THE GRACCHI AND THEIR REFORMS B.C. 133 THEODOR MOMMSEN (Cornelia, whose father was Scipio Africanus, preferred to be called "Mother of the Gracchi" rather than daughter of the conqueror of Numantia.

and what warning against vain valor was written on the desolate site where Numantia once had flourished?

Scipio Africanus the Younger reduces Numantia.

Some ancient cities made a most obstinate resistance, like Tarentum; like Carthage, which stood a siege of four years; like Numantia in Spain, and like Jerusalem.

12 N[)o]v[)i]om[=a]gum, Spire, an ancient city of Germany, in the now upper circle of the Rhine, and on that river Numantia, a celebrated city of ancient Spain, famous for a gallant resistance against the Romans, in a siege of fourteen years; Almasan Numeius, G. i. 7 Num[)i]dae, the inhabitants of, G. ii.

Thus doing, as Hierom said of Blesilla, [5039]"Furius did not so triumph over the Gauls, Papyrius of the Samnites, Scipio of Numantia, as she did by her temperance;" pulla semper veste, &c., they should insult and domineer over lust, folly, vainglory, all such inordinate, furious and unruly passions.

Non sic Furius de Gallis, not Papyrius de Samnitibus, Scipio de Numantia triumphavit, ac illa se vincendo in hac parte. 5040.

The old town of Numantia (captured by the Romans under P. Cornelius Scipio AEmilianus, 133 B.C.) lay about three miles to the north of the present site of Soria.]

Many a time as a boy must he have been told how long and how heroically Saguntum had withstood the assaults and baffled the triumph of Hannibal; how bravely Viriathus had fought, and how shamefully he fell; and how at length the unequal contest, which reduced Spain to the condition of a province, was closed, when the heroic defenders of Numantia, rather than yield to Scipio, reduced their city to a heap of bloodstained ruins.

General expectation would have pointed to Scipio Aemilianus, the conqueror of Numantia and Carthage, and the foremost man at Rome.

Attalus died in 133, the year of the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus, when Scipio was besieging Numantia, and the first slave revolt was raging in Sicily.

He had served at Numantia under Scipio, along with his future conqueror Marius.

Soon made an officer, he won Scipio's favour as a brave, frugal, incorruptible, and trusty soldier, who never quarrelled with his general's orders, even when they ran as counter to his own inclinations as the expulsion of all soothsayers from the camp before Numantia.

By it your ancestors first subdued the whole of Italy; then destroyed Carthage, overthrew Numantia, and reduced the most mighty kings and most warlike nations under the dominion of this empire. VI.

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.

The most important of these is the rapid importation of foreign blood into the Roman citizen body, which long before the time of Cicero largely consisted of enfranchised slaves or their descendants; it was to this that Scipio Aemilianus alluded in his famous words to the contio he was addressing after his return from Numantia, "Silence, ye to whom Italy is but a stepmother" (Val. Max.

Several Greek writers have given examples of the latter method; thus Callisthenes, Timaeus, and Polybius, treating respectively of the Trojan war, and of the wars of Pyrrhus and of Numantia, detached their narratives of these conflicts from their main treatises; and it is open to you, in a similar way, to treat of the Catiline conspiracy independently of the main current of your history.