r. He is said to have grieved over
the fate of Carthage, and to have dreaded any further increase of the Roman
territory. In 142 Scipio was censor, and acted with almost Catonian
severity. In 134, though not a candidate, he was elected to the consulship
and put in command of the Roman army then besieging the city of Numantia in
Spain. The war, of which this siege formed a part, had been going on for
some years most disastrously for the Romans, but Scipio speedily brought it
to a conclusion in 133. While before Numantia he received news of the
murder of Ti. Gracchus, whose sister he had married and whose cousin he had
become by adoption, but whose policy he had on the whole opposed, though he
had occasionally coquetted with the democrats. This course cost him the
favor of the people, and when in 131 he desired to conduct the war against
Aristonicus, only two of the thirty-five tribes voted for his appointment.
In 129, after a violent scene in the senate, where he had opposed the
carrying out of Ti. Gracchus' agrarian law, he was triumphantly escorted
home by a crowd, composed chiefly of Italians whose interests had been
threatened by the law. Next morning he was found dead in his bed. Opinion
as to the cause of his death was divided at the time and so remained. In
the _Laelius_ the death is assumed to have been from natural causes.[52]
Elsewhere, however, Cicero adopts the view of many of Scipio's friends that
he was murdered by Carbo.[53] Carbo afterwards lent color to the suspicions
by putting himself to death, in order, as was supposed, to avoid a direct
prosecution. In ancient times even C. Gracchus was suspected of having thus
avenged his brother's death, but no modern scholar of any rank has
countenanced the suspicion.

Whether the degree of intimacy between Cato and Scipio, which Cicero
assumes, ever existed or not, cannot be determined.[54] There was much in
Scipio that would attract Cato. Unlike the elder Africanus, he was severe
and simple in his outward life, and though a lover of Greek and Greeks, yet
attached to all that was best in the old Roman character and polity. Though
an opponent of revolution, he was far from being a partisan of the
oligarchy. Altogether, of all Romans, he most nearly deserved the
description, '[Greek: aner tetragonos aneu psogou],' 'a man four-square
without reproach.' In his _De Re Publica_, Cicero points to Scipio as the
ideal statesman, and often elsewhere eulogizes him as an almos