es not become history either to repeat the
reports handed down from the contemporary gossip of the city, or
to set about the childish attempt to ascertain the truth out of such
materials. This much only is clear, that the instigator of the deed
must have belonged to the Gracchan party; the assassination of Scipio
was the democratic reply to the aristocratic massacre at the temple
of Fidelity. The tribunals did not interfere. The popular party,
justly fearing that its leaders Gaius Gracchus, Flaccus, and Carbo,
whether guilty or not, might be involved in the prosecution, opposed
with all its might the institution of an inquiry; and the aristocracy,
which lost in Scipio quite as much an antagonist as an ally, was not
unwilling to let the matter sleep. The multitude and men of moderate
views were shocked; none more so than Quintus Metellus, who had
disapproved of Scipio's interference against reform, but turned away
with horror from such confederates, and ordered his four sons to carry
the bier of his great antagonist to the funeral pile. The funeral
was hurried over; with veiled head the last of the family of the
conqueror of Zama was borne forth, without any one having been
previously allowed to see the face of the deceased, and the flames
of the funeral pile consumed with the remains of the illustrious
man the traces at the same time of the crime.

The history of Rome presents various men of greater genius than Scipio
Aemilianus, but none equalling him in moral purity, in the utter
absence of political selfishness, in generous love of his country,
and none, perhaps, to whom destiny has assigned a more tragic part.
Conscious of the best intentions and of no common abilities, he was
doomed to see the ruin of his country carried out before his eyes,
and to repress within him every earnest attempt to save it, because
he clearly perceived that he should only thereby make the evil worse;
doomed to the necessity of sanctioning outrages like that of Nasica,
and at the same time of defending the work of the victim against
his murderers. Yet he might say that he had not lived in vain.
It was to him, at least quite as much as to the author of the
Sempronian law, that the Roman burgesses were indebted for an increase
of nearly 80,000 new farm-allotments; he it was too who put a stop to
this distribution of the domains, when it had produced such benefit
as it could produce. That it was time to break it off, was no doubt
disp