[-5-] Such was the end of the famous Pompey the Great, wherein once more the weakness and the strange fortune of the human race are proved.  He was no whit deficient in foresight, but was deceived by having been always absolutely secure against any force of harmful potency.  He had won many unexpected victories in Africa, and many in Asia and Europe, both by land and by sea ever since boyhood; and was now in the fifty-eighth year of his age defeated without good reason.  He who had subdued the entire Roman sea perished on it:  and whereas he had once, as the story goes, been master of a thousand ships, he was destroyed in a tiny boat near Egypt and really by that same Ptolemy whose father he had once restored from exile to that land and to his kingdom.  The man whom at that time Roman soldiers were still guarding, soldiers left behind by Gabinius as a favor to Pompey and on account of the hatred felt by the Egyptians for the young prince’s father, seemed now to have put him to death by the hands of those Romans and those Egyptians.  Pompey, who was previously considered the dominant figure among the Romans so that he even had the nickname of Agamemnon, was now slain like any of the lowest of the Egyptians themselves, near Mount Casius and on the anniversary of the day on which he had celebrated a triumph over Mithridates and the pirates.  Even in this point, therefore, there was nothing similar in the two parts of his career.  Of yore on that day he had experienced the most brilliant success, whereas he now suffered the most grievous fate:  again, following a certain oracle he had been suspicious of all the citizens named Cassius, but instead of being the object of a plot by any man called Cassius he died and was buried beside the mountain that had this name.  Of his fellow voyagers some were captured at once, while others fled, among them his wife and child.  The former under a safe conduct came later safely to Rome:  the latter, Sextus, proceeded to Africa to his brother Gnaeus; these are the names by which they are distinguished, since they both bore the appellation Pompey.

[-6-] Caesar, when he had attended to pressing demands after the battle and had assigned to certain others Greece and the remainder of that region to win over and administer, himself pursued after Pompey.  He hurried forward as far as Asia in quest of news about him, and there waited for a time since no one knew which way he had sailed.  Everything turned out favorably for him:  for instance, while crossing the Hellespont in a kind of ferryboat, he met Pompey’s fleet sailing with Lucius Cassius in command, but so far from suffering any harm at their hands he terrified them and won them to his side.  Next, meeting with no resistance any longer he took possession of the rest of that district and regulated its affairs, levying a money contribution, as I said, but otherwise doing no one any harm and even conferring benefits on all, so far as was visible.  He did away with the taxgatherers, who abused the people most cruelly, and he converted the product of the taxes into a payment of tribute.