We know how he and his son perished there, each of them probably avoiding the last extremity of misery to a Roman--that of falling into the hands of a barbarian enemy--by destroying himself.

Than the life of Crassus nothing could be more contemptible; than the death nothing more pitiable.

"For Pompeius," says Mommsen, "such a coalition was certainly a political suicide." As events turned out it became so, because Caesar was the stronger man of the two; but it is intelligible that at that time Pompey should have felt that he could not lord it over the Senate, as he wished to do, without aid from the democratic party.

He had no well-defined views, but he wished to be the first man in Rome.

He regarded himself as still greatly superior to Caesar, who as yet had been no more than Praetor, and at this time was being balked of his triumph because he could not at one and the same moment be in the city, as candidate for the Consulship, and out of the city waiting for his triumph.