POMPEY AND AGESILAUS. 155

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 preeminence 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 Avar, 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 bat- tle 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 hav- ing 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 prolong- ation of the term of his government, and thought it in- tolerable to grant another consulship, to him he gave the power, by letting him take the city, to tell Metellus, to- gether 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 dis- played, and by it kept himself invincible ; whereas in con- tending with Pompey, Caesar, who was the weaker, suc- cessfully declined the danger, and his own strength being

in his land forces, drove him into putting the conflict to