by Joseph Broadworth

Created on: June 23, 2010   Last Updated: June 24, 2010

Rather than going methodically through the decades and centuries in which a myriad of factors occurred and evolved that significantly weakened the Roman Empire and led to its collapse, as some of the other very good articles under this title have attempted, I would like to concentrate specifically on one enormous conflict between two men that set the Roman World on the path to Empire and the inescapable collapse that resulted from it. This is a conflict of two comparably evenly matched Roman statesmen and generals, one of whom you'll immediately recognize (the winner) and the other of whom you probably will not (the loser). In my opinion this conflict and the final battle on a large plain in Greece could very well have been the single most important event in the direction of Western Civilization that followed from it.

In 106 B.C. a child was born in the Roman Republic (Picenum) who was named Gnaeus Pompeius, whom history would call Pompeius Magnus, and the english-speaking world would call Pompey the Great. His father, Strabo, was a Roman general who took the side of L. Cornelius Sulla in his conflict with Gaius Marius. This conflict was essentially the first of the Roman Civil Wars. When Strabo died, the young Pompey (about 21 years old), took control of his father's forces and on his own initiative raised more. When Sulla landed in Italy after his eastern wars to fight the forces of Marius for control of the Roman World, Pompey and other young Roman military commanders flocked to his banner (not out of any noble principle but because they thought he would win). The young Pompey outmaneuvered and outfought Marius' allies and joined with Sulla's armies already marching on Rome. Sulla was impressed with the young man and called him 'Magnus', or 'the Great'. This was the start of Pompey's exceptional rise. He was over the years given more and more extraordinary commands by the Roman Senate. We will leave his story for a while at this point.

In 100 B.C. a child was born into the aristocratic 'Julian' clan in Rome. As he started his slow rise in Roman politics he would be known in full as Gaius Julius Caesar. Young Caesar was a  late bloomer, suffering from what was called at that time 'the falling sickness', or epilepsy. Nonetheless, other Roman movers and shakers soon noticed his astonishing intelligence and ability to manipulate almost everyone he met. As Pompey marched his vast armies over the eastern Mediterranean world (and being the first Roman to

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