4.4
In Sulla’s case, at any rate, it is no easy matter even to enumerate the pitched battles which he won and the myriads of enemies whom he slew; Rome itself he captured twice, and he took the Piraeus of Athens, not by famine, as Lysander did, but by a series of great battles, after he had driven Archelaüs from the land to the sea. It is important, too, that we consider the character of their antagonists. For I think it was the merest child’s play to win a sea-fight against Antiochius, Alcibiades’ pilot, or to outwit Philocles, the Athenian demagogue, Inglorious foe, whose only weapon is a sharpened tongue;An iambic trimeter of unknown authorship (Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag.2 p. 921). such men as these Mithridates would not have deigned to compare with his groom, nor Marius with his lictor.
4.5
But of the dynasts, consuls, generals, and demagogues who lifted themselves against Sulla, to pass by the rest, who among the Romans was more formidable than Marius? who among the kings was more powerful than Mithridates? who among the Italians was more warlike than Lamponius and Telesinus? And yet Sulla banished the first of these, subdued the second, and slew the others.
