and helpless, he was wont to conceal his irresolution and indecision
under a solemn silence, and, when he thought to play a subtle
game, simply to deceive himself with the belief that he was
deceiving others. By his military position and his territorial
connections he acquired almost without any action of his own
a considerable party personally devoted to him, with which
the greatest things might have been accomplished; but Pompeius
was in every respect incapable of leading and keeping together a party,
and, if it still kept together, it did so--in like manner without
his action--through the sheer force of circumstances. In this,
as in other things, he reminds us of Marius; but Marius, with his
nature of boorish roughness and sensuous passion, was still less
intolerable than this most tiresome and most starched of all
artificial great men. His political position was utterly perverse.
He was a Sullan officer and under obligation to stand up for
the restored constitution, and yet again in opposition to Sulla
personally as well as to the whole senatorial government. The gens
of the Pompeii, which had only been named for some sixty years
in the consular lists, had by no means acquired full standing
in the eyes of the aristocracy; even the father of this Pompeius
had occupied a very invidious equivocal position towards
the senate,(10) and he himself had once been in the ranks
of the Cinnans(11)--recollections which were suppressed perhaps,
but not forgotten. The prominent position which Pompeius
acquired for himself under Sulla set him at inward variance
with the aristocracy, quite as much as it brought him into outward
connection with it. Weak-headed as he was, Pompeius was seized
with giddiness on the height of glory which he had climbed
with such dangerous rapidity and ease. Just as if he would himself
ridicule his dry prosaic nature by the parallel with the most