The Comparison of Lucullus with Cimon   

But did not Cimon also suffer like him in this? For the citizens arraigned
him, and did not leave off till they had banished him, that, as Plato
says, they might not hear him for the space of ten years. For high
and noble minds seldom please the vulgar, or are acceptable to them;
for the force they use to straighten their distorted actions gives
the same pain as surgeons' bandages do in bringing dislocated bones
to their natural position. Both of them, perhaps, come off pretty
much with an equal acquittal on this count.
Lucullus very much outwent him in war, being the first Roman who carried
an army over Taurus, passed the Tigris, took and burned the royal
palaces of Asia in the sight of the kings, Tigranocerta, Cabira, Sinope,
and Nisibis, seizing and overwhelming the northern parts as far as
the Phasis, the east as far as Media, and making the South and Red
Sea his own through the kings of the Arabians. He shattered the power
of the kings, and narrowly missed their persons, while like wild beasts
they fled away into deserts and thick and impassable woods. In demonstration
of this superiority, we see that the Persians, as if no great harm
had befallen them under Cimon, soon after appeared in arms against
the Greeks, and overcame and destroyed their numerous forces in Egypt.
But after Lucullus, Tigranes and Mithridates were able to do nothing;
the latter, being disabled and broken in the former wars, never dared
to show his army to Pompey outside the camp, but fled away to Bosporus,
and there died. Tigranes threw himself, naked and unarmed, down before
Pompey, and taking his crown from his head laid it at his feet, complimenting
Pompey with what was not his own, but, in real truth, the conquest
already effected by Lucullus. And when he received the ensigns of
majesty again, he was well pleased, evidently because he had forfeited
them before. And the commander, as the wrestler, is to be accounted
to have done most who leaves an adversary almost conquered for his
successor. Cimon moreover, when he took the command, found the power
of the king broken, and the spirits of the Persians humbled by their
great defeats and incessant routs under Themistocles, Pausanias, and
Leontychides, and thus easily overcame the bodies of men whose souls
were quelled and defeated beforehand. But Tigranes had never yet in
many combats been beaten, and was flushed with success when he engaged
with Lucullus. There is no comparison between the numbers which came
against Lucullus and those subdued by Cimon. All which things being
rightly considered, it is a hard matter to give judgment. For supernatural
favour also appears to have attended both of them, directing the one
what to do, the other what to avoid, and thus they have, both of them,
so to say, the vote of the gods, to declare them noble and divine
characters.
THE END