one of the
fire or mystery that made Alexander seem to his contemporaries as
beautiful as a god. His manners were grave and dignified. He gave all
who saw him an impression of his importance. Pompeius had a very strong
sense of his own importance. The thing he was most afraid of was of
being laughed at. When he suspected that any one was doing this, he lost
his temper.

[Illustration: POMPEIUS]

Pompeius belonged to a family old and honourable enough, though
plebeian, to make the senators at last accept him as one of themselves,
the more readily that he had acquired immense wealth in the
proscriptions. At the time of the civil war he was on the side of
Marius, and closely associated with him, while Marius and Cinna were in
power in Rome. His first wife Antistia was the daughter of a friend of
Cinna's. When Sulla landed, however, Pompeius soon saw which way things
were going. He collected an army and marched to join Sulla. Although he
was only twenty-three at the time, Sulla hailed him as one of the most
important of his supporters. He suggested to him that he should put away
his young wife Antistia and marry his own daughter-in-law. To this
Pompeius agreed, although Antistia loved him and was in the deepest
distress, since her father had been killed in the proscriptions;
moreover, her mother, when she heard how Pompeius intended to treat her
daughter, laid violent hands upon herself. In the proscriptions Pompeius
acquired so much wealth that within a few years he was one of the
richest men in Rome. His popularity was great and he could afford to
keep it up by giving splendid shows and presents to the people.

His wealth, his quick success, his great popularity filled the senators
with awe. They had a constant fear that he was to be the next Sulla.
They listened with respect to all that Pompeius said, though he was a
dull speaker; and regarded him as the first general of the day, though
he had really done nothing to deserve that title. But he was always
lucky in his campaigns, and again and again had the good fortune to be
made commander just at the stage when the fruits of a long struggle,
carried on by others, were ready to be gathered. In the means by which
he achieved success Pompeius was not over scrupulous. His want of
feeling in the matter of Antistia was only one sign of this. The same
kind of callousness was shown in the way he secured the final defeat of
Sertorius, not by action in the field but by a plot.