ABSTRACT
The surprise attack of the Albanians was the last moment of real danger in the campaign. In the spring of 65 Pompey set out on what turned out to be a triumphal progress through Western Asia, slowly wending his way, gathering spoils as he went, through the great monarchies, the free cities, the maritime republics, the petty theocracies, and the numerous brigand or private communities which had sprung up out of the chaos of the Empire of Alexander. He passed by the legendary scenes of the poetry and mythology of Greece; he visited lands and cities and battlefields whose names had long been familiar to the Western imagination; he contemplated the infinite variety of barbarous nations scattered through Asia between the Caucasus and Arabia, with every diversity of language, custom and religion; he became acquainted with the wonders and the depravity of that ancient industrial and Hellenized Orient which lived by exploiting the barbarians in its service and differed so profoundly from the younger and more buoyant civilization of Italy: its weird and impressive cults compounded of layer upon layer of superstition, its intensive and laborious agriculture, where the soil allowed it, the arts and industries of the famous cities which manufactured the luxuries of the whole of the Mediterranean world: above all, the men and women who lived in these great industrial centres—their labouring population, sober, hard-working and thrifty, yet quick and intelligent and strangely sensitive to the influence of religion: their class of professional intellectuals, philosophers and scientists, still so rare a phenomenon in Italy: and the royal Courts with their vice and luxury, their untold treasures, and the elaborate and striking ceremonial which excited so much curiosity amongst the simple-minded democracy of Italy.
