Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans
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 favor 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
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 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
defenseless, and fled; whereas he ought either to have conquered in
fight for the defense 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
term 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 clamor 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 defense 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 theater 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 defense of the land, and sustained in
Egypt also numerous calumnies, slanders, and suspicions on the part
of the king, whom he counseled 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 honorably, 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 be had been brought over to assist.
ALEXANDER
It being my purpose to write the lives of Alexander the king, and
of Caesar, by whom Pompey was destroyed, the multitude of their
great actions affords so large a field that I were to blame if I
should not by way of apology forewarn my reader that I have chosen
rather to epitomize the most celebrated parts of their story, than
to insist at large on every particular circumstance of it. It
must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories,
but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish
us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men;
sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest,
informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the
most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest
battles whatsoever. Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact
in the lines and features of the face in which the character is
seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to
give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of
the souls of men, and while I endeavor by these to portray their
lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles
to be treated of by others.
It is agreed on by all hands, that on the father's side, Alexander
descended from Hercules by Caranus, and from Aeacus by Neoptolemus
on the mother's side. His father Philip, being in Samothrace,
when he was quite young, fell in love there with Olympias, in
company with whom he was initiated in the religious ceremonies of
the country, and her father and mother being both dead, soon
after, with the consent of her brother Arymbas, he married her.
The night before the consummation of their marriage, she dreamed
that a thunderbolt fell upon her body, which kindled a great fire,
whose divided flames dispersed themselves all about, and then were
extinguished. And Philip some time after he was married, dreamt
that he sealed up his wife's body with a seal, whose impression,
as he fancied, was the figure of a lion. Some of the diviners
interpreted this as a warning to Philip to look narrowly to his
wife; but Aristander of Telmessus, considering how unusual it was
to seal up anything that was empty, assured him the meaning of
his dream was, that the queen was with child of a boy, who would
one day prove as stout and courageous as a lion. Once, moreover,
a serpent was found lying by Olympias as she slept, which more
than anything else, it is said, abated Philip's passion for her;
and whether he feared her as an enchantress, or thought she had
commerce with some god, and so looked on himself as excluded, he
was ever after less fond of her conversation. Others say, that
the women of this country having always been extremely addicted
to the enthusiastic Orphic rites, and the wild worship of Bacchus,
(upon which account they were called Clodones, and Mimallones,)
imitated in many things the practices of the Edonian and Thracian
women about Mount Haemus, from whom the word threskeuein, seems
to have been derived, as a special term for superfluous and
over-curious forms of adoration; and that Olympias, zealously
affecting these fanatical and enthusiastic inspirations, to
perform them with more barbaric dread, was wont in the dances
proper to these ceremonies to have great tame serpents about her,
which sometimes creeping out of the ivy and the mystic fans,
sometimes winding themselves about the sacred spears, and the
women's chaplets, made a spectacle which the men could not look
upon without terror.
Philip, after this vision, sent Chaeron of Megalopolis to consult
the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, by which he was commanded to
perform sacrifice, and henceforth pay particular honor, above all
other gods, to Ammon; and was told he should one day lose that eye
with which he presumed to peep through the chink of the door, when
he saw the god, under the form of a serpent, in the company of his
wife. Eratosthenes says that Olympias, when she attended
Alexander on his way to the army in his first expedition, told him
the secret of his birth, and bade him behave himself with courage
suitable to his divine extraction. Others again affirm that she
wholly disclaimed any pretensions of the kind, and was wont to
say, "When will Alexander leave off slandering me to Juno?"
Alexander was born the sixth of Hecatombaeon, which month the
Macedonians call Lous, the same day that the temple of Diana at
Ephesus was burnt; which Hegesias of Magnesia makes the occasion
of a conceit, frigid enough to have stopped the conflagration.
The temple, he says, took fire and was burnt while its mistress
was absent, assisting at the birth of Alexander. And all the