[Footnote 393:  He is called Cordus by Lucanus (viii. 715), and had formerly been a quaestor of Pompeius.]

COMPARISON OF AGESILAUS AND POMPEIUS.

I. As both these men’s lives are now before us, let us briefly recapitulate them, observing as we do so the points in which they differ from one another.  These are as follows:—­First, Pompeius obtained his power and renown by the most strictly legitimate means, chiefly by his own exertions when assisting Sulla in the liberation of Italy; while Agesilaus obtained the throne in defiance of both human and divine laws, for he declared Leotychides to be a bastard, although his brother had publicly recognised him as his own son, and he also by a quibble evaded the oracle about a lame reign.

Secondly, Pompeius both respected Sulla while he lived, gave his body an honourable burial, in spite of Lepidus, when he died, and married Sulla’s daughter to his own son Faustus; while Agesilaus, on a trifling pretext, disgraced and ruined Lysander.  Yet Sulla gave Pompeius nothing more than he possessed himself, whereas Lysander made Agesilaus king of Sparta, and leader of the united armies of Greece.

Thirdly, the political wrong-doings of Pompeius were chiefly committed to serve his relatives, Caesar and Scipio; while Agesilaus saved Sphodrias from the death which he deserved for his outrage upon the Athenians merely to please his son, and vigorously supported Phoebidas when he committed a similar breach of the peace against the Thebans.  And generally, we may say that while Pompeius only injured the Romans through inability to refuse the demands of friends, or through ignorance, Agesilaus ruined the Lacedaemonians by plunging them into war with Thebes, to gratify his own angry and quarrelsome temper.

II.  If it be right to attribute the disasters which befel either of those men to some special ill-luck which attended them, the Romans had no reason whatever to suspect any such thing of Pompeius; but Agesilaus, although the Lacedaemonians well knew the words of the oracle, yet would not allow them to avoid “a lame reign.”  Even if Leotychides had been proved a thousand times to be a bastard, the family of Eurypon could have supplied Sparta with a legitimate and sound king, had not Lysander, for the sake of Agesilaus, deceived them as to the true meaning of the oracle.  On the other hand, we have no specimen of the political ingenuity of Pompeius which can be compared with that admirable device of Agesilaus, when he readmitted the survivors of the battle of Leuktra to the privileges of Spartan citizens, by permitting the laws to sleep for one day.  Pompeius did not even think it his duty to abide by the laws which he had himself enacted, but broke them to prove his great power to his friends.  Agesilaus, when forced either to abolish the laws or to ruin his friends, discovered an expedient by which the laws did his friends