ight, but was deceived by having been
always absolutely secure against any force of harmful potency. He had
won many unexpected victories in Africa, and many in Asia and Europe,
both by land and by sea ever since boyhood; and was now in the
fifty-eighth year of his age defeated without good reason. He who had
subdued the entire Roman sea perished on it: and whereas he had once, as
the story goes, been master of a thousand ships, he was destroyed in a
tiny boat near Egypt and really by that same Ptolemy whose father he had
once restored from exile to that land and to his kingdom. The man whom
at that time Roman soldiers were still guarding, soldiers left behind by
Gabinius as a favor to Pompey and on account of the hatred felt by the
Egyptians for the young prince's father, seemed now to have put him to
death by the hands of those Romans and those Egyptians. Pompey, who was
previously considered the dominant figure among the Romans so that he
even had the nickname of _Agamemnon_, was now slain like any of the
lowest of the Egyptians themselves, near Mount Casius and on the
anniversary of the day on which he had celebrated a triumph over
Mithridates and the pirates. Even in this point, therefore, there was
nothing similar in the two parts of his career. Of yore on that day he
had experienced the most brilliant success, whereas he now suffered the
most grievous fate: again, following a certain oracle he had been
suspicious of all the citizens named Cassius, but instead of being the
object of a plot by any man called Cassius he died and was buried beside
the mountain that had this name. Of his fellow voyagers some were
captured at once, while others fled, among them his wife and child. The
former under a safe conduct came later safely to Rome: the latter,
Sextus, proceeded to Africa to his brother Gnaeus; these are the names by
which they are distinguished, since they both bore the appellation
Pompey.

[-6-] Caesar, when he had attended to pressing demands after the battle
and had assigned to certain others Greece and the remainder of that
region to win over and administer, himself pursued after Pompey. He
hurried forward as far as Asia in quest of news about him, and there
waited for a time since no one knew which way he had sailed. Everything
turned out favorably for him: for instance, while crossing the
Hellespont in a kind of ferryboat, he met Pompey's fleet sailing with
Lucius Cassius in command, but so far from suffer