ABSTRACT
The ideal general, in my view, should possess these four qualities – military expertise, personal excellence, prestige and luck.
In knowledge of military affairs Pompey has never been surpassed. . . . Here is a man who moved straight from school and the classroom into his father’s army and the practical study of war, in a terrible campaign against the fiercest enemies. When Pompey was hardly more than a boy he served under a general of outstanding distinction and as a teenager he commanded a mighty army himself. . . . He has waged more wars than other people have read about. . . . In his teenage years he gained military expertise not from the instructions of others but from commands he held himself, not from reverses in warfare but from victories, not from campaigns but from triumphs. . . . Then again, what words can be found to do justice to Pompey’s personal excellence? . . . He has all the qualities of leadership commonly expected – application to duty, courage in danger, thoroughness in operation, swiftness in action, wisdom in strategy – and on his own he possesses these qualities to a greater extent than all other generals that we have seen or heard of.
