Brutus

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;

for there was but one advantageous course in view of the circumstances, and that was to receive him and put him to death.

And he added, as he closed his speech, A dead man does not bite. The council adopted his opinion, and Pompey the Great lay dead, an example of the unexpected and incredible in human life, and it was the work of Theodotus and his clever rhetoric, as that sophist himself was wont to say with boasting.[*](Cf. Pompey, chapters lxxvii.-lxxx. )

A little while afterwards, however, when Caesar came, the other wretches paid the penalty for their crime and perished wretchedly; as for Theodotus, after borrowing from Fortune enough time for a wandering, destitute, and inglorious life, he did not escape the notice of Brutus, who at this time traversed Asia, but was brought to him and punished, and won more fame for his death than for his life.