commonly been regarded. He is usually extolled as a patriot who
would not stir to humour a Roman rabble, but who, when downtrodden
honest farmers, his comrades in the wars, appealed to him, at once
stepped into the arena as their champion. [Sidenote: Attitude of
Scipio Aemilianus.] In reality he was a reactionist who, when the
inevitable results of those liberal ideas which had been broached in
his own circle stared him in the face, seized the first available
means of stifling them. The world had moved too fast for him. As
censor, instead of beseeching the gods to increase the glory of the
State, he begged them to preserve it. And no doubt he would have
greatly preferred that the gods should act without his intervention.
Brave as a man, he was a pusillanimous statesman; and when confronted
by the revolutionary spirit which he and his friends had helped to
evoke, he determined at all costs to prop up the senatorial power.
[Sidenote: His unpopularity with the Senate.] But the Senate hated
him, partly as a trimmer, and partly because by his personal character
he rebuked their baseness. He had just impeached Aurelius Cotta, a
senator, and the judices, from spite against him, had refused to
convict. So he turned to the Italian land-owners, and became
the mouthpiece of their selfishness, for a selfish or at best a
narrow-minded end. The nobles must have, at heart, disliked his
allies; but they cheered him in the Senate, and he succeeded in
practically strangling the commission by procuring the transfer of its
jurisdiction to the consuls. The consul for the time being immediately
found a pretext for leaving Rome, and a short time afterwards Scipio
was found one morning dead in his bed. [Sidenote: His death.] He had
gone to his chamber the night before to think over what he should say
next day to the people about the position of the country class, and,
if he was murdered, it is almost as probable that he was murdered by
some rancorous foe in the Senate as by Carbo or any other Gracchan. It
was well for his reputation that he died just then. Without Sulla's
personal vices he might have played Sulla's part as a politician, and
his atrocities in Spain as well as his remark on the death of Tiberius
Gracchus--words breathing the very essence of a narrow swordsman's
nature--showed that from bloodshed at all events he would not have
shrunk. It is hard to respect such a man in spite of all his good
qualities. Fortune gave him the opport