The rise of the dynasts in the period after Sulla, the extraordinary commands granted to Pompey by the lex Gabinia against the pirates in 67 BC and the lex Manilia against Mithridates in 66 BC and Pompey's settlement of the East, the wealth and ambition of Crassus, the politics of the consular decade at Rome including the Catilinarian Conspiracy of 63 BC and the rise of Caesar, and the Senate's short-sighted refusal to ratify Pompey's eastern settlement, to grant land to his veterans and to relieve Crassus's publicani, the blunder that drove the three men into a coalition

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to explain how, in the two decades after Sulla's death in 78 BC, a new kind of leader (the "dynast") rose above the ordinary rules of the Republic. You need to know the two extraordinary commands that made Pompey pre-eminent, the lex Gabinia against the pirates in 67 BC and the lex Manilia against Mithridates in 66 BC, and the settlement of the East that followed; the vast wealth and ambition of Crassus; the crises at Rome while Pompey was away, above all Cicero's consulship and the Catilinarian Conspiracy of 63 BC; the emergence of Caesar; and, finally, how the Senate's short-sighted refusal to ratify Pompey's settlement, reward his veterans and relieve Crassus's tax-farmers drove three rivals into the coalition that would break the Republic. Write it as analysis, causation and significance, not just a chronicle.

The answer

The dynasts inherit Sulla's Republic (the 70s BC)

Sulla died in 78 BC having tried to restore the Senate's supremacy by weakening the tribunes and fixing the machinery of office-holding. Within a decade his settlement was unravelling, and the men who unravelled it were his own former lieutenants.

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey) had won illegal commands as a young man under Sulla and had earned the title "Magnus" (the Great). In the 70s he fought Sertorius in Spain; Marcus Licinius Crassus crushed the slave revolt of Spartacus in Italy in 71 BC. In 70 BC the two rivals held the consulship together and, courting popular favour, restored the powers of the tribunate that Sulla had stripped away, the very instrument through which their own extraordinary commands would soon be voted.

The key structural point for your essays: the Republic's constitution rested on offices that were annual (one year), collegiate (shared with a colleague) and answerable to the Senate. A "dynast" is a leader whose personal power, wealth and army loyalty outgrew those limits. The story of 78 to 42 BC is the story of the constitution failing to contain such men.

Pompey's extraordinary commands: the lex Gabinia (67 BC)

By the 60s BC, piracy had made the Mediterranean unsafe, threatening Rome's grain supply. In 67 BC the tribune Aulus Gabinius proposed a radical solution: a single commander with sweeping powers to clear the whole sea.

The lex Gabinia gave Pompey an imperium over the entire Mediterranean and its coasts up to about 50 miles inland, for three years, with enormous resources. By Plutarch's figures (Pompey 25-26) this meant around 500 ships, tens of thousands of troops, large funds and about two dozen legates of senatorial rank to command sectors. Leading optimates, Quintus Lutatius Catulus and Quintus Hortensius among them, opposed it bitterly, warning against concentrating so much power in one man, but the People voted it through.

Pompey vindicated the gamble. Dividing the sea into zones and sweeping systematically from west to east, he cleared the western Mediterranean in about 40 days and the whole sea within roughly three months, treating the surrendered pirates with unusual leniency by resettling them. The command's success made the constitutional objection look pedantic and set a precedent: the People could vote one man a command of unprecedented scale.

The lex Manilia and the settlement of the East (66 to 62 BC)

The following year, in 66 BC, the tribune Gaius Manilius proposed transferring the long-running war against Mithridates VI of Pontus (and his ally Tigranes of Armenia) from Lucius Licinius Lucullus, whose troops had mutinied, to Pompey. Cicero, then praetor, spoke for the bill in his speech De Imperio Cn. Pompei, his first major intervention in high politics.

Pompey drove Mithridates from his kingdom; the old king fled to the Crimea and died there around 63 BC after his son Pharnaces revolted. Pompey then reorganised the whole East on his own authority: he annexed Syria (ending the Seleucid dynasty) in 64 BC, intervened in Judaea and took Jerusalem in 63 BC, created the province of Bithynia-Pontus, and settled a ring of client kingdoms loyal to himself personally. The wealth was staggering: by Plutarch's figures (illustrative, Pompey 45) the conquests raised Rome's public revenues sharply and filled the treasury, while also enriching Pompey and binding the East to him as its patron.

The wealth and ambition of Crassus

If Pompey embodied military glory, Marcus Licinius Crassus embodied money and influence. Reputedly the richest man in Rome, he had built his fortune under Sulla by buying the confiscated estates of the proscribed at knock-down prices, a source Plutarch says damaged his reputation (Crassus 2). He expanded it through Roman property (famously buying burning and adjacent buildings cheaply through his own gangs), silver mines, trained slaves and wide money-lending.

Crassus used wealth as Pompey used armies: to build obligation. He bankrolled ambitious younger men, above all Caesar, and acted as patron of the company of publicani who held the lucrative tax contract for the province of Asia. His ambition was real but harder to satisfy than Pompey's; he wanted a great military command of his own to match Pompey's glory, a hunger that would eventually take him to his death at Carrhae in 53 BC. In the 60s his rivalry with Pompey was one of the axes around which Roman politics turned.

