in the year 48 before our era, a few weeks after losing to caesar at pharsalus, pompey the great anchored off the coast of egypt, near pelusium, in the nile delta, and asked the king for asylum. the court deliberated and decided to kill him. plutarch relates that the decisive argument came from theodotus of chios, a hired teacher of rhetoric, and that he capped it with a phrase that has survived twenty centuries: «a dead man does not bite».
the king was ptolemy xiii, and he was a boy. plutarch calls him only «the young king», cassius dio «still a child»; appian is the only one to give a figure, «about thirteen years old», and his father had recovered the throne thanks to rome, with pompey behind it. those who really governed were his entourage: the eunuch pothinus, who ran his affairs, the general achillas and theodotus himself. plutarch reconstructs the council like this. some wanted to send pompey away and others to take him in; theodotus showed that neither course was safe. if they received him, they would have caesar as an enemy and pompey as a master; if they turned him away, pompey would reproach them for driving him off and caesar for forcing him to keep up the chase. the best thing was to send for him and kill him: that way they would please caesar and have nothing to fear from the other. and to this, says plutarch, «he added with a smile, so it is said», the phrase. in greek it is in the singular — νεκρὸς οὐ δάκνει — and it is not the argument that convinces but the tag that seals it.
they sent him a single fishing boat. achillas explained that there were shoals and that the sandy bottom gave too little depth for a trireme. in it were achillas and two romans: salvius, a centurion, and lucius septimius, who years before had been a tribune under pompey himself. septimius stood up and greeted him in latin as imperator. pompey took leave of his wife, cornelia, recited two lines of sophocles — whoever goes to a tyrant becomes his slave, even if he arrives free — and went down into the boat. during the crossing nobody addressed a kind word to him. then he turned to septimius: «i am not mistaken, am i? you were a comrade in arms of mine». septimius only nodded, without saying anything to him.
in the silence, pompey took out a small papyrus roll — plutarch says biblíon mikrón, «a small roll», not paper, which would not reach the mediterranean until the middle ages — with a speech he had written in greek to address ptolemy, and began to go over it. cornelia was watching from the trireme and was beginning to feel reassured on seeing so many of the king’s people gathered on the shore, as if for an honourable welcome. and when pompey took the hand of his freedman philip to get to his feet, septimius ran him through from behind with his sword; then salvius and achillas drew their daggers. pompey covered his face with his toga and bore the blows without saying anything unworthy of himself, with a single groan. appian tells the same scene with another name — the roman in the boat is called sempronius and he is the one who strikes the first blow — and dio calls septimius lucius: the skeleton matches and the details wobble.
he was seen off by a former slave and an old soldier, with wood that nobody wanted.
they cut off his head and threw the naked body out of the boat. philip stayed with it. he washed it in the sea, wrapped it in a tunic of his own and, having nothing else, searched the beach until he found the remains of a fishing boat, old wood, but enough for a pyre. while he was building it an elderly roman came up to him, who had made his first campaigns with pompey, and asked to share in the rite, so as to touch with his own hands and lay out, says plutarch, «the greatest of the roman generals». the ashes later reached cornelia, who buried them at her villa at alba. lucan, in the pharsalia, gives another ending: a quaestor named cordus buries the body and marks the grave. it is poetry, and it is best not mixed with the account.
when caesar reached alexandria, theodotus presented him with the head. plutarch keeps the two gestures carefully apart: from the man who brought him the head caesar turned away as from a murderer; what made him weep was pompey’s signet ring, with a lion holding a sword in its claws. pothinus and achillas died soon after; theodotus escaped, and plutarch relates that years later marcus brutus found him in asia and killed him; appian attributes that death to cassius, who crucified him.
that leaves the date, which has its fine print. velleius paterculus says that pompey died «on the very eve of his birthday», in his fifty-eighth year; plutarch, by contrast, in his life of pompey, has him die at sixty less one and «one day after his birthday». the birthday is given by pliny the elder: pompey celebrated his third triumph on his birthday, the eve of the kalends of october, and in the calendar before caesar september had twenty-nine days — macrobius relates that it was caesar who added the thirtieth —, so the birthday fell on the 29th and the eve is the 28th. modern chronology follows velleius. and even so it is a date in the republican calendar, which in 48 was far out of step with the sun, so much so that caesar had to stretch the year 46 to four hundred and forty-three days to put it back in place. in solar reckoning, that 28 september fell around the end of july.
the close has its nuances too. «three triumphs for the three parts of the world» — the first over africa, the second over europe, the third over asia — is not a neutral description: plutarch presents it as the glory that most exalted him, and it is the formula pompey himself put into circulation. that he received wider commands than any roman before him is true if one speaks of commands, not of territory: the extraordinary powers given him by the gabinian and manilian laws were temporary military imperia, and comparing them with sulla’s dictatorship measures different things. and reading his fall as a lesson about fortune is the frame of plutarch and of lucan, not a conclusion that needs adding. velleius sums it up in his own way: the man who shortly before could find no more lands to conquer found none for his burial.
