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5Such was the end of Pompey the Great, whereby was proved once more the weakness and the strange fortune of the human race. 2For, although he was not at all deficient in foresight, but had always been absolutely secure against any force able to do him harm, yet he was deceived; and although he had won many unexpected victories in Africa, and many, too, in Asia and Europe, both by land and by sea, ever since boyhood, yet now in his fifty-eighth year he was defeated without apparent reason. 3Although he had subdued the entire Roman sea, he perished on it; and although he had once been, as the saying is, “master of a thousand ships,” he was destroyed in a tiny boat near Egypt and in a sense by Ptolemy, whose father he had once restored from exile to that land and to his kingdom. 4The man whom Roman soldiers were then still guarding,—soldiers left behind by Gabinius as a favour from Pompey and on account of the hatred felt by the Egyptians for the young prince’s father,—this very man seemed to have put him to death by the hands of both Egyptians and Romans. 5Thus Pompey, who previously had been considered the most powerful of the Romans, so that he even received the nickname of Agamemnon, was now butchered like one of the lowest of the Egyptians themselves, not only near Mount Casius but on the anniversary of the day on which he had once celebrated a triumph over Mithridates and the pirates. 6So even in this respect the two parts of his career were utterly contradictory: on that day of yore he had gained 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. 7Of his fellow-voyagers some were captured at once, while others escaped, among them his wife and son. His wife later obtained pardon and came back safely to Rome, while Sextus proceeded to Africa to his brother Gnaeus; these are the names by which they were distinguished, since they both bore the name of Pompey.
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