nate appears to deserve no credit--Flamininus,
whose restless vanity sought after new opportunities for great
achievements, undertook on his own part to deliver Rome from Hannibal
as he had delivered the Greeks from their chains, and, if not to
wield--which was not diplomatic--at any rate to whet and to point,
the dagger against the greatest man of his time. Prusias, the most
pitiful among the pitiful princes of Asia, was delighted to grant the
little favour which the Roman envoy in ambiguous terms requested; and,
when Hannibal saw his house beset by assassins, he took poison. He
had long been prepared to do so, adds a Roman, for he knew the Romans
and the word of kings. The year of his death is uncertain; probably
he died in the latter half of the year 571, at the age of sixty-seven.
When he was born, Rome was contending with doubtful success for the
possession of Sicily; he had lived long enough to see the West wholly
subdued, and to fight his own last battle with the Romans against the
vessels of his native city which had itself become Roman; and he was
constrained at last to remain a mere spectator, while Rome overpowered
the East as the tempest overpowers the ship that has no one at the
helm, and to feel that he alone was the pilot that could have
weathered the storm. There was left to him no further hope to be
disappointed, when he died; but he had honestly, through fifty years
of struggle, kept the oath which he had sworn when a boy.

Death of Scipio

About the same time, probably in the same year, died also the man whom
the Romans were wont to call his conqueror, Publius Scipio. On him
fortune had lavished all the successes which she denied to his
antagonist--successes which did belong to him, and successes which did
not. He had added to the empire Spain, Africa, and Asia; and Rome,
which he had found merely the first community of Italy, was at his
death mistress of the civilized world. He himself had so many titles
of victory, that some of them were made over to his brother and his
cousin.(9) And yet he too spent his last years in bitter vexation,
and died when little more than fifty years of age in voluntary
banishment, leaving orders to his relatives not to bury his remains
in the city for which he had lived and in which his ancestors reposed.
It is not exactly known what drove him from the city. The charges of
corruption and embezzlement, which were directed against him and still
more against his