that things could be changed. What was to happen would happen; to
perturb and perplex oneself was useless and might be dangerous. The
people who got excited and believed that great improvements could be
brought about easily seemed to him stupid and dangerous. It was easy to
breed disorder; to spoil the things that had made Rome great; very hard
to make alterations. The men who really served the Republic were not the
politicians clamouring in the market-place, orating in the Assembly, or
the idle dirty mobs who listened to them and were ready to shout for
this to-day and the other thing to-morrow. Them Scipio scorned. The real
workers and builders he thought were the silent soldiers fighting and
working in all the dreariness and discomfort of camps in foreign
countries. In Scipio there was a good deal of the temper of that Lucius
Junius Brutus who in the earliest days of the Republic had condemned his
own sons to death for treason to the State. He judged his own friends
and relations more, not less, severely than other people. Thus when
Tiberius Gracchus, the kinsman and brother-in-law of Scipio (his own
wife was Sempronia, the sister of Gracchus) brought in his Land Bill and
came, over it, into conflict with the Senate, Scipio was against him.
When disorders and rioting in the streets of Rome grew out of the
struggle over the Land Bill and Tiberius was murdered, Scipio made a
speech in the Senate in which he said that Tiberius had deserved his
death. He quoted a line of Homer: 'So perish all who do the like again.'
When the people shouted him down in their anger he turned on them with
cold contempt--fear of any kind was not in Scipio--and said, 'Be silent,
ye to whom Italy is only a step-mother.' Speeches like that did not make
him popular. Scipio was so much respected that men always listened when
he spoke. There was something lofty and splendid about him and no
soldier of his day could compare with him. But he stood aloof. Outside
his own circle of close friends he was little known and less understood.

His death was sudden and mysterious. One day after speaking in the
Senate he returned home apparently well and in his ordinary calm frame
of mind. Nothing had occurred to disturb him. He did not seem to be
disturbed about anything. Next morning he was found dead in his bed.
What had happened was never known. It was whispered about that he had
been murdered.

V

The Gracchi

No account of the heroes of Roman