Antistia

Antistia was a Roman woman and the first of the five wives of Gnaeus Pompeius, later known as Pompey the Great.

Little is known of Antistia outside her marriage to Pompey. She was promised to Pompey in marriage by her father, the lawyer, orator and senator Publius Antistius, in 86 BCE, while Antistius was presiding over the trial of Pompey for financial misconduct. In 82 or 81 BCE, Pompey divorced her in favour of Aemilia, the stepdaughter of Sulla, at the dictator's urging. The affair attracted criticism in Rome, and was used by Pompey's later political enemies to portray him as placing political self-interest over his familial duties.

The lack of secure historical information on Antistia's life freed later dramatists and writers to fictionalise her feelings and motives in her marriage, and to invent more elaborate endings to the story. Beginning with the French dramatist Pierre Corneille, who included her in his 1662 play Sertorius, Antistia has been presented as a cruelly-treated victim of Pompey's political ambition, whose love for her husband proved little obstacle to his own self-interest and the machinations of Sulla.