guments which he foolishly urges have no connection with
the dream of which we are now talking, we will pass them over
at present, and attend only to the calumny which will stick
both to Cicero and Plato, unless it is silenced. He says that
a fable ought not to have been invented by a philosopher,
since no kind of falsehood is suitable to professors of
truth. For why, says he, if you wish to give us a notion of
heavenly things and to teach us the nature of souls, did you
not do so by a simple and plain explanation? Why was a
character invented, and circumstances, and strange events,
and a scene of cunningly adduced falsehood arranged, to
pollute the very door of the investigation of truth by a lie?
Since these things, though they are said of the Platonic Er,
do also attack the rest of our dreaming Africanus.

VIII. This occasion incited Scipio to relate his dream, which
he declares that he had buried in silence for a long time.
For when Laelius was complaining that there were no statues of
Nasica erected in any public place, as a reward for his
having slain the tyrant, Scipio replied in these words: "But
although the consciousness itself of great deeds is to wise
men the most ample reward of virtue, yet that divine nature
ought to have, not statues fixed in lead, nor triumphs with
withering laurels, but some more stable and lasting kinds of
rewards." "What are they?" said Laelius. "Then," said Scipio,
"suffer me, since we have now been keeping holiday for three
days, * * * etc." By which preface he came to the relation of
his dream; pointing out that those were the more stable and
lasting kinds of rewards which he himself had seen in heaven
reserved for good governors of commonwealths.

IX. When I had arrived in Africa, where I was, as you are aware,
military tribune of the fourth legion under the consul Manilius, there
was nothing of which I was more earnestly desirous than to see King
Masinissa, who, for very just reasons, had been always the especial
friend of our family. When I was introduced to him, the old man
embraced me, shed tears, and then, looking up to heaven, exclaimed--I
thank thee, O supreme Sun, and ye also, ye other celestial beings, that
before I depart from this life I behold in my kingdom, and in this my
palace, Publius Cornelius Scipio, by whose mere name I se