In 67 BC the Roman people handed Pompey something no man had held before: three years of authority over every province within fifty miles of the Mediterranean, the money to spend as he judged best, and the right to appoint his own commanders. Piracy had grown bad enough to threaten the grain supply, and Rome had run out of patience. He carved the sea into districts, put fifteen legates in charge of them, took the grain route under his own hand and swept from west to east. The western Mediterranean was clear in forty days. The entire war was finished in three months. And the reason it went that fast is the part usually left out — he had a reputation for clemency, so most of his opponents surrendered without fighting at all, and he settled them on land in cities the Mithridatic wars had wrecked rather than crucifying them. It was the most competent thing any Roman did that decade. It was also the precedent — one man, one command, one sea — that a younger rival would put to entirely different use.

King & Country give him the gilded cuirass and heavy red cloak of a man who celebrated three triumphs, the last on his forty-fifth birthday. He is unavoidably half of a pair: display him with Gaius Julius Caesar, the son-in-law who became the enemy, and the story runs from alliance to Pharsalus in 48 BC, where Pompey's thirty-eight thousand men and seven thousand horse were broken by Caesar's twenty-two thousand. He was murdered in Egypt weeks later by a Roman officer who had once served under him. The Death of Caesar completes that sequence, and General Marcus Agrippa finishes the family off — it was Agrippa who destroyed the fleet of Pompey's son Sextus. A two-figure diorama with a table between them tells the whole Republic's ending.

Model: ROM040 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set