Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/225

 ANTONY. 217 and that, retiring into Thrace or Macedonia, the quarrel should be decided in a land fight. For Dicornes, also, the king of the Gette, promised to come and join him with a great army, and it would not be any kind of disparage- ment to him to yield the sea to Ca3sar, who, in the Sicilian wars, had had such long practice in ship-fighting ; on the . contrary, it would be simply ridiculous for Antony, who was by land the most experienced commander living, to make no use of his well-disciplined and numerous infantry, scattering and wasting his forces by parcelling them out in the ships. But for all this, Cleopatra prevailed that a searfight should determine all, having already an eye to flight, and ordering all her afiairs, not so as to assist in gaining a victory, but to escape with the greatest safety from the first commencement of a defeat. There were two long walls, extending from the camp to the station of the ships, between which Antony used to pass to and fro without suspecting any danger. But Caesar, upon the suggestion of a servant that it would not be difficult to surprise him, laid an ambush, which, rising up somewhat too hastily, seized the man that came just before him, he himself escaping narrowly by flight. When it was resolved to stand to a fight at sea, they set fire to all the Egyptian ships except sixty ; and of these the best and largest, from ten banks down to three, he manned with twenty thousand full-armed men, and two thousand archers. Here it is related that a foot cap- tain, one that had fought often under Antony, and had his body aU mangled with wounds, exclaimed, " 0, my general, what have our wounds and swords done to dis- please you, that you should give your confidence to rotten timbers ? Let Egyptians and Phoenicians contend at sea, give us the land, where we know well how to die upon the spot or gain the victory." To which he answered nothing, but, by his look and motion of his hand seeming