Now that a year has passed since the change in the mayor of Pamplona, the current mayor, Joseba Asiron, announced the celebration, in this new 2025, the 2100th birthday of the city of Pamplona.

About this event that, fortunately, we want to commemorate, we have only brief news in ancient authors, geographers and historians. Sallust, historian, speaks of the withdrawal of the Romans to the Vascon territory to supply wheat to his army during the bellum Sertorianum, the war that confronted Sertorius, governor deposed from his position in the Citerior after the coup d'état of Sulla, and Pompey, precisely sent by the Senate against him.

For some time it was considered that Plutarch, biographer of Sertorius, also alluded to this event, although it seems that where, in his text, we should read "Vascones" we should read "Vacceos" and, therefore, invalidate this allusion. The geographer is Strabo who, in a very clear passage, lists some foci of the Roman presence in the Ebro, almost all connected with the events of the end of the Republic or the beginning of the Principality. When speaking of the Basque territory he alludes to the fact that Pompellus is found there, a toponym that, due to its vernacular nature, and in order to be understood by his erudite readers, he is obliged to translate into Greek as Pompeiopolis, "the city of Pompey".

It is possible that the foundation did not take place in the winter of 75 B.C. but later, in 72-71 B.C., at the end of that civil war between Romans -the same one that destroyed the oppidum of Irulegi- that if, in part, was fought in Vascon territory was due to the absolute integration of the populations of that territory in the orbit of Rome, integration that would have begun in the dawn of the II century B.C. That Pompey founded Pamplona seems to us to be beyond any doubt. To resolve if it was in 75 B.C. seems impossible given the fragmentary character of the sources we have.

In spite of it, it is to celebrate that the City Council wants -in a custom, by the way, very Roman- to remember in this year to its conditor urbis, to its founder, to Pompey. His dispatch to the peninsula to counteract the Sertorian resistance was rooted in the fact that his father, Cnaeus Pompeius Strabo, already had contact with Hispanic horsemen, some of them with Basque names, in the so-called "war of the allies" fought in Italy five years earlier and in which Rome had to make use of mercenaries "from the provinces".

In the same way that the Senate must have sought, when sending Pompey to the peninsula, to reactivate the old loyalties that his father could have forged with the warrior elites of the place, it is good news to recognize our undeniable Roman past and to highlight the fact that Pamplona was founded by a consul of Rome, one of the most powerful, moreover, of the last century of the Roman Republic. To do so is, of course, to remember that we were Romans and that, precisely, if we consider ourselves Vascones it is because Rome, in part, created that element so anchored today in our cultural imaginary.

Happy initiative and, of course, happy birthday -bimillenary, in any case, year up or down- to that Pompelo -better than Pompaelo- Roman whose previous name, despite the myth of old Iruña, we still do not know.