic hadn’t been abolished, the senate was still powerful and the public stage of able men and no outer enemy forced the ruling families to stand united behind one leader.

11

I don’t know that that’s true. Cato had succeeded in most of the leadership roles he had found himself in. He was a successful quaestor, when he was elected plebeian tribune he came to dominate that body, as senator, he could generally get that body to vote his way and succeeded in splitting Pompey off his alliance with Caesar, and he was remarkably popular as governor of Cyprus.

So I don’t know that he “never would have been a leader”. At the time of the civil war, he already was a leader.

12

Isaac Asimov has an essay called “Pompey and Circumstance” about how Pompey had been very lucky up until he invaded Judea, after which he was very unlucky.

Don’t mess with the Holy of Holies.

13

See, I agree that Octavian’s principate wasn’t inevitable. What was inevitable was an end to republican rule. But imagine that Marc Anthony or Pompey had taken control. Would they have been able to maintain decades of peace and prosperity? Almost certainly not. Their autocratic rule would have been short and tempestuous, and they would have been overthrown eventually by some other autocrat, and so on until the empire itself was in tatters.

A key part of Octavian’s rule was insisting that he wasn’t a dictator, the republic was still intact, and he wasn’t an autocratic ruler but merely an influential leader. Of course this was fiction. Would Marc Anthony or Pompey have tried to rule this way? It seems impossible. And that would have doomed not just the republic, but the empire itself.

14

Et tu, Bluto?

15

Lemur866, I think our positions are pretty close, I’m just less sure than you, when it comes to the inevitability of the “end to republican rule”. Sure, it had to end sooner or later, just like Rome couldn’t possibly avoid its eventual decline, no power ever stays on top, but I don’t think the republic was inevitably done already.

Yes, neither Marcus Antonius, alright: Marc Anthony (do you know why Roman names are anglicized?) nor Pompey had the abilities to restore long-lasting order to the Roman civilization.

But if Pompey had won, Marc Anthony wouldn’t have been an alternate candidate for leadership anyway, because he would have followed Caesar either into exile or death.

There was, however, at least one alternative to Pompey: Cicero. His two major blunders have damaged his image as a political leader in posterity; but in our scenario, the first one wouldn’t have been considered a blunder, because this time, he chose the winning side – and his second blunder during his campaign against Marc Anthony wouldn’t have happened at all.

And if he had campaigned against Pompey, his chances for success would have been higher, because he wouldn’t have had lost prestige (being one of the losers of the civil war) and he would have had an adversary who had proven time and again that politics wasn’t his strong point.

I think, Cicero could have emerged as the political leader after Caesar’s defeat and his career as well as his work tell us that he would have known what to do to strengthen the republic.

I don’t know how persistent his order would have been, it surely wouldn’t have reached the stability of Augustus’ rule, but he might have revitalized the republic enough to add decades to its life.

Finally, another attempt to achieve autarchy would have been successful – but the result would have been a different Rome than the one of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

Unlike you, I don’t think that a couple more decades of republican rule would have doomed the Roman sphere of influence. Time and again, the leading families had shown that they would close ranks as soon as Rome itself was in danger.

I don’t see any basis for the assumption that they had already lost the will and skills to defend their place at the top of the Mediterranean world against an outer enemy.

Besides, who could that have been? Too late for the Gauls, too early for the Germans, the Parthians too far away …

16

So, nobody thinks Rome could have survived much longer in its political form as before the Civil Wars – i.e., an aristocratic republic internally, while maintaining imperial rule over subject provinces and tributary states?

Why not?

17

I’m not thinking so much of an outer enemy, but rather of governors/generals taking personal control over various provinces, as happened over and over during the civil wars. Octavian put a stop to all that by ending the civil wars. But without an end to the political chaos the provinces become the personal property of various potentates. In real history the governors always seemed to get dragged back into empire-wide politics either by backing one faction or another, or somebody looking for glory deciding that conquering a rebel general was just the thing to build prestige.

So in real-life rebellious generals always seemed to either either join a losing faction and get crushed, or join a winning faction and the rebellion is retroactively authorized. But you had instances of provinces becoming private fiefdoms for years and years. Just extend that farther, and when provinces are de facto independent for decades suddenly there isn’t a Roman empire any more.

18

True, but let us not forget that Octavian was one of the major players in the escalation of the civil war. The prolonged war against the Pompeyan side, then against Marc Anthony and Octavian’s old allies weakened Rome for a considerable period in which provinces could drift away.

If Pompey had won, Marc Anthony might have fought on too, but I doubt that he could have prolonged the war for long. If he had lost early, governors/generals would have had less time to establish themselves as independent rulers.

I also don’t think that the Rome of Pompey/Cato/Cicero/Brutus wouldn’t have attacked forcefully all renegade provinces to restore the old rule.

19

Heh. Sounds a bit like the end of the Ottoman Empire.

20

At the end of the second century BC, a Roman politician/general named Gaius Marius reformed the Roman army. Up to that point, it had been largely a volunteer army made up of people with property…the volunteer had to provide his own weapons and prove that he had enough money and property to support himself on campaign. When there was a military campaign or crisis, the consuls would call for volunteers, and then when the campaign was over, the volunteers would go home and back to their lives.

Marius changed this in an attempt to increase available manpower, by creating a professional army opening the army up to the urban poor. The idea was that the soldiers would be paid, and serve for a fixed term of 16 years. When that time was up, soldiers colonies would be set up on public land, and the land divided up and given to the retiring troops as farms.

One of the effects of that was that the soldiers became loyal to the generals who led them rather than to Rome itself. This meant that generals could use their loyal troops to seize power for themselves, and that’s what happened, first Marius himself, and then Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and then Pompey, and then Julius Caesar.