Laelius, who had been his devoted lieutenant in
the Spanish and African wars, Tiberius Gracchus the Elder, the husband
of Scipio's daughter Cornelia, herself a woman of high character and
educated ability; and Aemilius Paulus, whose sister he married and whose
nephew was afterwards adopted into the family of the Scipios by the son
of Africanus and known as Scipio Aemilianus. As they read the plays,
poetry, and philosophy of the Greeks, educated Romans learned that they
were not alone in the world. Before them had lived a people who were
skilled in all the arts of life at a time when they themselves were rude
barbarians, like the Gauls whom they despised.

The Greece of their day, however, was no longer the Greece of the
glorious past. Alexander's great empire, which had extended over half
Asia, had fallen to pieces. In Greece itself the different peoples were
quarrelling among themselves. Even after the Roman armies had freed the
Greeks from Philip of Macedonia, Antiochus of Asia threatened them; at
the Court of Antiochus was Hannibal. It was as an envoy from Rome to his
Court that Scipio met and talked with Hannibal. Later he went out as
assistant to his brother Lucius, when the latter was made commander in
the war against Antiochus, and finally defeated him at the battle of
Magnesia in Asia Minor.

By no means all educated Romans shared Scipio's feelings about Greece.
On the contrary there were many who thought that the simplicity of the
grand old Roman character was being destroyed, while the young men were
falling into luxurious and effeminate ways. Marcus Porcius Cato, for
example, a man of the utmost uprightness and courage, took this view. He
was a hard man himself, and he wanted others to be hard. He could see no
difference between a love of beauty and luxury. He saw nothing that was
bad in the old order, nothing that was good in the new.

The Scipios, Africanus and his brother, who now bore the name of
Asiaticus, were Cato's particular enemies. He had struggled in the
Senate with Africanus over Carthage, for the old man wanted to see the
city of Hannibal razed to the ground. He hated Scipio's Greek ideas. He
thought him too proud and self-willed to be a good servant of the State.
After the Greek campaign Cato called upon Asiaticus to give an account
of the money spent in the wars against Antiochus, suggesting that he had
been extravagant. That such a charge should be brought against his
brother roused Scipio