ctly an author, he yet, like Cato,
committed to writing his political speeches--they were, like the letters
of his adopted sister the mother of the Gracchi, esteemed by the later
-litteratores- as masterpieces of model prose--and took pleasure in
surrounding himself with the better Greek and Roman -litterati-,
a plebeian society which was doubtless regarded with no small
suspicion by those colleagues in the senate whose noble birth was
their sole distinction. A man morally steadfast and trustworthy,
his word held good with friend and foe; he avoided buildings and
speculations, and lived with simplicity; while in money matters he
acted not merely honourably and disinterestedly, but also with a
tenderness and liberality which seemed singular to the mercantile
spirit of his contemporaries. He was an able soldier and officer;
he brought home from the African war the honorary wreath which was
wont to be conferred on those who saved the lives of citizens in
danger at the peril of their own, and terminated as general the
war which he had begun as an officer; circumstances gave him no
opportunity of trying his skill as a general on tasks really
difficult. Scipio was not, any more than his father, a man
of brilliant gifts--as is indicated by the very fact of his
predilection for Xenophon, the sober soldier and correct author-
but he was an honest and true man, who seemed pre-eminently called
to stem the incipient decay by organic reforms. All the more
significant is the fact that he did not attempt it. It is true
that he helped, as he had opportunity and means, to redress or
prevent abuses, and laboured in particular at the improvement of
the administration of justice. It was chiefly by his assistance
that Lucius Cassius, an able man of the old Roman austerity and
uprightness, was enabled to carry against the most vehement
opposition of the Optimates his law as to voting, which introduced
vote by ballot for those popular tribunals which still embraced
the most important part of the criminal jurisdiction.(23) In like
manner, although he had not chosen to take part in boyish
impeachments, he himself in his mature years put upon their trial
several of the guiltiest of the aristocracy. In a like spirit, when
commanding before Carthage and Numantia, he drove forth the women
and priests to the gates of the camp, and subjected the rabble of
soldiers once more to the iron yoke of the old military discipline;
and when censor (61