Plutarch
46-119 A.C.E - Wrote in Greek
The Comparison of
Pompey with Agesilaus
Written 75 A.C.E.
Translated by John Dryden
The Comparison of
Pompey with Agesilaus
By Plutarch
Thus having drawn out the history of the lives of Agesilaus and Pompey,
the next thing is to compare them; and in order to this, to take a cursory
view, and bring together the points in which they chiefly disagree; which
are these. In the first place, Pompey attained to all his greatness and
glory by the fairest and justest means, owing his advancement to his own
efforts, and to the frequent and important aid which he rendered Sylla,
in delivering Italy from its tyrants. But Agesilaus appears to have obtained
his kingdom, not without offence both towards gods and towards men, towards
these, by procuring judgment of bastardy against Leotychides, whom his
brother had declared his lawful son, and towards those, by putting a false
gloss upon the oracle, and eluding its sentence against his lameness. Secondly,
Pompey never ceased to display his respect for Sylla during his lifetime,
and expressed it also after his death, by enforcing the honourable interment
of his corpse, in despite of Lepidus, and by giving his daughter in marriage
to his son Faustus. But Agesilaus, upon a slight pretence, cast off Lysander
with reproach and dishonour. Yet Sylla in fact had owed to Pompey services
as much as Pompey ever received from him, whereas Lysander made Agesilaus
King of Sparta and general of all Greece. Thirdly, Pompey's transgressions
of right and justice in his political life were occasioned chiefly by his
relations with other people, and most of his errors had some affinity,
as well as himself to Caesar and Scipio, his fathers-in-law. But Agesilaus,
to gratify the fondness of his son, saved the life of Sphodrias by a sort
of violence, when he deserved death for the wrong he had done to the Athenians;
and when Phoebidas treacherously broke the peace with Thebes, zealously
abetted him for the sake, it was clear, of the unjust act itself. In short,
what mischief soever Pompey might be said to have brought on Rome through
compliance with the wishes of his friends or through inadvertency, Agesilaus
may be said to have brought on Sparta out of obstinacy and malice, by kindling
the Boeotian war. And if, moreover, we are to attribute any part of these
disasters to some personal ill-fortune, attaching to the men themselves,
in the case of Pompey, certainly the Romans had no reason to anticipate
it. Whereas Agesilaus would not suffer the Lacedaemonians to avoid what
they foresaw and were forewarned must attend the "lame sovereignty." For
had Leotychides been chargeable ten thousand times as foreign and spurious,
yet the race of the Eurypontidae was still in being, and could easily have
furnished Sparta with a lawful king that was sound in his limbs, had not
Lysander darkened and disguised the true sense of the oracle in favour
of Agesilaus.
Such a politic piece of sophistry as was devised by Agesilaus,
in that great perplexity of the people as to the treatment to be given
to those who had played the coward at the battle of Leuctra, when after
that unhappy defeat he decreed that the laws should sleep for that day,
it would be hard to find any parallel to; neither have we the fellow of
it in all Pompey's story. But on the contrary, Pompey for a friend thought
it no sin to break those very laws which he himself had made, as if to
show at once the force of his friendship, and the greatness of his power;
whereas Agesilaus, under the necessity, as it seemed, of either rescinding
the laws, or not saving the citizens, contrived an expedient by the help
of which the laws should not touch these citizens, and yet should not,
to avoid it, be overthrown. Then I must commend it as an incomparable act
of civil virtue and obedience in Agesilaus, that immediately upon the receipt
of the scytala, he left the wars in Asia and returned into his country.
For he did not, like Pompey, merely advance his country's interest by acts
that contributed at the same time to promote his own greatness, but looking
to his country's good, for its sake laid aside as great authority and honour
as ever any man had before or since, except Alexander the
Great.
But now to take another point of view, if we sum up Pompey's military
expeditions and exploits of war, the number of his trophies, and the greatness
of the powers which he subdued, and the multitude of battles in which he
triumphed, I am persuaded even Xenophon himself would not put the victories
of Agesilaus in balance with his, though Xenophon has this privilege allowed
him, as a sort of special reward for his other excellences, that he may
write and speak, in favour of his hero, whatever he pleases. Methinks,
too, there is a great deal of difference betwixt these men in their clemency
and moderation towards their enemies. For Agesilaus, while attempting to
enslave Thebes and exterminate Messene, the latter, his country's ancient
associate, and Thebes, the mother-city of his own royal house, almost lost
Sparta itself, and did really lose the government of Greece; whereas Pompey
gave cities to those of the pirates who were willing to change their manner
of life; and when it was in his power to lead Tigranes, King of Armenia,
in triumph, he chose rather to make him a confederate of the Romans, saying,
that a single day was worth less than all future time. But if the pre-eminence
in that which relates to the office and virtues of a general should be
determined by the greatest and most important acts and counsels of war,
the Lacedaemonian would not a little exceed the Roman. For Agesilaus never
deserted his city, though it was besieged by an army of seventy thousand
men, when there were very few soldiers within to defend it, and those had
been defeated too, but a little before, at the battle of Leuctra. But Pompey,
when Caesar, with a body only of fifty-three hundred men, had taken but
one town in Italy, departed in a panic out of Rome, either through cowardice,
when there were so few, or at least through a false and mistaken belief
that there were more; and having conveyed away his wife and children, he
left all the rest of the citizens defenceless, and fled; whereas he ought
either to have conquered in fight for the defence of his country, or yielded
upon terms to the conqueror, who was, moreover, his fellow-citizen and
allied to him; but now to the same man to whom he refused a prolongation
of the terms of his government, and thought it intolerable to grant another
consulship, to him he gave the power, by letting him take the city, to
tell Metellus, together with all the rest, that they were his
prisoners.
