e had spoken in public the day before, and then in the
evening had retired earlier than usual to his bedchamber with a view
to prepare the outline of his speech for the following day. That he
had been the victim of a political assassination, cannot be doubted;
he himself shortly before had publicly mentioned the plots formed
to murder him. What assassin's hand had during the night slain
the first statesman and the first general of his age, was never
discovered; and it does not become history either to repeat the
reports handed down from the contemporary gossip of the city, or
to set about the childish attempt to ascertain the truth out of such
materials. This much only is clear, that the instigator of the deed
must have belonged to the Gracchan party; the assassination of Scipio
was the democratic reply to the aristocratic massacre at the temple
of Fidelity. The tribunals did not interfere. The popular party,
justly fearing that its leaders Gaius Gracchus, Flaccus, and Carbo,
whether guilty or not, might be involved in the prosecution, opposed
with all its might the institution of an inquiry; and the aristocracy,
which lost in Scipio quite as much an antagonist as an ally, was not
unwilling to let the matter sleep. The multitude and men of moderate
views were shocked; none more so than Quintus Metellus, who had
disapproved of Scipio's interference against reform, but turned away
with horror from such confederates, and ordered his four sons to carry
the bier of his great antagonist to the funeral pile. The funeral
was hurried over; with veiled head the last of the family of the
conqueror of Zama was borne forth, without any one having been
previously allowed to see the face of the deceased, and the flames
of the funeral pile consumed with the remains of the illustrious
man the traces at the same time of the crime.

The history of Rome presents various men of greater genius than Scipio
Aemilianus, but none equalling him in moral purity, in the utter
absence of political selfishness, in generous love of his country,
and none, perhaps, to whom destiny has assigned a more tragic part.
Conscious of the best intentions and of no common abilities, he was
doomed to see the ruin of his country carried out before his eyes,
and to repress within him every earnest attempt to save it, because
he clearly perceived that he should only thereby make the evil worse;
doomed to the necessity of sanctioning outrages like that of Nasic