Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, 106-47 BC

Shakespeare portrays - with gentle comedy - Pompey as the font of all military wisdom. Cicero - who generally supported Pompey but whose private letters are venomous about his failings - could still claim, when civil war began, that he would die for him. When the poet Lucan wrote his great epic of the Civil Wars in the age of Nero, Pompey had become the Republican hero and Caesar, the villain.