The Tragedy of Pompey the Great

Pompey had declared in the Senate that he had only to stamp his foot for soldiers to spring up all over Italy against Caesar who, having conquered Gaul, is advancing to the River Rubicon.

Pompey remembers the time when he sided with Sulla to save Rome from the blood-letting of a former civil war and is reluctant to plunge the city back into such chaos.

Instead he plans to withdraw to Macedonia with the navy that he commands and leave Caesar to secure his rear first by dealing with hostile legions in Spain.

When his assassination onshore is witnessed by those watching, the captain orders the anchor cable cut in haste and they sail away singing wryly of man's necessary submission to fate.

Masefield chose his subject after long research into the circumstances and personalities involved in Caesar's civil war and the extinction of the Roman Republic.

[5] Spotting its ambivalence of purpose, Wyndham Lewis commented on the play in the year of its publication that the author "makes Pompey a sort of Tolstoyan or neo-Christian hero".

Who but an English poet would have ended The Tragedy of Pompey the Great with a chantey to the tune of Hanging Johnny?”[7] The same hesitation about its effectiveness was expressed by another critic with similar scepticism.

At the close of Act II.1, the four centurions marching off with the body of Flaccus take as the hopeful theme of their chant that, having lived nobly, "it is most grand to die".