Pompey

His wife Metella shared his wishes, and together they persuaded Pompey to divorce Antistia and marry Aemilia, the step-daughter of Sulla, whom Metella had borne to Scaurus, and who was living with a husband already and was with child by him at this time.[*](Cf. the Sulla, xxxiii. 3. This was in 82 B.C. With a similar purpose Sulla tried to make Julius Caesar part with his wife, but Caesar refused (cf. Plutarch’s Caesar, i. 1).) This marriage was therefore characteristic of a tyranny, and befitted the needs of Sulla rather than the nature and habits of Pompey, Aemilia being given to him in marriage when she was with child by another man,

and Antistia being driven away from him in dishonour, and in piteous plight too, since she had lately been deprived of her father because of her husband (for Antistius had been killed in the senate-house[*](Earlier in the same year, 82 B.C., by order of the younger Marius, one of the consuls (Appian, Bell. Civ. i. 88).) because he was thought to be a partisan of Sulla for Pompey’s sake), and her mother, on beholding these indignities, had taken her own life. This calamity was added to the tragedy of that second marriage, and it was not the only one, indeed, since Aemilia had scarcely entered Pompey’s house before she succumbed to the pains of childbirth.

After this, word was brought to Sulla that Perpenna was making himself master of Sicily and furnishing a refuge in that island for the survivors of the opposite faction[*](The Marian party.), that Carbo was hovering in those waters with a fleet, that Domitius had forced an entry into Africa, and that many other exiled men of note were thronging to those parts, all, in fact, who had succeeded in escaping his proscriptions. Against these men Pompey was sent with a large force.