Two opinions have been advanced, neither of which do I approve.  The one, because I always think it dangerous unless it be absolutely necessary, the other, because I think it wholly unsuited to the emergency.  For an extraordinary commission is a measure suited rather to the fickle character of the mob, one which does not at all become our dignity or this assembly.  In the war against Antiochus, a great and important war, when Asia had fallen by lot to Lucius Scipio as his province, and when he was thought to have hardly spirit and hardly vigour enough for it, and when the senate was inclined to entrust the business to his colleague Caius Laelius, the father of this Laelius, who was surnamed the Wise; Publius Africanus, the elder brother of Lucius Scipio, rose up, and entreated them not to cast such a slur on his family, and said that in his brother there was united the greatest possible valour, with the most consummate prudence, and that he too, notwithstanding his age, and all the exploits which he had performed, would attend his brother as his lieutenant.  And after he had said this, nothing was changed in respect to Scipio’s province, nor was any extraordinary command sought for any more in that war than in those two terrible Punic wars which had preceded it, which were carried on and conducted to their termination either by the consuls or by dictators, or than in the war with Pyrrhus, or in that with Philippus, or afterwards in the Achaean war, or in the third Punic war, for which last the Roman people took great care to select a suitable general, Publius Scipio, but at the same time it appointed him to the consulship in order to conduct it.

VIII.  War was to be waged against Aristonicus in the consulship of Publius Licunius and Lucius Valerius.  The people was consulted as to whom it wished to have the management of that war.  Crassus, the consul and Pontifex Maximus, threatened to impose a fine upon Flaccus his colleague the priest of Mars, if he deserted the sacrifices.  And though the people remitted the fine, still they ordered the priest to submit to the commands of the pontiff.  But even then the Roman people did not commit the management of the war to a private individual, although there was Africanus, who the year before had celebrated a triumph over the people of Numantia, and who was far superior to all men in martial renown and military skill; yet he only gained the votes of two tribunes.  And accordingly the Roman people entrusted the management of the war to Crassus the consul rather than to the private individual Africanus.  As to the commands given to Cnaeus Pompeius, that most illustrious man, that first of men, they were carried by some turbulent tribunes of the people.  For the war against Sertorius was only given by the senate to a private individual because the consuls refused it, when Lucius Philippus said that he sent the general in the place of the two consuls, not as proconsul.