Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.4, 1865).djvu/265

 CAESAR. 257 fell into the hands of Sylla's soldiers, who were searching those parts in order to apprehend any who had absconded. Cassar, by a bribe of two talents, prevailed with Corne- lius, their captain, to let him go, and was no sooner dis- missed but he put to sea, and made for Bithynia. After a short stay there with Nicomedes, the king, in his pas- sage back he was taken near the island Pharmacusa by some of the pirates, who, at that time, with large fleets of ships and innumerable smaller vessels infested the seas everywhere. When these men at first demanded of him twenty tal- ents for his ransom, he laughed at them for not under- standing the value of their prisoner, and voluntarily engaged to give them fifty. He presently despatched those about him to several places to raise the money, till at last he was left among a set of the most bloodthirsty people in the world, the Cilicians, only with one friend and two attendants. Yet he made so little of them, that when he had a mind to sleep, he would send to them, and order them to make no noise. For thirty-eight days, with all the freedom in the world, he amused himself with joining in their exercises and games, as if they had not been his keepers, but his guards. He wrote verses and speeches, and made them his auditors, and those who did not admire them, he called to their faces illiterate and barbarous, and would often, in raillery, threaten to hang them. They were greatly taken with this, and attributed his free-talking to a kind of simplicity and boyish play- fulness. As soon as his ransom was come from Miletus, he paid it, and was discharged, and proceeded at once to man some ships at the port of Miletus, and went in pur- suit of the pirates, whom he surprised with their ships still stationed at the island, and took most of them. Their money he made his prize, and the men he secured in prison at Pergamus, and made application to Junius, VOL. iv. 17