ABSTRACT
The historical figure of Sertorius, despite his minor importance in comparison with the other protagonists of the late-republican bella civilia, has not ceased to be of interest to modern historiography. This interest has certainly never been free of controversy centred on the acceptance or not of the judgement of Sertorius given more than a century ago by the great Mommsen. According to the German Nobel winner, the Roman general would have been ‘one of the great men, perhaps the greatest of all that Rome had produced, and one who in more fortunate circumstances could perhaps have become the regenerator of his country’.1 This enthusiastic evaluation was contested even in its day by his countryman Ihne.2 The polemic rests on deciding whether what lay behind his actions was a real political design for the unstable res publica of the day after the bellum Marsicum or only a desperate fight for survival by an able and astute warlord, who lacked a political cause to serve with his sword or to enrich himself by after the final disaster of the Porta Collina.