Rome while Pompey was away: the Catilinarian Conspiracy (63 BC)

The consular decade at Rome was dominated by debt, ambition and the fear of what Pompey would do on his return. The crisis came in 63 BC, the consulship of Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Lucius Sergius Catilina (Catiline), a patrician twice defeated for the consulship, gathered discontented nobles, veterans and debtors on a platform of tabulae novae (cancellation of debts) and planned an armed uprising. Cicero exposed the plot, denouncing Catiline in the Senate (the First Catilinarian oration) and driving him from Rome to his army in Etruria. When envoys of the Gallic Allobroges provided written evidence, five leading conspirators, including Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura, were arrested.

On 5 December 63 BC the Senate debated their fate, a scene Sallust dramatises in his Bellum Catilinae. Caesar, praetor-elect, argued against executing citizens without trial and proposed life imprisonment; Cato the Younger demanded death and carried the house. Under the emergency senatus consultum ultimum the five were executed. Catiline died in battle at Pistoria early in 62 BC. Cicero was hailed as the saviour of the state (later pater patriae), but the execution of citizens without trial would haunt him and be used against him.

The rise of Caesar

The affair also lit up a rising figure. Gaius Julius Caesar, heavily in debt to Crassus, had climbed the ladder by spectacular expenditure and popular gestures. In 63 BC he won election as pontifex maximus, Rome's chief priest, over the senior optimate Catulus, a startling coup for a relatively junior man. In the Catilinarian debate his plea for restraint marked him out as a leader of the popularis tendency and drew suspicion, voiced by Cato, that he sympathised with the conspirators. He went on to the praetorship in 62 BC and a governorship in Further Spain, returning in 60 BC hungry for the consulship, a triumph and a great command. Caesar is the man the whole period is building towards.

The Senate's blunder: refusing the dynasts

The decisive turn came not from the dynasts' ambition but from the Senate's response to it. When Pompey landed at Brundisium in 62 BC he did the constitutional thing: he disbanded his army rather than march on Rome. He then asked the Senate for two reasonable things, to ratify his eastern settlement (his acta) as a single package, and to grant land to his loyal veterans.

Led by Cato, Lucullus and Metellus Celer, the Senate refused both and stalled for over a year, insisting on picking his arrangements apart item by item. At the same time Cato blocked the tax relief Crassus sought for the publicani who had overbid on the Asian contract, and the optimates obstructed Caesar's wish to stand for the consulship in absentia while claiming a triumph. Three men with very different, even conflicting, aims had each been snubbed by the same body. In 60 BC they combined. That coalition, the arrangement modern historians call the First Triumvirate, is the subject of the next dot point; the point to grasp here is that senatorial short-sightedness manufactured it. Had the Senate simply absorbed Pompey graciously, it might never have formed.

The second figure sets out the causal heart of the topic: three separate refusals converging on one coalition.

How to read a source on this topic

Sources on this period fall into three groups, and good answers weigh them differently.

First, the contemporary voices. Cicero is our richest source, through his speeches (De Imperio Cn. Pompei, the Catilinarians) and his letters, but he is deeply partisan: he magnified his own role in 63 BC and disliked the concentration of power in Pompey and Caesar. Sallust's Bellum Catilinae is near-contemporary and vivid, but it is a moralising monograph shaped by his thesis that Rome decayed once the fear of a foreign enemy (metus hostilis) was removed, and by his own pro-Caesarian, anti-nobility outlook. Both are indispensable and both need handling for bias.

Second, the later narrative historians: Plutarch (Lives of Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, Cicero and Cato, 2nd century AD), Appian (Civil Wars) and Cassius Dio (early 3rd century AD). They preserve detail lost elsewhere but wrote centuries later, drawing on earlier accounts, and Plutarch in particular shapes events to illuminate character. Treat their figures (troop numbers, sums of money) as illustrative unless corroborated.

Third, the material and documentary evidence: coins advertising Pompey's triumph, honorific inscriptions from eastern cities, the physical record of the settlements. These show the image a dynast projected and how provincials responded, but they are self-presentation, not neutral fact. The habit to build is always the same: state the content, then ask who made it, when and why, then judge its usefulness for the specific question, and always corroborate one type of source against another.

Historians

Sallust (Bellum Catilinae, c. 42-41 BC) reads the era as one of moral collapse: with Carthage gone, the disciplining fear of an enemy vanished and ambitio and avaritia corrupted the governing class, with Catiline the sharpest symptom. His value is contemporary insight; his limit is a moralising, partisan frame.

Ronald Syme (The Roman Revolution, 1939) argues that behind the constitutional facade, Roman politics was the competition of a narrow oligarchy and its factions, and that the late Republic saw power pass to individuals commanding armies, wealth and personal loyalty, exactly the dynasts of this period.

Erich Gruen (The Last Generation of the Roman Republic, 1974) resists reading the 60s BC as the inevitable slide to collapse. He stresses that traditional institutions still worked, that the extraordinary commands were lawful acts of the sovereign People, and that the Republic's fall was contingent, not predestined.

Robin Seager (Pompey the Great, 2002) argues that Pompey did not aim at monarchy but at recognised pre-eminence and honour within the constitution, which makes the Senate's refusal to accommodate him after 62 BC look like an avoidable political error rather than a defence against a would-be king.