no hurt, and yet had not to be abolished in order to save them.  I also place to the credit of Agesilaus that unparalleled act of obedience, when on receiving a despatch from Sparta he abandoned the whole of his Asian enterprise.  For Agesilaus did not, like Pompeius, enrich the state by his own exploits, but looking solely to the interests of his country, he gave up a position of greater glory and power than any Greek before or since ever held, with the single exception of Alexander.

III.  Looking at them from another point of view, I suppose that even Xenophon himself would not think of comparing the number of the victories won by Pompeius, the size of the armies which he commanded, and that of those which he defeated, with any of the victories of Agesilaus; although Xenophon has written so admirably upon other subjects, that he seems to think himself privileged to say whatever he pleases about the life of his favourite hero.  I think also that the two men differ much in their treatment of their enemies.  The Greek wished to sell the Thebans for slaves, and to drive the Messenians from their country, although Thebes was the mother city of Sparta, and the Messenians sprang from the same stock as the Lacedaemonians.  In his attempts to effect this, he all but lost Sparta herself, and did lose the Spartan empire; while Pompeius even gave cities to be inhabited by such of the Mediterranean pirates as abandoned that mode of life; and when Tigranes the king of Armenia was in his power, he did not lead him in his triumph, but chose rather to make him an ally of Rome; observing, that he preferred an advantage which would last for all time to the glory which only endured for a single day.

If, however, we place the chief glory of a general in feats of arms and strategy, the Laconian will be found greatly to excel the Roman.  Agesilaus did not abandon Sparta even when it was attacked by seventy thousand men, when he had but few troops with which to defend it, and those too all disheartened by their recent defeat at Leuktra.  Pompeius, on hearing that Caesar, with only five thousand three hundred men, had taken a town in Italy, left Rome in terror, either yielding to this small force like a coward, or else falsely supposing it to be more numerous than it was.  He carefully carried off his own wife and children, but left the families of his partizans unprotected in Rome, when he ought either to have fought for the city against Caesar, or else to have acknowledged him as his superior and submitted to him, for Caesar was both his fellow-countryman and his relative.  Yet, after having violently objected to the prorogation of Caesar’s term of office as consul, he put it in his power to capture Rome itself, and to say to Metellus that he regarded him and all the rest of the citizens as prisoners of war.