Comparison of Agesilaus and Pompey

Moreover, if we must assign to any ill-fortune of the two men the disasters which overtook them, that of Pompey could not have been anticipated by the Romans; but Agesilaüs would not permit the Lacedaemonians to guard against the lame sovereignty, although they had heard and knew before- hand about it. For even if Leotychides had been ten thousand times convicted of being bastard and alien, the family of the Eurypontidae could easily have furnished Sparta with a king who was of legitimate birth and sound of limb, had not Lysander darkened the meaning of the oracle in the interests of Agesilaüs.

On the other hand, when we consider the remedy which Agesilaüs applied to the perplexity of the state in dealing with those who had played the coward, after the disaster at Leuctra, when he urged that the laws should slumber for that day, there was never another political device like it, nor can we find anything in Pompey’s career to compare with it; on the contrary, he did not even think it incumbent upon him to abide by the laws which he himself had made, if he might only display the greatness of his power to his friends. But Agesilaüs, when he confronted the necessity of abrogating the laws in order to save his fellow-citizens, devised a way by which the citizens should not be harmed by the laws, nor the laws be abrogated to avoid such harm.

Further, I attribute also to political virtue in Agesilaüs that inimitable act of his in abandoning his career in Asia on receipt of the dispatch-roll. For he did not, like Pompey, help the commonwealth only as he made himself great, but with an eye to the welfare of his country he renounced such great fame and power as no man won before or since his day, except Alexander.