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 Cæsar, 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 Cæsar, or else to have acknowledged him as his superior and submitted to him, for Cæsar was both his fellow-countryman and his relative. Yet, after having violently objected to the prorogation of Cæsar'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. 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 Cæsar by sea, and was forced by him to hazard everything on the event of a land battle; for as soon as Cæsar 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