body arrived, but rashly assaulted the city, and fell by an unknown hand in an insignificant skirmish.  He did not meet his death facing overwhelming odds, like Kleombrotus at Leuktra, nor yet in the act of rallying his broken forces, or of consummating his victory, as did Cyrus and Epameinondas.  All these died as became generals and kings; but Lysander ingloriously flung away his life like any common light infantry soldier, and proved the wisdom of the ancient Spartans, who always avoided the attack of fortified places, where the bravest may fall by the hand of the most worthless man, or even by that of a woman or a child, as Achilles is said to have been slain by Paris at the gates of Troy.  Turning now to Sulla, it is not easy to enumerate all the pitched battles he won, the thousands of enemies that he overthrew.  He twice took Rome itself by storm, and at Athens he took Peiraeus, not by famine like Lysander, but after a gigantic struggle, at the end of which he drove Archelaus into the sea.

It is important also to consider who were the generals to whom they were opposed.  It must have been mere child’s-play to Lysander to defeat Antiochus, the pilot of Alkibiades, and to outwit Philokles, the Athenian mob-orator,

     “A knave, whose tongue was sharper than his sword,”

for they were both of them men whom Mithridates would not have thought a match for one of his grooms, or Marius for one of his lictors.  Not to mention the rest of the potentates, consuls, praetors and tribunes with whom Sulla had to contend, what Roman was more to be dreaded than Marius?  What king more powerful than Mithridates?  Who was there in Italy more warlike than Lamponius and Pontius Telesinus?  Yet Sulla drove Marius into exile, crushed the power of Mithridates, and put Lamponius and Pontius to death.

V. What, however, to my mind incontestably proves Sulla to have been the greater man of the two, is that, whereas Lysander was always loyally assisted by his countrymen in all his enterprises, Sulla, during his campaign in Boeotia, was a mere exile.  His enemies were all-powerful at Rome.  They had driven his wife to seek safety in flight, had pulled down his house, and murdered his friends.  Yet he fought in his country’s cause against overwhelming numbers, and gained the victory.  Afterwards, when Mithridates offered to join him and furnish him with the means of overcoming his private enemies, he showed no sign of weakness, and would not even speak to him or give him his hand until he heard him solemnly renounce all claim to Asia Minor, engage to deliver up his fleet, and to restore Bithynia and Cappadocia to their native sovereigns.  Never did Sulla act in a more noble and high-minded manner.  He preferred his country’s good to his own private advantage, and, like a well-bred hound, never relaxed his hold till his enemy gave in, and then began to turn his attention to redressing his own private wrongs.

Perhaps their treatment of Athens gives us some insight into their respective characters.  Although that city sided with Mithridates and fought to maintain his empire, yet when Sulla had taken it he made it free and independent.  Lysander, on the other hand, felt no pity for Athens when she fell from her glorious position as the leading state in Greece, but put an end to her free constitution and established the cruel and lawless government of the Thirty.