unger
Scipio, is made the speaker in the passage here quoted. Laelius, was a
son of Caius Laelius, the friend and companion of the elder Scipio,
whose actions are so interwoven with those of Scipio that a writer in
Smith's "Dictionary" says, "It is difficult to relate them
separately." The younger Laelius was intimate with the younger Scipio
in a degree almost as remarkable as his father had been with the
elder. The younger, immortalized by Cicero's treatise on Friendship,
was born about 186 B.C., and was a man of fine culture noted as an
orator. His personal worth was so generally esteemed that it survived
to Seneca's day. One of Seneca's injunctions to a friend was that he
should "live like Laelius."]

[Footnote 29: Scipio Africanus minor by whom Carthage was destroyed in
146 B.C., and Numantia, a town of Spain, was destroyed in 133 B.C.
From the letter he obtained the surname of Numantinus.]

[Footnote 30: Magna Graecia was a name given by the ancients to that
part of southern Italy which, before the rise of the Roman state, was
colonized by Greeks. Its time of greatest splendor was the seventh and
sixth centuries B.C.; that is, intermediate between the Homeric age
and the Periclean. Among its leading cities were Cumae, Sybaris, Locri,
Regium, Tarentum, Heraclea, and Paestum. At the last-named place
imposing ruins still survive.]

[Footnote 31: Empedocles, philosopher, poet, and historian, who lived
et Agrigentum in Sicily, about 490-430 B.C., and wrote a poem on the
doctrines of Pythagoras. A legend has survived that he jumped into the
crater of Etna, in order that people might conclude, from his complete
disappearance, that he was a god. Matthew Arnold's poem on this
incident is among his better-known works.]

[Footnote 32: Tarquinius Superbus, seventh and last King of Rome,
occupied the throne for twenty-five years, and as a consequence of the
rape of Lucretia by his son Sextus was banished about 509 B.C.]

JULIUS CAESAR

Born in 100 B.C.; assassinated in 44; famous as general,
statesman, orator, and writer; served in Mitylene in 80;
captured by pirates in 76; questor in 68; pontifex maximus
in 63; propretor in Spain in 61; member of the First
Triumvirate in 60; Consul in 59; defeated the Helvetii in
58; invaded Britain in 55 and 54; crossed the Rhine in 55;
crossed the Rubicon and began the Civil war in 49; dictator
from 49 to 45; defeated Pompey in 48; reform