De Amicitia, Scipios Dream | Page 9

lose. Thus his
life was such that nothing either in fortune or in fame could be added to
it, while the suddenness of his death must have taken away the pain of
dying. Of the mode of his death it is hard to speak with certainty, you
are aware what suspicions are abroad. [Footnote: He retired to his
sleeping apartment apparently in perfect health, and was found dead on
his couch in the morning,--as was rumored, with marks of violence on
his neck. His wife was Sempronia, the sister of the Gracchi whose
agrarian schemes he had vehemently opposed. She was suspected of
having at least given admission to the assassin, and even her mother,
the Cornelia who has been regarded as unparelleled among Roman
women for the virutes appertaining to a wife and mother, did not escape
the charge of complicity. Her son Caius was also among those
suspected, but the more probable opinion is that Papirius Carbo was
alone answerable for the crime. Carbo had been Scipio's most bitter
enemy and had endeavoured to inflame the people against him as their
enemy.] But this may be said with truth that of the many days of
surpassing fame and happiness which Publius Scipio saw in his lifetime,
the most glorious was the day before his death when on the
adjournment of the Senate he was escorted home by the Conscript
Fathers, the Roman people, the men of Latium and the allies,
[Footnote): Scipio had at that session of the senate proposed a measure
in the utmost degree offensive to Caius Gracchus and his party. The
law of Tiberius Gracchus would have disposed, at the hands of the
commissioners appointed under it, of large tracts of land belonging to
the Italian allies. Scipio's plan provided that such lands should be taken
out of the jurisdiction of the commissioners, and that matters relating to
them should be adjudged by a different board to be specially
appointed--a measure which would have been a virtual abrogation of
the agrarian law. On this account he had his honorable escort home,
and on this account, in all probability, he was mudered.]--so that from

so high a grade of honor he seems to have passed on into the assembly
of the gods rather than to have gone down into the underworld.
4 For I am far from agreeing with those who have of late promulgated
the opinion that the soul perishes with the body and that death blots out
the whole being. [Footnote: The reference here is of course to the
Epicurians. This school of philosophy had grown very rapidly, and
numbered many disciples when this essay was written; but in the time
of Laelius it had but recently invaded Rome, and Amafanius, who must
have been his contemporary, was the earliest Roman writer who
expounded its doctrine] I on the other hand attach superior value to the
authority of the ancients whether that of our ancestors who established
religious rites for the dead which they certainly would not have done if
they had thought the dead wholly unconcerned in such observances
[Footnote: This is sound reasoning as these rites were annually renewed
and consisted in great part of the invocation of ancestors--a custom
which could not have originated if those ancestors were supposed to be
utterly dead. This passage may remind the reader of the answer of Jesus
Christ to the Sadducees, who denied that the Pentateuch contained any
intimation of immortality. He quotes the passage in which God is
represented as saying, "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac,
and the God of Jacob," and adds, "God is not the God of the dead, but
of the living," implying that ancestors whom the writer of that record
supposed to be dead could not have been thus mentioned.] or thatof the
former Greek colonists in this country who by their schools and
teaching made Southern Italy [Footnote: Latin Magna Graecia-the
name given to the cluster of Greek colonies that were scattered thick
along the shore of Southern Italy. At Croton in Magna Graecia
Pythagoras established his school and the colonies were the chief seat
and seminary of his philosophy which taught the immortality of the
soul.]--now in its decline, then flourishing--a seat of learning, or that of
him whom the oracle of Apollo pronounced the wisest of men who said
not one thing to-day, another to-morrow, as many do, but the same
thing always, maintaining that the souls of men are divine, and that
when they go out from the body, the return to heaven is open to them,
and direct and easy in proportion to their integrity and excellence. This
was also the opinion of Scipio, who seemed prescient of the event so

near, when, a very short time before his death,