Thus having drawn out the history of the lives of Agesilaus and
Pompey, the next thing is to compare them; and in order to this, to
take a cursory view, and bring together the points in which they
chiefly disagree; which are these. In the first place, Pompey
attained to all his greatness and glory by the fairest and justest
means, owing his advancement to his own efforts, and to the frequent
and important aid which he rendered Sylla, in delivering Italy from
its tyrants. But Agesilaus appears to have obtained his kingdom,
not without offense both towards gods and towards men, towards
these, by procuring judgment of bastardy against Leotychides, whom
his brother had declared his lawful son, and towards those, by
putting a false gloss upon the oracle, and eluding its sentence
against his lameness. Secondly, Pompey never ceased to display his
respect for Sylla during his lifetime, and expressed it also after
his death, by enforcing the honorable interment of his corpse, in
despite of Lepidus, and by giving his daughter in marriage to his
son Faustus. But Agesilaus, upon a slight presence, cast off
Lysander with reproach and dishonor. Yet Sylla in fact had owed to
Pompey's services, as much as Pompey ever received from him, whereas
Lysander made Agesilaus king of Sparta, and general of all Greece.
Thirdly, Pompey's transgressions of right and justice in his
political life were occasioned chiefly by his relations with other
people, and most of his errors had some affinity, as well as
himself, to Caesar and Scipio, his fathers-in-law. But Agesilaus,
to gratify the fondness of his son, saved the life of Sphodrias by a
sort of violence, when he deserved death for the wrong he had done
to the Athenians; and when Phoebidas treacherously broke the peace
with Thebes, zealously abetted him for the sake, it was clear, of
the unjust act itself. In short, what mischief soever Pompey might
be said to have brought on Rome through compliance with the wishes
of his friends or through inadvertency, Agesilaus may be said to
have brought on Sparta out of obstinacy and malice, by kindling the
Boeotian war. And if, moreover, we are to attribute any part of
these disasters to some personal ill-fortune attaching to the men
themselves, in the case of Pompey, certainly, the Romans had no
reason to anticipate it. Whereas Agesilaus would not suffer the
Lacedaemonians to avoid what they foresaw and were forewarned must
attend the "lame sovereignty." For had Leotychides been chargeable
ten thousand times as foreign and spurious, yet the race of the
Eurypontidae was still in being, and could easily have furnished
Sparta with a lawful king, that was sound in his limbs, had not
Lysander darkened and disguised the true sense of the oracle in
favor of Agesilaus.
Such a politic piece of sophistry as was devised by Agesilaus, in
that great perplexity of the people as to the treatment to be given
to those who had played the coward at the battle of Leuctra, when
after that unhappy defeat, he decreed, that the laws should sleep
for that day, it would be hard to find any parallel to; neither
indeed have we the fellow of it in all Pompey's story. But on the
contrary, Pompey for a friend thought it no sin to break those very
laws which he himself had made; as if to show at once the force of
his friendship, and the greatness of his power; whereas Agesilaus,
under the necessity, as it seemed, of either rescinding the laws, or
not saving the citizens, contrived an expedient by the help of which
the laws should not touch these citizens, and yet should not, to
avoid it, be overthrown. Then I must commend it as an incomparable
act of civil virtue and obedience in Agesilaus, that immediately
upon the receipt of the scytala, he left the wars in Asia, and
returned into his country. For he did not like Pompey merely
advance his country's interest by acts that contributed at the same
time to promote his own greatness, but looking to his country's
good, for its sake laid aside as great authority and honor as ever
any man had before or since, except Alexander the Great.
But now to take another point of view, if we sum up Pompey's
military expeditions and exploits of war, the number of his
trophies, and the greatness of the powers which he subdued, and the
multitude of battles in which he triumphed, I am persuaded even
Xenophon himself would not put the victories of Agesilaus in balance
with his, though Xenophon has this privilege allowed him, as a sort
of special reward for his other excellences, that he may write and
speak, in favor of his hero, whatever he pleases. Methinks, too,
there is a great deal of difference betwixt these men, in their
clemency and moderation towards their enemies. For Agesilaus, while
attempting to enslave Thebes and exterminate Messene, the latter,
his country's ancient associate, and Thebes, the mother-city of his
own royal house, almost lost Sparta itself, and did really lose the
government of Greece; whereas Pompey gave cities to those of the
pirates who were willing to change their manner of life; and when it
was in his power to lead Tigranes, king of Armenia, in triumph, he
chose rather to make him a confederate of the Romans, saying, that a
single day was worth less than all future time. But if the
preeminence in that which relates to the office and virtues of a
general, should be determined by the greatest and most important
acts and counsels of war, the Lacedaemonian would not a little
exceed the Roman. For Agesilaus never deserted his city, though it
was besieged by an army of seventy thousand men, when there were
very few soldiers within to defend it, and those had been defeated
too, but a little before, at the battle of Leuctra. But Pompey,
when Caesar with a body only of fifty-three hundred men, had taken
but one town in Italy, departed in a panic out of Rome, either
through cowardice, when there were so few, or at least through a
false and mistaken belief that there were more; and having conveyed
away his wife and children, he left all the rest of the citizens
defenseless, and fled; whereas he ought either to have conquered in
fight for the defense of his country, or yielded upon terms to the
conqueror, who was moreover his fellow-citizen, and allied to him;
but now to the same man to whom he refused a prolongation of the
term of his government, and thought it intolerable to grant
another consulship, to him he gave the power, by letting him take
the city, to tell Metellus, together with all the rest, that they
were his prisoners.
