Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Now that the Lives have been set out, let us run quickly over their points of difference, bringing them together side by side. They are these: first, that Pompey advanced to power and reputation by the most just of means, setting out under his own impulse and joining Sulla in many great labors as he freed Italy from her tyrants,
whereas Agesilaus was thought to have obtained his kingship neither blamelessly toward the gods nor toward men, having judged Leotychidas — whom his own brother had declared to be his legitimate son — to be a bastard, and having mocked and evaded the oracle concerning the lameness. Second, that Pompey continued honoring Sulla both while he lived and, when he died, buried him by force against Lepidus, and joined his own daughter in marriage to Sulla's son Faustus; whereas Agesilaus cast out and insulted Lysander on a trivial pretext,
and yet Sulla obtained no less from Pompey than he had furnished him, while Lysander made Agesilaus both king of Sparta and general of Greece. Third, the transgressions of justice in political matters that befell Pompey arose out of family ties: for most of his wrongs he committed jointly with Caesar and Scipio, who were his kinsmen by marriage,
whereas Agesilaus, out of favor to the love of his son, snatched Sphodrias away from the death he owed for the wrongs he had done the Athenians, and in the case of Phoebidas, who had broken the treaty against the Thebans, he was plainly and eagerly helping him precisely because of that very wrongdoing. And in general, whatever harm Pompey was blamed for doing the Romans through deference or ignorance, that same sort of harm Agesilaus did the Lacedaemonians through anger and contentiousness, kindling the Boeotian war.
But if one must also assign some share of fortune to the failings of each of these men, Pompey's misfortune was unforeseen by the Romans, whereas Agesilaus did not allow the Lacedaemonians, though they heard of it and knew it beforehand, to guard against the lame kingship. For even if Leotychidas had been proven a thousand times over to be a foreigner and a bastard, the Eurypontids would not have lacked a legitimate and sound-footed man to furnish Sparta as king, had not Lysander, on Agesilaus' account, thrown a shadow over the oracle.
Yet as for the remedy Agesilaus brought to the difficulty concerning those who had fled in fear, after the disaster at Leuctra, when he ordered that the laws sleep for that one day — no other political device has ever equaled it, nor do we have anything of Pompey's like it; rather, the opposite: he did not think it necessary to abide even by the laws he himself had established, displaying to his friends how great his power was. Agesilaus, on the other hand, when brought to the necessity of dissolving the laws in order to save the citizens, discovered a way by which the laws would neither be harmed nor, in order not to harm them, be left undissolved.
I set down too as that inimitable deed of Agesilaus' political virtue, his leaving behind his exploits in Asia upon receiving the scytale — for it was not, as with Pompey, that he benefited the commonwealth by the means through which he made himself great; rather, looking to what his fatherland required, he let go of a power and glory as great as no one else, before or since, possessed except Alexander.
Turning now to another starting point, in generalships and in matters of war — in the number and greatness of the trophies and of the forces which Pompey brought to bear, and in the multitude of the pitched battles which he won — I doubt even Xenophon would set Agesilaus's victories beside them, though that writer, thanks to the man's other virtues, has been granted the special privilege of writing and saying whatever he wishes about him;
yet I think the man differs from the man also in his fairness toward enemies. For the one, wishing to enslave Thebes and to uproot Messene — the one a portion equal to his own fatherland, the other the mother-city of his race — came within a hair's breadth of losing Sparta itself, and did lose the hegemony; whereas the other even granted cities to pirates who changed sides, and made Tigranes, king of the Armenians, though he might have led him in triumph over himself, into an ally instead, saying that he valued a single day's freedom above an eternity.
If, however, first place for a leader's virtue is to be given to the greatest and most decisive actions and calculations concerning arms, the Laconian has by no small measure surpassed the Roman. For, in the first place, he neither abandoned his city nor left it when seventy thousand of the enemy's army invaded, though he had but few hoplites, and those already defeated at Leuctra; whereas Pompey,
when Caesar seized a single Italian town with only five thousand three hundred men, was driven out of Rome by fear — either yielding ignobly to so few, or falsely reckoning them to be more — and having gathered up his children and his wife, but leaving those of the other citizens bereft, fled, when he should instead have either won through by fighting on his homeland's behalf, or else come to terms with the side that was stronger; for he was, after all, a citizen and bound to Caesar by marriage:
yet now, to the man for whom it seemed a terrible thing to have his term of command extended and a consulship voted, to that same man he gave occasion, once he had taken the city, to say to Metellus that he considered him too, and all the rest as well, his prisoners.
Now, what is the chief work of a good general — when stronger, to force the enemy to fight; when weaker in strength, not to be forced — this Agesilaus always did, and thereby kept himself ever unconquered; but Caesar, where he was weaker than Pompey, escaped being harmed, while where he was stronger, he forced Pompey, once he had engaged him with his infantry, to be overthrown in respect of everything; and Caesar was at once master of money, of markets, and of the sea, all of which, had they belonged to Pompey's side, might have decided the matter without a battle,
and the defense offered for these things is itself the greatest accusation against so great a general. For it is likely and pardonable that a young commander, thrown into confusion by clamor and outcry charging him with softness and cowardice, should fall from the safest calculations; but Pompey the Great was another matter entirely — his camp was what the Romans styled their fatherland, his tent what they styled their senate, while they branded as rebels and traitors those very men holding office and command back in Rome — and he was known to answer to no one's command,
and who had campaigned as sole commander in all his campaigns most excellently — who could bear that he, to avoid being called an Agamemnon, was, for the sake of the jibes of Favonius and Domitius, driven, by the narrowest margin, to risk the danger concerning empire and freedom? He who, if he had looked only to the disgrace of the passing day, ought to have stood his ground and fought it out for Rome from the very beginning, rather than, having displayed that flight as a Themistoclean stratagem, later come to regard as shameful his own delay in Thessaly before the battle.
For surely it was not that the god had marked out that Pharsalian plain as a racecourse and theater for them to contend in for the empire, nor was he summoned by herald to come down and fight or else yield the crown to another; rather, many plains, countless cities, and boundless land, or opportunity by sea, were available to one who wished to imitate Fabius Maximus and Marius and Lucullus, and Agesilaus himself,
who endured no less an uproar in Sparta among those wishing to fight the Thebans for their territory, and bore in Egypt many slanders, accusations, and suspicions from the king, by bidding them keep quiet, and by making use of the best calculations as he wished,
not only saved the Egyptians against their will, and alone kept Sparta ever upright amid so great an earthquake of troubles, but also set up a trophy against the Thebans in their own city, having furnished the means of winning again from that point on by not perishing beforehand through being forced into battle. Whence Agesilaus was afterward praised by those very men who had been forced, once they were saved, whereas Pompey, having erred on account of others, had as his accusers the very men by whose persuasion he had erred.
And yet some claim Scipio, his own father-in-law, had tricked him: much of the money he was bringing from Asia, Scipio wanted to embezzle, so he hid it away and then pushed for battle on the pretext that no money remained — yet even granting that this was so, a general should not have been taken in so, nor, duped so readily, have gambled away the highest of stakes. Such, then, is how we may view each of these two men in these matters.
Into Egypt the one man sailed because he had no other option, a fugitive; the other went neither for an honorable reason nor because he had to, but for money, so that his pay as a general serving among barbarians might fund a war against the Greeks. Then, the very things for which we blame Pompey with regard to the Egyptians, the Egyptians charge against Agesilaus for the same things: for the one was wronged after trusting them, while the other, having been trusted, abandoned them and went over to those at war with the very people he had sailed to fight alongside as an ally: