[238] The incident referred to is narrated in Appian. Punica, 103. Scipio relieved this body of men, who were beleaguered on the top of a hill, by a rapid and bold movement of his cavalry.
[239] Odyssey, 20, 495. Cato had always been opposed to the Scipios, but Livy seems to attribute his former criticisms of the younger Africanus to his general habit of caustic disparagement (vir promptioris ad vituperandum linguae), and we know that his elder son had married a daughter of Paulus, sister to the younger Africanus.
[240] Livy, Ep. 49.
[241] He seems to have forgotten his namesake mentioned in 11, [15].
[242] For Callicrates, the author of the Romanising policy, see 26, [1]-3. One of the statues raised to him by the Spartan exiles was at Olympia, the base of which has been discovered. See Hicks’s Greek Inscriptions, p. 330. To what the fragment refers is not clear, but evidently to something connected with the popular movement against Sparta, and a recurrence to the policy of Philopoemen as represented by Lycortas, which eventually brought down the vengeance of Rome.
[243] Prusias was killed at Pergamum by his son Nicomedes with the connivance of Attalus (Livy, Ep. 50).
[244] A considerable passage is here lost, with the exception of a few words, insufficient to ground a conjectural translation upon.
[245] Demetrius II., son of Antigonus Gonatas.
[246] Pseudophilippus, after cutting to pieces a Roman legion under the praetor Juventius, was conquered and captured by Q. Caecilius Metellus in B.C. 148 (Livy, Ep. 50; Eutrop. 4, 6).
[247] Massanissa, feeling himself to be dying, had asked Scipio to come to him. He left his sons strict injunctions to submit the arrangements of the succession and division of his kingdom to Scipio. Appian, Punica, 105; Livy, Ep. 50. Livy has adopted the statement of Polybius as to the age of Massanissa at his death; and Cicero (de Sen. § 34) has made Cato take the same reckoning, perhaps from Polybius also. But it does not agree with another statement of Livy himself, who (24, 49) speaks of him as being seventeen in B.C. 213, in which case he would be in his eighty-second year in B.C. 148. It is, however, proposed to read xxvii. for xvii. in this passage of Livy.