Further, I attribute also to political virtue in Agesilaüs that inimitable act of his in abandoning his career in Asia on receipt of the dispatch-roll. For he did not, like Pompey, help the commonwealth only as he made himself great, but with an eye to the welfare of his country he renounced such great fame and power as no man won before or since his day, except Alexander.

And now from another point of view, that of their campaigns and achievements in war, the trophies of Pompey were so many, the forces led by him so vast, and the pitched battles in which he was victorious so innumerable, that not even Xenophon, I think, would compare the victories of Agesilaüs, although that historian, by reason of his other excellent qualities, is specially privileged, as it were, to say and write whatever he pleases about the man.