Word: pompey
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Herod was of desert stock, an Idumean, traditionally pagan in the Jewish world. He became king of Judea principally through the intrigues of his father, Antipater, who had been active in fomenting civil war in Palestine in the hope of securing Roman intervention. At that time Pompey, on a triumphal march from Armenia back to Rome, stopped to add to his laurels by putting Judea under Roman domination, left Antipater the real power behind a dummy king. Herod was thus always the representative of Rome in a remote and hostile country, first won recognition when he cleaned out rebellious patriots...
...Sulla's contemptuous pardon he was wise enough not to return till after Sulla's death. While Caesar was cultivating the arts of a courtier in Asia (Author Bentley has him companioning a pervert out of policy, implies he was not really that way himself), his rival Pompey was winning victories all over the place and becoming the darling of Rome...
When Rome was no longer too hot to hold him Caesar soon established himself there as one of the shrewdest schemers of a conspiratorial day. He fished to such good purpose in Rome's troubled waters that eventually he caught the great Pompey and the millionaire Crassus in his net, became with them one of the three rulers of the Roman world. Then he went off to make his military reputation in Gaul and Britain. Returning at the head of a victorious army, he gave the signal for civil war when he crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome...
...middleaged. Caesar's most constant mistress was Servilia, Brutus' mother, and of her Author Bentley contrives to make a somehow noble Roman matron, though she was twice married and continually unfaithful to both husbands. The other chief figures in the story appear as conventional history reports them: Pompey, a handsome, courageous, slow-minded soldier; Cicero a henpecked, opportunistic politician with a gift...
...startled the reader into attention with this splash, Author Pratt then backs water, slowly at first. Caesar won his campaigns because he planned by campaigns, not by battles; he had phenomenal luck ("nobody could fight Caesar without making fatal mistakes"). And by the time he came to grips with Pompey for the mastery of the civilized world Caesar had become a pretty good soldier after all. "He made himself a great general by sheer thought." Now his tactics were "impromptu" but "dazzling." Readers closed the book feeling not unlike rubes whom another high-binding barker had fooled again...