The Comparison of Pompey with Agesilaus   

Thus having drawn out the history of the lives of Agesilaus and Pompey,
the next thing is to compare them; and in order to this, to take a
cursory view, and bring together the points in which they chiefly
disagree; which are these. In the first place, Pompey attained to
all his greatness and glory by the fairest and justest means, owing
his advancement to his own efforts, and to the frequent and important
aid which he rendered Sylla, in delivering Italy from its tyrants.
But Agesilaus appears to have obtained his kingdom, not without offence
both towards gods and towards men, towards these, by procuring judgment
of bastardy against Leotychides, whom his brother had declared his
lawful son, and towards those, by putting a false gloss upon the oracle,
and eluding its sentence against his lameness. Secondly, Pompey never
ceased to display his respect for Sylla during his lifetime, and expressed
it also after his death, by enforcing the honourable interment of
his corpse, in despite of Lepidus, and by giving his daughter in marriage
to his son Faustus. But Agesilaus, upon a slight pretence, cast off
Lysander with reproach and dishonour. Yet Sylla in fact had owed to
Pompey services as much as Pompey ever received from him, whereas
Lysander made Agesilaus King of Sparta and general of all Greece.
Thirdly, Pompey's transgressions of right and justice in his political
life were occasioned chiefly by his relations with other people, and
most of his errors had some affinity, as well as himself to Caesar
and Scipio, his fathers-in-law. But Agesilaus, to gratify the fondness
of his son, saved the life of Sphodrias by a sort of violence, when
he deserved death for the wrong he had done to the Athenians; and
when Phoebidas treacherously broke the peace with Thebes, zealously
abetted him for the sake, it was clear, of the unjust act itself.
In short, what mischief soever Pompey might be said to have brought
on Rome through compliance with the wishes of his friends or through
inadvertency, Agesilaus may be said to have brought on Sparta out
of obstinacy and malice, by kindling the Boeotian war. And if, moreover,
we are to attribute any part of these disasters to some personal ill-fortune,
attaching to the men themselves, in the case of Pompey, certainly
the Romans had no reason to anticipate it. Whereas Agesilaus would
not suffer the Lacedaemonians to avoid what they foresaw and were
forewarned must attend the "lame sovereignty." For had Leotychides
been chargeable ten thousand times as foreign and spurious, yet the
race of the Eurypontidae was still in being, and could easily have
furnished Sparta with a lawful king that was sound in his limbs, had
not Lysander darkened and disguised the true sense of the oracle in
favour of Agesilaus.
Such a politic piece of sophistry as was devised by Agesilaus, in
that great perplexity of the people as to the treatment to be given
to those who had played the coward at the battle of Leuctra, when
after that unhappy defeat he decreed that the laws should sleep for
that day, it would be hard to find any parallel to; neither have we
the fellow of it in all Pompey's story. But on the contrary, Pompey
for a friend thought it no sin to break those very laws which he himself
had made, as if to show at once the force of his friendship, and the
greatness of his power; whereas Agesilaus, under the necessity, as
it seemed, of either rescinding the laws, or not saving the citizens,
contrived an expedient by the help of which the laws should not touch
these citizens, and yet should not, to avoid it, be overthrown. Then
I must commend it as an incomparable act of civil virtue and obedience
in Agesilaus, that immediately upon the receipt of the scytala, he
left the wars in Asia and returned into his country. For he did not,
like Pompey, merely advance his country's interest by acts that contributed
at the same time to promote his own greatness, but looking to his
country's good, for its sake laid aside as great authority and honour
as ever any man had before or since, except Alexander the Great.
But now to take another point of view, if we sum up Pompey's military
expeditions and exploits of war, the number of his trophies, and the
greatness of the powers which he subdued, and the multitude of battles