Lucius Septimius

Lucius Septimius was an Ancient Roman soldier stationed in Egypt in the 1st century BC. He is remembered by history as one of the assassins of Pompey the Great.

Septimius was the head of the Roman troops serving in the Egyptian army, at a time when Egypt was a vassal state of Rome. Pompey fled to Egypt in 48 BC following his defeat by Julius Caesar at the Battle of Pharsalia. Pompey had been friends with Egypt's prior king, Ptolemy XII Auletes, and so hoped to find aid; however the advisers of the child successor Ptolemy XIII believed they could win Caesar's favor by killing his foe. Septimius and the Egyptian general Achillas met Pompey at the shore in Alexandria under a pretense of friendship, killed him upon the landing, and then beheaded his corpse.

Later literary accounts often attributed Pompey's murder solely to Septimius, as in the poem Pharsalia by the Roman poet Lucan, or in modern fictionalizations such as the George Bernard Shaw play Caesar and Cleopatra, and the HBO television series Rome (depicted in the episodes "Pharsalus" and "Caesarion").