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Although he had an enmity of long standing against the Scipios, he would not endure what was taking place but spoke in defence of Africanus, who was accused while absent, and exerted himself to prevent any smirch from attaching to that leader; and he prevented the imprisonment of Asiaticus.
Leo Africanus describes them, and his picture in all essentials holds good to-day: "They are strong, terrible, robust men, who fear neither cold nor snow; their dress a tunic of wool over bare flesh, and above the tunic a mantle, round their legs twisted thongs, never anything on the head. They rear sheep, mules, and asses; and they are the greatest thieves, traitors, and assassins in the world."
It would not be more difficult to account for the loss of the African field than it is to account for the loss of the Flemish field, by the superior genius. The elder Africanus is the most exceptional character in all history, and it is impossible to place him.
The desolation of Italy was becoming dangerous, and the master of the lonely villa barred himself in at nights as though an enemy were at his gates. On one occasion Scipio Africanus was disturbed in his retreat at Liternum by a troop of bandits. He placed his armed servants on the roof and made every preparation for repelling the assault. But the visitors proved to be pacific.
Neither is this uncertainty to be thought strange, seeing the manner of the death of Scipio Africanus, who died at his own home after supper, has been found capable neither of proof or disproof; for some say he died a natural death, being of a sickly habit; others, that he poisoned himself; others again, that his enemies, breaking in upon him in the night, stifled him.
Then it had not been his own eyes but his mother's that had sparkled through tears, and it struck him that Klea, if she could be compared to any other woman, was most like to that noble matron to whom he owed his life, and that she might stand by the side of the daughter of the great Scipio Africanus like a youthful Minerva by the side of Juno, the stately mother of the gods.
The women cut off their hair to make bowstrings. Day and night the people worked, in forging weapons and in building a new fleet in the inner harbor. The Romans were repulsed; but P. Scipio AEmilianus, the adopted son of the first Scipio Africanus, shut in the city by land and by sea, and, in 146, captured and destroyed it. Its defenders fought from street to street, and from house to house.
"Near sixteen." "Ah, still a boy; you have a year ere you reach the bourne of young manhood, as the Romans held it. But what matters that? Was not Scipio Africanus namesake of the ingenuous youth that serves me styled boy at twenty? Yet you are old enough to walk alone, and not in leading strings or waiting maybe for dead men's shoes." "What do you mean, sir?"
When he had spoken thus, I said, "O Africanus, if indeed for those who have deserved well of their country there is, as it were, an open road by which they may enter heaven, though from boyhood treading in my father's steps and yours, I have done no discredit to your fame, I yet shall now strive to that end with a more watchful diligence."
There is no evidence to show that the Egyptians ever wrote history in our sense of the word, and there is not in existence any native work that can be regarded as a history of Egypt. The only portion of this History that has come down to us is the List of Kings, which formed a section of it; this List, in a form more or less accurate, is extant in the works of Africanus and Eusebius.
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