The young Scipio was born about 185, and when scarce 17 years old fought with daring bravery at Pydna. While still very young he showed a great devotion to study, which he retained through life. He was a thorough partisan of the new Greek learning, and grouped around him in friendship all the leaders of the Hellenistic movement. Among his dearest friends were Polybius, the Greek statesman and historian, and later Panaetius, the Stoic. In 151 B.C. when the consuls found it difficult to enlist officers and men for service in Spain, where great defeats had been suffered, Scipio volunteered, and served with great distinction as military tribune. When the war with Carthage broke out he
held the same rank, and shone by comparison with his blundering superior officers. Coming to Rome in 148 he stood for the aedileship, but was elected consul for the year 147, and again for 146, when he finished the war. He is said to have grieved over the fate of Carthage, and to have dreaded any further increase of the Roman territory. In 142 Scipio was censor, and acted with almost Catonian severity. In 134, though not a candidate, he was elected to the consulship and put in command of the Roman army then besieging the city of Numantia in Spain. The war, of which this siege formed a part, had been going on for some years most disastrously for the Romans, but Scipio speedily brought it to a conclusion in 133. While before Numantia he received news of the murder of Ti. Gracchus, whose sister he had married and whose cousin he had become by adoption, but whose policy he had on the whole opposed, though he had occasionally coquetted with the democrats. This course cost him the favor of the people, and when in 131 he desired to conduct the war against Aristonicus, only two of the thirty-five tribes voted for his appointment. In 129, after a violent scene in the senate, where he had opposed the carrying out of Ti. Gracchus' agrarian law, he was triumphantly escorted home by a crowd, composed chiefly of Italians whose interests had been threatened by the law. Next morning he was found dead in his bed. Opinion as to the cause of his death was divided at the time and so remained. In the Laelius the death is assumed to have been from natural causes.[[52]] Elsewhere, however, Cicero adopts the view of many of Scipio's friends that he was murdered by Carbo.[[53]] Carbo afterwards lent color to the suspicions by putting himself to death, in order, as was supposed, to avoid a direct prosecution. In ancient times even C. Gracchus was suspected of having thus avenged his brother's death, but no modern scholar of any rank has countenanced the suspicion.
Whether the degree of intimacy between Cato and Scipio, which Cicero assumes, ever existed or not, cannot be determined.[[54]]
There was much in Scipio that would attract Cato. Unlike the elder Africanus, he was severe and simple in his outward life, and though a lover of Greek and Greeks, yet attached to all that was best in the old Roman character and polity. Though an opponent of revolution, he was far from being a partisan of the oligarchy. Altogether, of all Romans, he most nearly deserved the description, 'ανηρ τετραγωνος ανευ ψογου,' 'a man four-square without reproach.' In his De Re Publica, Cicero points to Scipio as the ideal statesman, and often elsewhere eulogizes him as an almost perfect Roman.
(3.) Laelius. Gaius Laelius, born about 186, was Scipio's most distinguished officer before Carthage, and his most intimate friend throughout life. The friendship of the two was one of the most famous in antiquity, and is celebrated in the Laelius. Laelius was an able speaker, writer and soldier, and devoted to Greek learning, particularly to the Stoic philosophy. He is with Cicero the type of a man of culture.[[55]] He, too, is one of the interlocutors in the De Re Publica.
(ii.) SUBJECT-MATTER.
1. General View.
The Cato Maior falls naturally into three parts:—