The Roman Chronicles - Titans - Pompey

Pompey The Great

He cleared the Mediterranean of pirates in eighty-nine days. He defeated the king who had fought Rome for twenty-five years. He reorganised the East, founded twenty-nine cities, and returned to Rome with enough gold to fund the treasury for a decade. For thirty years, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus was the greatest man in the world.

Then Julius Caesar crossed a river at night — and everything Pompey had built began to unravel.

POMPEY THE GREAT is the story of the man Caesar defeated. Not just the defeat — the thirty-six years before it. The brilliant campaigns. The extraordinary commands. The private man inside the public colossus. And the specific, traceable sequence of decisions — each one reasonable, each one fatal — by which the greatest general of his age became the man who died in a small boat before he could reach the shore.

Told in multiple voices — Pompey himself; Sulla, who recognised him as a mirror-image type and was unsettled by the resemblance; Caesar, who saw the gap in Pompey's position before Pompey did; Julia, the one person who understood both men clearly and could not save either; Cato, the wary ally who trusted Pompey more than he trusted Caesar and knew that was not the same as trusting him; and Lucius Septimius, the soldier who was in the boat — this is history at the level where decisions are actually made: inside the mind of the person making them.

The history you think you know. The people you don't.

For readers of Tom Holland, Anthony Everitt, and Adrian Goldsworthy.

Book 6 in The Titan Series — Roman Chronicles by Theo van Stratum, PhD. Each volume stands alone. No prior knowledge of Roman history required.