Comparison of Lysander and Sulla (4.4)

In Sulla’s case, at any rate, it is no easy matter even to enumerate the pitched battles which he won and the myriads of enemies whom he slew; Rome itself he captured twice, and he took the Piraeus of Athens, not by famine, as Lysander did, but by a series of great battles, after he had driven Archelaüs from the land to the sea. It is important, too, that we consider the character of their antagonists. For I think it was the merest child’s play to win a sea-fight against Antiochius, Alcibiades’ pilot, or to outwit Philocles, the Athenian demagogue,

Inglorious foe, whose only weapon is a sharpened tongue;[*]