III.  Their several esteem for pleasure and for riches prove still more clearly that Lysander was born to command men; Sulla to tyrannize over them.  The former, although he rose to such an unparalleled height of power never was betrayed by it into any acts of insolent caprice, and there never was a man to whom the well-known proverb

     “Lions at home, but foxes in the field,”

was less applicable, Sulla, on the other hand, did not allow his poverty when young or his years when old to hinder him in the pursuit of pleasure, but he enacted laws to regulate the marriages and morals of his countrymen, and indulged his own amorous propensities in spite of them, as we read in Sallust’s history.  In consequence of his vices, Rome was so drained of money that he was driven to the expedient of allowing the allied cities to purchase their independence by payment, and that, too, although he was daily proscribing the richest men and selling their property by public auction.  Yet he wasted money without limit upon his courtiers.  What bounds can we imagine he would set to his generosity when in his cups, seeing that once, when a great estate was being sold by public auction, he ordered the auctioneer to knock it down to a friend of his own for a mere nominal sum, and when some one else made a higher bid, and the auctioneer called out the additional sum offered, Sulla flew into a passion and exclaimed:  “My friends, I am very hardly used if I may not dispose of my own plunder as I please.”  Now Lysander sent home to his countrymen even what he had himself received as presents together with the rest of the spoils.  Yet I do not approve of him for so doing:  for he did as much harm to Sparta by bestowing that money upon it as Sulla did harm to Rome by the money which he took from it:  but I mention it as proving how little he cared for money.  Each acted strangely towards his fellow-countrymen.  Sulla regulated and improved the morals of Rome, although he himself was wasteful and licentious.  Lysander filled his countrymen with the passions from which he himself was free.  Thus the former was worse than the laws which he himself enacted, while the latter rendered his countrymen worse than himself, as he taught the Spartans to covet what he had learned to despise.  So much for their political conduct.

IV.  In warlike exploits, in brilliancy of generalship, in the number of victories he won, and the greatness of the dangers which he encountered, Sulla is immeasurably the greater.  Lysander did indeed twice conquer in a sea-fight, and I will even allow him the credit of having taken Athens; no difficult matter, no doubt, but one which, brought him great glory because of its being so famous a city.  In Boeotia and before Haliartus he was perhaps unlucky, yet his conduct in not waiting for the arrival of the great force under Pausanias, which was at Plataea, close by, seems like bad generalship.  He would not stay till the main