That which is chiefly the office of a general, to force the enemy
into fighting when he finds himself the stronger, and to avoid being driven
into it himself when he is the weaker, this excellence Agesilaus always
displayed, and by it kept himself invincible; whereas in contending with
Pompey, Caesar, who was the weaker, successfully declined the danger, and
his own strength being in his land-forces, drove him into putting the conflict
to issue with these, and thus made himself master of the treasure, stores,
and the sea too, which were all in his enemy's hands, and by the help of
which the victory could have been secured without fighting. And what is
alleged as an apology in vindication of Pompey, is to a general of his
age and standing the greatest of disgraces. For, granting that a young
commander might by clamour and outcry be deprived of his fortitude and
strength of mind, and weakly forsake his better judgment, and the thing
be neither strange nor altogether unpardonable, yet for Pompey the Great,
whose camp the Romans called their country, and his tent the senate, styling
the consuls, praetors, and all other magistrates who were conducting the
government at Rome by no better title than that of rebels and traitors,
for him, whom they well knew never to have been under the command of any
but himself, having served all his campaigns under himself as sole general,
for him upon so small a provocation as the scoffs of Favonius and Domitius,
and lest he should bear the nickname of Agamemnon, to be wrought upon,
and even forced to hazard the whole empire and liberty of Rome upon the
cast of a die, was surely indeed intolerable. Who, if he had so much regarded
a present infamy, should have guarded the city at first with his arms,
and fought the battle in defence of Rome, not have left it as he did: nor
while declaring his flight from Italy an artifice in the manner of Themistocles,
nevertheless be ashamed in Thessaly of a prudent delay before engaging.
Heaven had not appointed the Pharsalian fields to be the stage and theatre
upon which they should contend for the empire of Rome, neither was he summoned
thither by any herald upon challenge, with intimation that he must either
undergo the combat or surrender the prize to another. There were many other
fields, thousands of cities, and even the whole earth placed at his command,
by the advantage of his fleet and his superiority at sea, if he would but
have followed the examples of Maximus, Marius, Lucullus, and even Agesilaus
himself, who endured no less tumults within the city of Sparta, when the
Thebans provoked him to come out and fight in defence of the land, and
sustained in Egypt also numerous calumnies, slanders, and suspicions on
the part of the king, whom he counselled to abstain from a battle. And
thus following always what he had determined in his own judgment upon mature
advice, by that means he not only preserved the Egyptians against their
wills, not only kept Sparta, in those desperate convulsions, by his sole
act, safe from overthrow, but even was able to set up trophies likewise
in the city over the Thebans, having given his countrymen an occasion of
being victorious afterwards by not at first leading them out, as they tried
to force him to do, to their own destruction. The consequence was that
in the end Agesilaus was commended by the very men, when they found themselves
saved, upon whom he had put this compulsion, whereas Pompey, whose error
had been occasioned by others, found those his accusers whose advice had
misled him. Some indeed profess that he was deceived by his father-in-law
Scipio, who, designing to conceal and keep to himself the greatest part
of that treasure which he had brought out of Asia, pressed Pompey to battle,
upon the pretence that there would be a want of money. Yet admitting he
was deceived, one in his place ought not to have been so, nor should have
allowed so slight an artifice to cause the hazard of such mighty interests.
And thus we have taken a view of each, by comparing together their conduct
and actions in war.
As to their voyages into Egypt, one steered his course thither
out of necessity in flight; the other neither honourably, nor of necessity,
but as a mercenary soldier, having enlisted himself into the service of
a barbarous nation for pay, that he might be able afterwards to wage war
upon the Greeks. And secondly, what we charge upon the Egyptians in the
name of Pompey, the Egyptians lay to the charge of Agesilaus. Pompey trusted
them and was betrayed and murdered by them; Agesilaus accepted their confidence
and deserted them, transferring his aid to the very enemies who were now
attacking those whom he had been brought over to assist.
THE END
|
