oduced without oppressing the dependent communities, had drawn upon
him the severe and deserved censure of the senate;(24) his interference
in the pitiful process directed against the Scipios who were personally
hostile to him(25) gave proof of his chivalrous feeling, and perhaps of
his regard for his own order; and his energetic action against the
freedmen in his censorship(26) evinced his conservative disposition.
As governor, moreover, of the province of the Ebro,(27) by his bravery
and above all by his integrity he rendered a permanent service to his
country, and at the same time raised to himself in the hearts of
the subject nation an enduring monument of reverence and affection.

His mother Cornelia was the daughter of the conqueror of Zama, who,
simply on account of that generous intervention, had chosen his former
opponent as a son-in-law; she herself was a highly cultivated and
notable woman, who after the death of her much older husband had
refused the hand of the king of Egypt and reared her three surviving
children in memory of her husband and her father. Tiberius, the
elder of the two sons, was of a good and moral disposition, of
gentle aspect and quiet bearing, apparently fitted for anything rather
than for an agitator of the masses. In all his relations and views
he belonged to the Scipionic circle, whose refined and thorough
culture, Greek and national, he and his brother and sister shared.
Scipio Aemilianus was at once his cousin and his sister's husband;
under him Tiberius, at the age of eighteen, had taken part in the
storming of Carthage, and had by his valour acquired the commendation
of the stern general and warlike distinctions. It was natural
that the able young man should, with all the vivacity and all the
stringent precision of youth, adopt and intensify the views as to
the pervading decay of the state which were prevalent in that circle,
and more especially their ideas as to the elevation of the Italian
farmers. Nor was it merely to the young men that the shrinking of
Laelius from the execution of his ideas of reform seemed to be not
judicious, but weak. Appius Claudius, who had already been consul
(611) and censor (618), one of the most respected men in the senate,
censured the Scipionic circle for having so soon abandoned the scheme
of distributing the domain-lands with all the passionate vehemence
which was the hereditary characteristic of the Claudian house; and with
the greater bitte