Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

Every five years a citizen had to register himself there. He also had to declare the name of his wife, the number of his children, his property, and his possessions, from his slaves and ready cash to his wife’s jewels and clothes. The state had the right to know everything, for the Romans believed that even “personal tastes and appetites should be subject to surveillance and review.”

So sensitive was Pompey about his age that he had even arranged for his triumph to start on the day before his birthday—his forty-fifth. Not that this was a detail he chose to broadcast. Sporting the cloak as well as the quiff of Alexander, he had no wish to appear as mutton dressed as lamb. Alexander had famously died young, at the age of thirty-two. Pompey had already spent a whole decade being thirty-four.

Pompey, for instance, swaggering his way around the east, had resented being upstaged by the splendors of Greek architecture, regarding it as an affront to his own prestige and that of Rome. Having looted everything from wine coolers to balsam trees for his triumph, he had rounded off his pilfering by having sketches drawn of the great theater of Mytilene, planning to build a copy of it, “only larger and more magnificent.”