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Can one blame Scipio to have availed himself of it? he was the man who perhaps did most honour to the Roman Republic; but why did the gods inspire him not to render his accounts? Numa did better; it was necessary to police some brigands and a senate which was the most difficult section of these brigands to govern.
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.
There are few generals who have had such successes thrown as it were into their lap by fortune: in the year 498 he stood precisely where Scipio stood fifty years later, with this difference, that he had no Hannibal and no experienced army arrayed against him.
Scipio was at this time informed that the consul Tib. Claudius Nero would come with an army to co-operate with him against Hannibal. Scipio, who wished to bring the war to a conclusion, and was unwilling to share the glory with anyone else, determined to bring Hannibal to a decisive battle.
But the news of the calamity of the Illiturgians had reached them before the arrival of Scipio; and in consequence of this, dismay and desperation had seized them; and as their cases were differently circumstanced, and each party was desirous of consulting its own safety independent of the other, at first secret jealousy, and then an open rupture, created a separation between the Carthaginians and Spaniards.
Cneius Cornelius Scipio defeats the Carthaginians in Spain, and takes Hanno, their general, prisoner. For never did any states and nations more efficient in their resources engage in contest; nor had they themselves at any other period so great a degree of power and energy.
In the midst of this rather unbecoming struggle of the mother against the child's obstinacy, the clatter of wheels and of horses' hoofs rang through the court-yard of the palace, and hardly had the sound reached the queen's ears than she turned away from the screaming child, hurried to the parapet of the roof, and called out to Zoe: "Publius Scipio is here; it is high time that I should dress for the banquet.
Publius Scipio must die because he is ruining your mother's daughter, and stands in the way of your saving Egypt. The Senate would take a terrible revenge if he were murdered, but what can they do if wild beasts fall on their plenipotentiary, and tear him to pieces?"
Such were the transactions in Spain of this year. At Rome the reputation of Scipio increased daily. The capture of Tarentum, though effected by artifice more than valour, was considered honourable to Fabius. The fame of Fulvius was on the wane.
Even then, sixteen years before Micipsa's death, he had entered into disloyal negotiations as to the Numidian succession with Roman comrades of rank, and Scipio had been under the necessity of gravely reminding him that it was becoming in foreign princes to be on terms of friendship with the Roman state rather than with individual Roman citizens.
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