Pompey Reorganises the East — The Settlement of 63 BCE
Pompey spent four years reorganising the eastern Mediterranean and doubled Rome's revenues doing it. He had been given an extraordinary command against the pirates in 67 BC — the whole Mediterranean and fifty miles inland, with 500 ships and unprecedented authority — and cleared them in about three months by sweeping the sea in sectors from west to east and then settling the survivors inland as farmers rather than crucifying them. He was then given the war against Mithridates of Pontus, which Lucullus had been winning and had lost control of through mutiny. Mithridates was beaten within a year and killed himself in the Crimea in 63 BC. What Pompey did afterwards is the substantial part. He annexed Pontus, Bithynia, Cilicia and Syria — ending the Seleucid dynasty after two and a half centuries by simply declining to restore it — created a ring of client kingdoms in Armenia, Cappadocia, Galatia and Judaea, and founded or refounded some forty cities. He intervened in a Jewish civil war and took Jerusalem, entering the Holy of Holies out of curiosity and touching nothing, which offended everyone and was reported for centuries. The arrangement he imposed lasted, with adjustments, for the next several hundred years. The senate then refused to ratify his settlement wholesale or to grant land to his veterans, which drove him into the alliance with Caesar and Crassus that destroyed the Republic. The scale of what he added is worth stating plainly. Plutarch reports that Pompey raised the state's annual revenues from 50 million to 135 million denarii, and the eastern provinces remained the wealthiest part of the empire for the next six centuries. He returned to Italy in 62 BC and disbanded his army at Brundisium, which everyone had expected him not to do.
- Year: 63 BCE
- Category: Political
