Brutus

When Brutus saw that the city of Patara was holding out strongly against him, he hesitated to attack it, and was in perplexity, fearing that it would be afflicted with the same madness; but as he held some of its women prisoners of war, he released them without ransom.

They were the wives and daughters of prominent men, and by rehearsing the praises of Brutus, calling him a man of the greatest moderation and justice, they persuaded them to yield and surrender their city.

Consequently all the rest of the Lycians came and entrusted themselves to him, and found that his goodness and kindness exceeded their hopes.

For whereas Cassius, about the same time, compelled the Rhodians individually to pay in to him all the gold and silver they possessed (thus accumulating about eight hundred talents), and fined the city as a whole five hundred talents more, Brutus exacted only a hundred and fifty talents from the Lycians, and, without doing them any other injury, set out with his army for Ionia.

Many were his memorable achievements in meting out rewards or punishments to those who deserved them, but I shall here describe only that in which both he himself and the chief men of Rome took especial pleasure.

When Pompey the Great, after he had been stripped of his great power by Caesar, put in as a fugitive at Pelusium in Egypt, the guardians of the boy king were holding a council with their friends, at which opinions differed. Some thought they should receive Pompey, others that they should repulse him from Egypt.

But a certain Theodotus, of Chios, who was attached to the king as a paid teacher of rhetoric, and was at this time deemed worthy of a place in the council for lack of better men, declared that both were wrong, both those who would admit and those who would reject Pompey;