ote: by Cn. Pompeius;] Most
welcome of all was Cneius Pompeius, welcome not only for his talents,
energy, and popularity, but because he did not come empty-handed. He
had taken service under Cinna, but had been looked on with distrust,
and an action had been brought against him to make him surrender
plunder which his father, Cneius Pompeius Strabo, was said to have
appropriated when he took Auximum. Carbo had pleaded for him, and he
had been acquitted. But, as soon as Sulla was gaining ground in Italy,
he went to Picenum where he had estates, and expelled from Auximum the
adherents of Carbo, and then passing from town to town won them one by
one from his late protector's interests, and got together a corps of
three legions, with all the proper equipment and munitions of war.
Three officers were sent against him at the head of three divisions;
but they quarrelled, and Pompeius, who is said to have slain with his
own hand the strongest horseman in the enemy's ranks, defeated one of
them and effected a junction with Sulla somewhere in Apulia. Sulla's
soldierly eye was pleased at the sight of troops thus successful, and
in good martial trim; and when Pompeius addressed him as Imperator,
he hailed him by the same title in return. Or, perhaps, he was only
playing on the youth's vanity, for Pompeius, who was for his courage
and good looks the darling of the soldiers and the women, was very
vain, and flattery was a potion which it seems to have been one
of Sulla's cynical maxims always to administer in strong doses.
[Sidenote: by Philippus;] Later on he was joined by Philippus, the foe
of Drusus, who for shifty and successful knavery seems to have been
another Marcus Scaurus; [Sidenote: by Cethegus;] by Cethegus, who
had been one of his bitterest enemies, which to a man of Sulla's
business-like disposition would not be an objection, so long as he
could make himself useful at the time; [Sidenote: by Verres.] and by
Caius Verres, a late quaestor of Carbo, who had embezzled the public
money in that capacity, and thus began by tergiversation and theft a
notorious career.

Sulla marched northwards through Apulia, gaining friends by committing
no devastation, and sending proposals of peace to the consul Norbanus,
which were as hypocritical as was his abstinence from ravaging the
country. He meant to deal with these Samnites through whose country he
was marching at some other time. At present it was most politic not to
provoke them.