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 Caesar by sea, and was forced by him to hazard
everything on the event of a land battle; for as soon as Caesar 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
which he was to contend with Caesar for the empire of the world, nor
was he summoned by the voice of a herald either to fight or to avow
himself vanquished. There were many plains, and innumerable cities and
countries which his command of the sea would have enabled him to
reach, if he had wished to imitate Fabius Maximus, Marius, Lucullus,
or Agesilaus himself, who resisted the same kind of clamour at Sparta,
when his countrymen wished to fight the Thebans and protect their
native land; while in Egypt he endured endless reproac