d by surrender many ships, and
among them ninety with brazen beaks. The pirates, who amounted to more
than twenty thousand, he never thought of putting to death, but he
considered that it would not be prudent to let them go and to allow
them to be dispersed or to unite again, being poor, and warlike and
many in number. Reflecting then that by nature man neither is made nor
is a wild animal nor unsocial, and that he changes his character by
the practice of vice which is contrary to his nature, but that he is
tamed by habits and change of place and life, and that wild beasts by
being accustomed to a gentler mode of living put off their wildness
and savageness, he determined to transfer the men to the land from the
sea and to let them taste a quiet life by being accustomed to live in
cities and to cultivate the ground. The small and somewhat depopulated
cities of Cilicia received some of the pirates whom they associated
with themselves, and the cities received some additional tracts of
land; and the city of Soli,[243] which had lately been deprived of its
inhabitants by Tigranes[244] the Armenian king, he restored and
settled many of them in it. To the greater part he gave as their
residence Dyme[245] in Achaea, which was then without inhabitants and
had much good land.

XXIX. Now those who envied Pompeius found fault with these measures;
but as to his conduct towards Metellus[246] in Crete, even his best
friends were not pleased with it. Metellus, who was a kinsman of the
Metellus who had the command in Iberia jointly with Pompeius, was sent
as commander to Crete before Pompeius was chosen. For Crete was a kind
of second source of pirates and next to Cilicia; and Metellus having
caught many of them in the island took them prisoners and put them to
death. Those who still survived and were blockaded, sent a suppliant
message and invited Pompeius to the island, as being a part of his
government and falling entirely within the limits reckoned from the
coast. Pompeius accepted the invitation and wrote to Metellus to
forbid him continuing the war. He also wrote to the cities not to pay
any attention to Metellus, and he sent as commander one of his own
officers, Lucius Octavius, who entering into the forts of the besieged
pirates and fighting on their side made Pompeius not only odious and
intolerable, but ridiculous also, inasmuch as he lent his name to
accursed and godless men and threw around them his reputation as a
kind of