XXIX.  Now those who envied Pompeius found fault with these measures; but as to his conduct towards Metellus[246] in Crete, even his best friends were not pleased with it.  Metellus, who was a kinsman of the Metellus who had the command in Iberia jointly with Pompeius, was sent as commander to Crete before Pompeius was chosen.  For Crete was a kind of second source of pirates and next to Cilicia; and Metellus having caught many of them in the island took them prisoners and put them to death.  Those who still survived and were blockaded, sent a suppliant message and invited Pompeius to the island, as being a part of his government and falling entirely within the limits reckoned from the coast.  Pompeius accepted the invitation and wrote to Metellus to forbid him continuing the war.  He also wrote to the cities not to pay any attention to Metellus, and he sent as commander one of his own officers, Lucius Octavius, who entering into the forts of the besieged pirates and fighting on their side made Pompeius not only odious and intolerable, but ridiculous also, inasmuch as he lent his name to accursed and godless men and threw around them his reputation as a kind of amulet, through envy and jealousy of Metellus.  Neither did Achilles,[247] it was argued, act like a man, but like a youth all full of violence and passionately pursuing glory, when he made a sign to the rest of the Greeks and would not let them strike Hector,

    “For fear another gave the blow and won
    The fame, and he should second only come;”

but Pompeius even protected and fought in behalf of the common enemy, that he might deprive of a triumph a general who had endured so much toil.  Metellus however did not give in, but he took and punished the pirates, and after insulting and abusing Octavius in his camp he let him go.

XXX.  When news reached Rome that the Pirates’ war was at an end and that Pompeius being now at leisure was visiting the cities, Manlius,[248] one of the tribunes, proposed a law, that Pompeius should take all the country and force which Lucullus commanded, with the addition of Bithynia, which Glabrio[249] had, and should carry on the war against the kings Mithridates and Tigranes, with both the naval force and the dominion of the sea on the terms on which he received it originally.  This was in short for the Roman dominion to be placed at the disposal of one man.  For the provinces which alone he could not touch under the former law, Phrygia, Lycaonia, Galatia, Cappadocia, Cilicia, the upper Colchis, Armenia, these he now had together with the armies and resources with which Lucullus defeated Mithridates and Tigranes.  But though Lucullus was thus deprived of the glory of his achievements and was receiving a successor in a triumph rather than in a war, the aristocratical party thought less of this, though they considered that the man was treated unjustly and ungratefully, but they were much dissatisfied with the power of