The History of Rome, vol 5 | Page 6

his
military capacity, without trace of any higher gifts. It was characteristic
of him as a general, as well as in other respects, to set to work with a
caution bordering on timidity, and, if possible, to give the decisive
blow only when he had established an immense superiority over his
opponent. His culture was the average culture of the time; although

entirely a soldier, he did not neglect, when he went to Rhodes, dutifully
to admire, and to make presents to, the rhetoricians there. His integrity
was that of a rich man who manages with discretion his considerable
property inherited and acquired. He did not disdain to make money in
the usual senatorial way, but he was too cold and too rich to incur
special risks, or draw down on himself conspicuous disgrace, on that
account. The vice so much in vogue among his contemporaries, rather
than any virtue of his own, procured for him the
reputation--comparatively, no doubt, well warranted--of integrity and
disinterestedness. His "honest countenance" became almost proverbial,
and even after his death he was esteemed as a worthy and moral man;
he was in fact a good neighbour, who did not join in the revolting
schemes by which the grandees of that age extended the bounds of their
domains through forced sales or measures still worse at the expense of
their humbler neighbours, and in domestic life he displayed attachment
to his wife and children: it redounds moreover to his credit that he was
the first to depart from the barbarous custom of putting to death the
captive kings and generals of the enemy, after they had been exhibited
in triumph. But this did not prevent him from separating from his
beloved wife at the command of his lord and master Sulla, because she
belonged to an outlawed family, nor from ordering with great
composure that men who had stood by him and helped him in times of
difficulty should be executed before his eyes at the nod of the same
master:(9) he was not cruel, thoughhe was reproached with being so,
but--what perhaps was worse-- he was cold and, in good as in evil,
unimpassioned. In the tumult of battle he faced the enemy fearlessly; in
civil life he was a shy man, whose cheek flushed on the slightest
occasion; he spoke in public not without embarrassment, and generally
was angular, stiff, and awkward in intercourse. With all his haughty
obstinacy he was-- as indeed persons ordinarily are, who make a
display of their independence--a pliant tool in the hands of men who
knew how to manage him, especially of his freedmen and clients, by
whom he had no fear of being controlled. For nothing was he less
qualified than for a statesman. Uncertain as to his aims, unskilful in the
choice of his means, alike in little and great matters shortsighted and
helpless, he was wont to conceal his irresolution and indecision under a
solemn silence, and, when he thought to play a subtle game, simply to

deceive himself with the belief that he was deceiving others. By his
military position and his territorial connections he acquired almost
without any action of his own a considerable party personally devoted
to him, with which the greatest things might have been accomplished;
but Pompeius was in every respect incapable of leading and keeping
together a party, and, if it still kept together, it did so--in like manner
without his action--through the sheer force of circumstances. In this, as
in other things, he reminds us of Marius; but Marius, with his nature of
boorish roughness and sensuous passion, was still less intolerable than
this most tiresome and most starched of all artificial great men. His
political position was utterly perverse. He was a Sullan officer and
under obligation to stand up for the restored constitution, and yet again
in opposition to Sulla personally as well as to the whole senatorial
government. The gens of the Pompeii, which had only been named for
some sixty years in the consular lists, had by no means acquired full
standing in the eyes of the aristocracy; even the father of this Pompeius
had occupied a very invidious equivocal position towards the
senate,(10) and he himself had once been in the ranks of the
Cinnans(11)--recollections which were suppressed perhaps, but not
forgotten. The prominent position which Pompeius acquired for
himself under Sulla set him at inward variance with the aristocracy,
quite as much as it brought him into outward connection with it.
Weak-headed as he was, Pompeius was seized with giddiness on the
height of glory which he had climbed with such dangerous rapidity and
ease. Just as if he would himself ridicule his dry prosaic nature by the
parallel with the most poetical of all heroic figures, he began to
compare himself with