“It was an awakening truth,” says a great authority, “in the minds of Romans like Scipio, that intellectual culture must be built upon a foundation of moral rectitude:  and such a foundation they could find in the storehouse of their own domestic traditions."[157] When Cicero, who held him to be the greatest of Romans, wrote his dialogue on the State (de Republica), with the new idea pervading it of the moral and political ascendancy of a single man, he made Scipio the hero and the one ascendant figure in his work, and ended it with an imitation of the Platonic “myth,” in the form of a “dream of Scipio.”

Scipio gathered round him a circle of able and cultured men, both Roman and Greek, including almost every living Roman of ability, and among the Greeks the historian Polybius and the philosopher Panaetius, of whom we shall have more to learn in the course of this volume.  Of this circle the best and ablest men of Cicero’s earlier days were mentally the children, and his own views both of literature and politics were largely formed upon the Scipionic tradition.  Indeed to understand the mental and moral furniture of the Roman mind in the Ciceronian age, it is absolutely necessary to study that of the generation which made that mind what it was; but here space can only be found to point out how the enlightenment of the Scipionic circle opened out new ways in manners, in literature, in philosophical receptivity, and lastly in the study of the law, which was destined to be Rome’s greatest contribution to civilisation.

Manners, the demeanour of the individual in social intercourse, are a valuable index, if not an entirely conclusive one, of the mental and moral tone of society in any age.  Ease and courteousness of bearing mean, as a rule, that the sense of another’s claims as a human being are always present to the mind.  Whatever be the shortcomings of the last age of the Republic, we must give due credit to the fact that in their outward demeanour towards each other the educated men of that age almost invariably show good breeding.  It is true enough that public vituperation, in senate or law-courts, was a fact of every day, and the wealth of violent personal abuse which a gentleman like Cicero could expend on one whom for the time he hated, or who had done him some wrong, passes all belief.[158] But the history of this vituperation is a curious one; it was a traditional method of hostile oratory, and sprang from an old Roman root, the tendency to defamation and satire, which may itself be attributed in part to the Italian custom of levelling abuse at a public man (e.g. at his triumph) in order to avert evil from him.[159] To single out a man’s personal ugliness, to calumniate his ancestry in the vilest terms,—­these were little more than traditional practices, oratorical devices, which the rhetorical education of the day encouraged, and which no one took very seriously.[160] But we are concerned in this chapter mainly with private life; and there we find almost universal consideration and courtesy.  In the whole of the Ciceronian correspondence there is hardly a letter that does not show good breeding, and there are many that are the natural result of real kindly feeling and true sympathy.