Comparison of Agesilaus and Pompey (3.2-3.3)

I think also that in merciful behaviour towards their enemies the two men were different. For Agesilaüs was so bent on enslaving Thebes and depopulating Messenia, Thebes the mother-city of his royal line, and Messenia a sister colony to his country,[*] that he nearly lost Sparta, and did lose her supremacy in Greece; whereas Pompey gave cities to such of the pirates as changed their mode of life, and when it was in his power to lead Tigranes the king of Armenia in his triumphal procession, made him an ally instead, saying that he thought more of future time than of a single day.

If, however, it is the greatest and most far-reaching decisions and acts in war that are to determine preeminence in the virtues of leadership, then the Lacedaemonian leaves the Roman far behind. For, in the first place, he did not desert nor abandon his city, though the enemy attacked it with an army of seventy thousand men, while he had only a few men-at-arms, and these had recently been vanquished at Leuctra;