IV.  Agesilaus, when he was the stronger, always forced his enemy to fight, and when weaker, always avoided a battle.  By always practising this, the highest art of a general, he passed through his life without a single defeat; whereas Pompeius was unable to make use of his superiority to Caesar by sea, and was forced by him to hazard everything on the event of a land battle; for as soon as Caesar had defeated him, he at once obtained possession of all Pompeius’s treasure, supplies, and command of the sea, without gaining which he must inevitably have been defeated, even without a battle.  Pompeius’s excuse for his conduct is, in truth, his severest condemnation.  It is very natural and pardonable for a young general to be influenced by clamours and accusations of remissness and cowardice, so as to abandon the course which he had previously decided upon as the safest; but that the great Pompeius, of whom the Romans used to say that the camp was his home, and that he only made an occasional campaign in the senate house, at a time when his followers called the consuls and generals of Rome traitors and rebels, and when they knew that he was in possession of absolute uncontrolled power, and had already conducted so many campaigns with such brilliant success as commander-in-chief—­that he should be moved by the scoffs of a Favonius or a Domitius, and hazard his army and his life lest they should call him Agamemnon, is a most discreditable supposition.  If he were so sensitive on the point of honour, he ought to have made a stand at the very beginning, and fought a battle in defence of Rome, not first to have retreated, giving out that he was acting with a subtlety worthy of Themistokles himself, and then to have regarded every day spent in Thessaly without fighting as a disgrace.  The plain of Pharsalia was not specially appointed by heaven as the arena in which he was to contend with Caesar for the empire of the world, nor was he summoned by the voice of a herald either to fight or to avow himself vanquished.  There were many plains, and innumerable cities and countries which his command of the sea would have enabled him to reach, if he had wished to imitate Fabius Maximus, Marius, Lucullus, or Agesilaus himself, who resisted the same kind of clamour at Sparta, when his countrymen wished to fight the Thebans and protect their native land; while in Egypt he endured endless reproaches, abuse, and suspicion from Nektanebis because he forbade him to fight, and by consistently carrying out his own judicious policy saved the Egyptians against their will.  He not only guided Sparta safely through that terrible crisis, but was enabled to win a victory over the Thebans in the city itself, which he never could have done had he yielded to the entreaties of the Lacedaemonians to fight when their country was first invaded.  Thus it happened that Agesilaus was warmly praised by those whose opinions he had overruled, while Pompeius made mistakes to please his friends, and afterwards was reproached by them for what he had done.  Some historians tell us, however, that he was deceived by his father-in-law, Scipio, who with the intention of embezzling and converting to his own use the greater part of the treasure which Pompeius brought from Asia, urged him to fight as soon as possible, as though there was likely to be a scarcity of money.  In these respects, then, we have reviewed their respective characters.