impetuosity and enthusiasm had cooled, men began
to ask themselves amid the general silence what they had really
done, and whether favour had not carried the day against
judgement. There was a strong feeling that the proconsul was too
young, and some even found a bad omen in the misfortunes of his
family and in the very name of Scipio, as he was leaving two
households in mourning to go to provinces where he would have to
fight over the tombs of his father and of his uncle.

When Scipio saw the trouble and anxiety caused by this hasty
action, he invited the people to meet him, and spoke with such
pride and confidence of his youth and the duty entrusted to him
and the war which he was to conduct that he awakened and renewed
all the former enthusiasm, and filled his hearers with a more
sanguine hope than is usually suggested by trust in promises or by
inference from established facts. Scipio, indeed, did not merely
deserve admiration for his genuine qualities, but from his youth
upwards he had been endowed with a peculiar faculty for making the
most of them. When he gave counsel to the people, he founded it on
a vision of the night or an inspiration seemingly divine, either
because he was in some sort influenced by superstition, or because
he expected that his wishes and commands would be carried out
readily if they came with a kind of oracular sanction. In very
early life he began to create this impression, and as soon as he
was of age, he would do no business, public or private, till he
had gone to the Capitol and entered the temple, generally sitting
there for a time alone and apart. By this habit, which he
maintained all through his life, he gave support, either of set
purpose or by accident, to a belief held by some that he was of
divine parentage, and he thus revived a similar and equally
baseless story, once current about Alexander the Great, that he
was the son of a huge serpent, which had often been seen in the
house before his birth, but glided away at the approach of any one
and disappeared from sight. Scipio did nothing to discredit these
wonders; in fact, he indirectly confirmed them, for, if he
asserted nothing, he did not deny anything.

Livy, xxvi. 18-19.

He was still very young, nevertheless he had already made people feel
confidence in him. In Spain, although he began with a bad failure since
he allowed Hasdrubal to cross the Py