occasion
he showed a power of quick retort. As censor he had degraded a man
named Asellus, whom Mummius afterwards restored to the equites.
Asellus impeached Scipio, and taunted him with the unluckiness of his
censorship--its mortality, &c. 'No wonder,' said Scipio, 'for the man
who inaugurated it rehabilitated you.'

Such anecdotes show that he was a vigorous speaker. He was of a
healthy constitution, temperate, brave, and honest in money matters;
for he led a simple life, and with all his opportunities for extortion
did not die rich. Polybius, the historian, Panaetius, the philosopher,
Terence and Lucilius, the poets, and the orator and politician
Laelius were his friends. From his position, his talents, and his
associations, he seemed marked out as the one man who could and
would desire to step forth as the saviour of his country. But such
self-sacrifice is not exhibited by men of Scipio's type. Too able to
be blind to the signs of the times, they are swayed by instincts too
strong for their convictions. An aristocrat of aristocrats, Scipio was
a reformer only so far as he thought reform might prolong the reign of
his order. From any more radical measures he shrank with dislike,
if not with fear. The weak spot often to be found in those cultured
aristocrats who coquet with liberalism was fatal to his chance of
being a hero. He was a trimmer to the core, who, without intentional
dishonesty, stood facing both ways till the hour came when he was
forced to range himself on one side or the other, and then he took the
side which he must have known to be the wrong one. Palliation of the
errors of a man placed in so terribly difficult a position is only
just; but laudation of his statesmanship seems absurd. As a statesman
he carried not one great measure, and if one was conceived in his
circle, he cordially approved of its abandonment. To those who claim
for him that he saw the impossibility of those changes which his
brother-in-law advocated, it is sufficient to reply that Rome did
not rest till those changes had been adopted, and that the hearty
co-operation of himself and his friends would have gone far to turn
failure into success. But his mind was too narrow to break through the
associations which had environed him from his childhood. When Tiberius
Gracchus, a nobler man than himself, had suffered martyrdom for the
cause with which he had only dallied, he was base enough to quote from
Homer [Greek: os apoloito kai all