Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 14, 2025
Can Scipio wonder at the ingratitude of Rome to her generals? Did not he reproach her with it in the epitaph he ordered to be inscribed upon his tomb at Liternum, that mean village in Campania, to which she had driven the conqueror of Hannibal and of Carthage?
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.
There are other signs that Scipio was a man of strong personality, unlike the typical Roman of his day; he put a value upon his own thoughts and habits, apart from his duty to the State, and retired to Liternum to indulge them.
This is told us in an amusing letter of Seneca's, who also gives a description of the bath in the villa of the elder Scipio at Liternum, which consisted of a single room without a window, and was supplied with water which was often thick after rain. "Nesciit vivere," says Seneca, in ironical allusion to the luxury of his own day.
That these victors could not be charged with wrongdoing is made plain by my former statements and was shown still more conclusively on the occasion of the confiscation of the property of Asiaticus, which was found to consist merely of his original inheritance, or again by the retirement of Africanus to Liternum and the security that he enjoyed there to the end of his life.
As soon as the Romans breathed from the toils of the Punic war, they were attracted by the beauties and the pleasures of Campania; and the country-house of the elder Scipio at Liternum exhibited a lasting model of their rustic simplicity.
He seems never to have been young, and we cannot associate the idea of age with him, even when he is dying at Liternum at upwards of fifty. He was a man at seventeen, when first he steps boldly out on the historic page, and there is no apparent change in him when we find him leading great armies, and creating a new policy for the redemption of Italy from the evils of war.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking