ABSTRACT
While Lucullus was fighting in Asia, the Conservative party continued to lose ground in Italy. The successes of its general in the East caused no improvement in its own position at home, for everyone realized that they were due solely to the personal initiative of Lucullus and not to the policy of the Senate. Even aristocrats began to turn towards ideas of democratic reform; and one of the most active and prominent young men of the party was even now preparing to secede from its ranks. In the second half of the year 71, when he returned to Rome from the Spanish War, Pompey was no longer what he had been at his departure, a young protégé of Sulla, for whom everyone predicted a brilliant career. By his victory over Sertorius, he had become, at the age of thirty-six, one of the great personages of the Republic, a man who, although he had never held any public office, and was not even a Senator, could take equal rank beside the most influential and respected of his contemporaries. No member of the younger generation, not even Crassus, had had greater chances offered him than Pompey. But the rapidity of his rise, as he could not help being aware, had excited much jealousy among the ruling caste. On his return from Spain he felt his anomalous situation was becoming precarious; and he resolved to secure himself once and for all by standing in the ordinary course as a candidate for public office. Unfortunately, it is sometimes just as difficult to find the way out of a privileged position as to find the way in. After commanding armies as a Proconsul and receiving the title of Imperator, Pompey could not very well begin his career over again, as the laws demanded, with the Quæstorship and the Ædileship. He decided, therefore, to concentrate his efforts on the highest office of all, and to appear as a candidate for the Consulship in the year 70, thus returning into the ordinary groove through an irregularity greater than all that had preceded; for he had neither the age nor any of the other qualifications requisite for becoming Consul.
