Pompeius belonged to a family old and honourable enough, though plebeian, to make the senators at last accept him as one of themselves, the more readily that he had acquired immense wealth in the proscriptions. At the time of the civil war he was on the side of Marius, and closely associated with him, while Marius and Cinna were in power in Rome. His first wife Antistia was the daughter of a friend of Cinna’s. When Sulla landed, however, Pompeius soon saw which way things were going. He collected an army and marched to join Sulla. Although he was only twenty-three at the time, Sulla hailed him as one of the most important of his supporters. He suggested to him that he should put away his young wife Antistia and marry his own daughter-in-law. To this Pompeius agreed, although Antistia loved him and was in the deepest distress, since her father had been killed in the proscriptions; moreover, her mother, when she heard how Pompeius intended to treat her daughter, laid violent hands upon herself. In the proscriptions Pompeius acquired so much wealth that within a few years he was one of the richest men in Rome. His popularity was great and he could afford to keep it up by giving splendid shows and presents to the people. His wealth, his quick success, his great popularity filled the senators with awe. They had a constant fear that he was to be the next Sulla. They listened with respect to all that Pompeius said, though he was a dull speaker; and regarded him as the first general of the day, though he had really done nothing to deserve that title. But he was always lucky in his campaigns, and again and again had the good fortune to be made commander just at the stage when the fruits of a long struggle, carried on by others, were ready to be gathered. In the means by which he achieved success Pompeius was not over scrupulous. His want of feeling in the matter of Antistia was only one sign of this. The same kind of callousness was shown in the way he secured the final defeat of Sertorius, not by action in the field but by a plot. After three years of unsuccessful fighting Sertorius, much the ablest of Marius’s followers, who had raised the standard of revolt in Spain, was still as far from being conquered as ever. Pompeius was tired of the war; so were his troops. At last by the treachery of Perpenna and some other Romans in his army, on whose minds secret emissaries from Rome had worked, Sertorius was murdered. Pompeius then suppressed the revolt in Spain with horrible cruelty and returned to Rome crowned with success.