That which is chiefly the office of a general, to force the enemy
into fighting when he finds himself the stronger, and to avoid being
driven into it himself when he is the weaker, this excellence
Agesilaus always displayed, and by it kept himself invincible;
whereas in contending with Pompey, Caesar, who was the weaker,
successfully declined the danger, and his own strength being in his
land forces. drove him into putting the conflict to issue with
these, and thus made himself master of the treasure, stores, and the
sea too, which were all in his enemy's hands, and by the help of
which the victory could have been secured without fighting. And
what is alleged as an apology in vindication of Pompey, is to a
general of his age and standing the greatest of disgraces. For,
granting that a young commander might by clamor and outcry be
deprived of his fortitude and strength of mind, and weakly forsake
his better judgment, and the thing be neither strange nor altogether
unpardonable, yet for Pompey the Great, whose camp the Romans called
their country, and his tent the senate, styling the consuls,
praetors, and all other magistrates who were conducting, the
government at Rome, by no better title than that of rebels and
traitors, for him, whom they well knew never to have been under the
command of any but himself, having served all his campaigns under
himself as sole general, for him upon so small a provocation as the
scoffs of Favonius and Domitius, and lest he should bear the
nickname of Agamemnon, to be wrought upon, and even forced to hazard
the whole empire and liberty of Rome upon the cast of a die, was
surely indeed intolerable. Who, if he had so much regarded a
present infamy, should have guarded the city at first with his arms,
and fought the battle in defense of Rome, not have left it as he
did; nor while declaring his flight from Italy an artifice in the
manner of Themistocles, nevertheless be ashamed in Thessaly of a
prudent delay before engaging. Heaven had not appointed the
Pharsalian fields to be the stage and theater upon which they should
contend for the empire of Rome, neither was he summoned thither by
any herald upon challenge, with intimation that he must either
undergo the combat, or surrender the prize to another. There were
many other fields, thousands of cities, and even the whole earth
placed at his command, by the advantage of his fleet, and his
superiority at sea, if he would but have followed the examples of
Maximus, Marius, Lucullus, and even Agesilaus himself, who endured
no less tumults within the city of Sparta, when the Thebans provoked
him to come out and fight in defense of the land, and sustained in
Egypt also numerous calumnies, slanders, and suspicions on the part
of the king, whom he counseled to abstain from a battle. And thus
following always what he had determined in his own judgment upon
mature advice, by that means he not only preserved the Egyptians,
against their wills, not only kept Sparta, in those desperate
convulsions, by his sole act, safe from overthrow, but even was able
to set up trophies likewise in the city over the Thebans, having
given his countrymen an occasion of being victorious afterwards by
not at first leading them out, as they tried to force him to do to
their own destruction. The consequence was that in the end
Agesilaus was commended by the very men, when they found themselves
saved, upon whom he had put this compulsion, whereas Pompey, whose
error had been occasioned by others, found those his accusers whose
advice had misled him. Some indeed profess that he was deceived by
his father-in-law Scipio, who, designing to conceal and keep to
himself the greatest part of that treasure which he had brought out
of Asia, pressed Pompey to battle, upon the pretence that there
would be a want of money. Yet admitting he was deceived, one in his
place ought not to have been so, nor should have allowed so slight
an artifice to cause the hazard of such mighty interests. And thus
we have taken a view of each, by comparing together their conduct,
and actions in war.
As to their voyages into Egypt, one steered his course thither out
of necessity in flight; the other neither honorably, nor of
necessity, but as a mercenary soldier, having enlisted himself into
the service of a barbarous nation for pay, that he might be able
afterwards to wage war upon the Greeks. And secondly, what we
charge upon the Egyptians in the name of Pompey, the Egyptians lay
to the charge of Agesilaus. Pompey trusted them and was betrayed
and murdered by them; Agesilaus accepted their confidence and
deserted them, transferring his aid to the very enemies who were now
attacking those whom be had been brought over to assist.