healthy, never ailing in body, and never at a loss to resolve on the immediate and necessary course of action.  Even in his youth he had kept aloof from the usual proceedings of political novices—­the attending in the antechambers of prominent senators and the delivery of forensic declamations.  On the other hand he loved the chase—­when a youth of seventeen, after having served with distinction under his father in the campaign against Perseus, he had asked as his reward the free range of the deer forest of the kings of Macedonia which had been untouched for four years—­and he was especially fond of devoting his leisure to scientific and literary enjoyment.  By the care of his father he had been early initiated into that genuine Greek culture, which elevated him above the insipid Hellenizing of the semi-culture commonly in vogue; by his earnest and apt appreciation of the good and bad qualities in the Greek character, and by his aristocratic carriage, this Roman made an impression on the courts of the east and even on the scoffing Alexandrians.  His Hellenism was especially recognizable in the delicate irony of his discourse and in the classic purity of his Latin.  Although not strictly an author, he yet, like Cato, committed to writing his political speeches—­they were, like the letters of his adopted sister the mother of the Gracchi, esteemed by the later -litteratores- as masterpieces of model prose—­and took pleasure in surrounding himself with the better Greek and Roman -litterati-, a plebeian society which was doubtless regarded with no small suspicion by those colleagues in the senate whose noble birth was their sole distinction.  A man morally steadfast and trustworthy, his word held good with friend and foe; he avoided buildings and speculations, and lived with simplicity; while in money matters he acted not merely honourably and disinterestedly, but also with a tenderness and liberality which seemed singular to the mercantile spirit of his contemporaries.  He was an able soldier and officer; he brought home from the African war the honorary wreath which was wont to be conferred on those who saved the lives of citizens in danger at the peril of their own, and terminated as general the war which he had begun as an officer; circumstances gave him no opportunity of trying his skill as a general on tasks really difficult.  Scipio was not, any more than his father, a man of brilliant gifts—­as is indicated by the very fact of his predilection for Xenophon, the sober soldier and correct author-but he was an honest and true man, who seemed pre-eminently called to stem the incipient decay by organic reforms.  All the more significant is the fact that he did not attempt it.  It is true that he helped, as he had opportunity and means, to redress or prevent abuses, and laboured in particular at the improvement of the administration of justice.  It was chiefly by his assistance that Lucius Cassius, an able man of the old Roman austerity and uprightness, was enabled