Sextus Pompeius

The son of Pompey the Great cast a long shadow. Acclaimed by the Roman populace in his lifetime, his traditional virtues and military successes put to shame his civil-war rival Octavian. After his death, he was passionately and safely abused by Octavian and Augustan writers as a marginal nuisance, a pirate. The image of a 'second rank' figure has been propagated by scholars into recent times. But a very different story can now be constructed, from the testimony of historians and poets in antiquity – and from the eloquent and long neglected coinage of Sextus Pompeius himself. Here ten studies from an international cast reveal a figure whose actions and image shaped the ethos not just of the civil-war period but of the early Principate.