- Synchronizing Times II: West and East
through southern Gaul; a small island of territory in North Africa; and, in the east,
Macedonia, Greece, and the province of ‘Asia’ (the western coast of Turkey and its
hinterland).”^96 Gruen has shown in detail just how attenuated and hands-off
Roman involvement in the East had continued to be for more than a century after
the battle of Magnesia in 189 b.c.e., when the Scipios broke the back of the
Seleucids.^97 This entire situation was transformed by Pompey, who divided up ter-
ritories, organized kingdoms, and incorporated provinces throughout the Eastern
world, redrawing the map of the Roman Empire in the process and increasing
provincial tax revenues by 70 percent.^98 Above all, he brought the East home to
Rome in a way that had never happened before, as Kuttner has shown in her fine
study of Pompey’s theater complex, dedicated in 55 b.c.e., and stuffed with art
objects, jewels, animals, plants, and trees from the Orient.^99 According to the elder
Pliny, Pompey told the people in a contiothat he had assumed command of the
province of Asia when it was on the outside edge of the Roman world, and handed
it back to his fatherland as a central part of it (Asiam ultimam prouinciarum accepisse
eandemque mediam patriae reddidisse, HN7.99).^100 The most compelling explicit
testimony to this frame of mind comes at the end of Appian’s Mithridatic Wars
(114 – 18), where Appian spells out in great detail the incorporation of the East into
the imperiumfor the first time.
Appian also calls attention to the universal reach of Pompey’s power in the 60s,
from Spain to Syria, above all with his unparalleled command against the pirates,
which gave him imperiumover the whole Mediterranean.^101 Pliny likewise alludes
to this universalism, not least with his reference to Alexander the Great as the pro-
totype, and also to Hercules and Dionysus, the paradigms for “the two options for
world conquest” in West or East.^102 As Clarke puts it, in her comprehensive dis-
cussion of the universalism of the 60s, “it was with Pompey that the idea of Roman
rule stretching right across the known world took on a coherent form.”^103 Similarly,
Gruen has pointed out that with Pompey we see for the first time a Roman imper-
ator boasting about extending the territory of the Roman Empire, as he claimed to
have “pushed the frontiers of the empire to the boundaries of the earth.”^104
When Pliny refers to Pompey’s role as a world conqueror, he reveals that it was
not possible to speak of Pompey in this role without also speaking of Caesar (HN
7.99):
si quis e contrario simili modo uelit percensere Caesaris res, qui maior illo
apparuit, totum profecto terrarum orbem enumeret, quod infinitum esse
conueniet.