Posté le Mercredi 12 septembre 2007 par Akanin
« He began by giving the latest details of the pirate attack on Ostia: 19 consular triremes destroyed, a couple of hundred men killed, grain warehouses torched, two praetors seized in their official robes. A ransom demand for their release had arrived in Rome yesterday. ‘But for my part’, said Pompey, ‘I do not believe we should negotiate with such people, as it will encourage them in their criminal acts’. (Everyone nodded in agreement). The raid on Ostia, he continued, was a turning point in the history of Rome.
This was not an isolated accident, but merely the most daring in a long line of such outrages. Where would be struck next? What Rome was facing was a threat very different from that posed by a conventional enemy. These pirates were a new type of ruthless foe, with no government to represent them and no treaties to bind them. Their bases were not confined to a single state. They had no unified system of command. They were a worldwide pestilence, a parasite which needed to be stamped out, otherwise Rome – despite her overwhelming military superiority – would never again know security or peace. The existing national security system, of giving men of consular rank a single command of limited duration in an individual theatre, was clearly inadequate to the challenge.’Long before Ostia, I had been devoting much careful study to this problem’, declared Pompey, ‘and I believe this unique enemy demand a unique response. Now is our opportunity’. He clapped his hands and a pair of slaves carried in a large map of the Mediterranean, which they set up on a stand beside him. His audience leaned forwards to get a better look, for they could see mysterious lines had been drawn vertically across both sea and land. ‘The basis of our strategy from now on must be to combine the military and the political spheres’, said Pompey. ‘We hit them with everything’. He took up a pointer and rapped it on the painted board. ‘I propose we divide the Mediterranean into 15 zones, from the Pillars of Hercules here in the west to the waters of Egypt and Syria here in the east, each zone to have its own legate, whose task will be to scour his area clean of pirates and then to make treaties with the local rulers to ensure the brigands’ vessels never return to their waters. All captured pirates are to be handed over to Roman jurisdiction. Any ruler who refuses to cooperate will be regarded as Rome’s enemy. Those who are not with us are against us. These fifteen legates will all report to one supreme commander, who will have absolute authority over all the mainland for a distance of 50 miles from sea. I shall be that commander.’
There was a long silence. It was Cicero who spoke first. ‘Your plan is certainly a bold one, Pompey, although some might consider it a disproportionate response to the loss of 19 triremes. You do realize that such a concentration of power in a single pair of hands has never been proposed in the entire history of the Republic?’
‘As a matter of fact, I do realize that’, replied Pompey. He tried to keep a straight face, but in the end he could not stop it breaking into a broad grin, and quickly everyone was laughing, apart from Cicero, who looked as if his world had just fallen apart – which in a sense it had, because this was, as he put it afterwards, a plan for the domination of the world by one man, nothing less, and he had few doubts where it would lead. ‘Perhaps I should have walked out there and then’, he mused to me later on the journey home.”
Robert Harris, extrait de Imperium
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2 réponses à “Bush en Pompée”
13 sept 07 à 01:53
César en Dick Cheney :
« Hortensius had just about reached his peroration when the figure of Caesar rose from that obscure region at the back of the chamber, close to the door, which had once been occupied by Cicero, and asked Hortensius to give way. The respectful silence in which the great advocate had been heard fractured immediately, and one has to admit that it was brave of Caesar to take him on in such an atmosphere. Caesar stood his ground until at last he could be heard, and then started to speak, in his clear, compelling, remorseless way. There was nothing un-Roman, he said, about seeking to defeat pirates, who were the scum of the sea; what was un-Roman was to will the end of a thing but not the means. If the Republic functioned as perferctly as Hortensius said it did, why had the menace been allowed to grow? And now that it was grown monstrous, how was it to be defeated? He had himself been captured by pirates a few years back on his way to Rhodes, and held to ransom, and when at last he had been released, he had gone back and hunted down every last man of his kidnappers, and carried out the promise he had made to them when he was their prisoner – had seen to it that the scroundrels were crucified! ‘That, Hortensius, is the Roman way to deal with piracy – and that is what the lex Gabinia will enable us to do! »
On voit que César n’était pas sensible au syndrome de Stockholm !
12 sept 07 à 13:26
Hortensius en Ted Kennedy :
« It seemed that Pompey’s over-reaching ambition had brought Hortensius back into the arena revitalised, and listening to him one of just how formidable he could be on a big set-piece occasion such as this. He never ranted or stooped to vulgarity, but eloquently restated the old republican: that power must always be divided, hedged around with limitations, and renewed by annual votes, and that while he had nothing personally against Pompey – indeed felt that Pompey was more worthy of supreme command than any other man in the state – it was a dangerous, un-Roman precedent that would be set by the lex Gabinia, and ancient liberties were not to be flung aside merely because of some passing scare about pirates. Cicero was shifting in his place and I could not help but reflect that this was exactly the speech which he would have made if he had been free to speak his mind. »
