Pompey’s New Order in the Mediterranean East (67–61 BCE)

This book provides a collaborative reassessment of Pompey’s campaigns in the Greek East, the ensuing political settlement, and the consequences they had in Rome and in Italy. An international group of scholars offers a fresh reconsideration of a dossier that has received much attention over the centuries, albeit usually through the somewhat limiting (if crucially informative) prism of Greek and Latin textual sources. By adopting a more capacious approach, encompassing traditions that found room in Jewish, Byzantine, and Syriac authors, and providing new discussions of the epigraphical and numismatic evidence, this volume brings into sharper focus the ambition and significance of Pompey’s intervention. The long-term engagement of the Roman commander in the region emerges as a moment that had profound implications to the history of the Roman empire, marked a controversial turning point in internal politics, and set the Roman presence in the Eastern Mediterranean on a new footing. It was the opening act of a new season of Roman geopolitics that would go on to shape the longer-term trajectory of the empire.