The editors: Anton Powell is author of Athens and Sparta and of studies in the politics of Latin poetry. Kathryn Welch has published numerous papers on the politics of late-Republican Rome. Powell and Welch have previously collaborated in editing Julius Caesar as Artful Reporter (CPW and Duckworth, 1998).

The son of Pompey the Great cast a long shadow. Acclaimed by the Roman populace in his lifetime, his traditional virtues and military successes put to shame his civil-war rival Octavian. After his death, he was passionately and safely abused by Octavian and Augustan writers as a marginal nuisance, a pirate. The image of a 'second rank' figure has been propagated by scholars into recent times. But a very different story can now be constructed, from the testimony of historians and poets in antiquity and from the eloquent and long-neglected coinage of Sextus Pompeius himself. Here ten studies from an international cast reveal a figure whose actions and image shaped the ethos not just of the civil-war period but of the early Principate.