Antiochus seems to have intended to act on this message, whatever it meant, and retreated upon Mount Sipylus, where he fortified his camp; but Lucius Scipio followed hard after him, as if resolved to force on the combat and have the glory without his brother. He had sixteen of the Carthaginian elephants, but these were inferior, both in size and intelligence, to the thirty-four from India that Antiochus had, which carried towers on their backs, each holding four men, and had plumes of feathers on their heads, with purple and gold trappings. The Syrian army had, indeed, much of the old Persian splendour, but likewise of the Persian cumbrousness, and though there were Greeks enough to make a brave resistance, the defeat was entire. Antiochus fled to Antioch, and thence humbly entreated for peace.

Scipio Africanus never showed any jealousy of his brother's success, and assisted him in receiving the embassy. Antiochus was to give up Asia as far as Mount Taurus; to send his second surviving son as a hostage to Rome; and to cease to harbour Hannibal, who thereupon fled to Crete, and afterwards went to the court of Prusias, king of Bithynia.

The brothers returned home, and Lucius entered Rome in triumph, and received the surname of Asiagenes, or Asiaticus. But the hostility of the opposite faction could not long be silent. In 187 two tribunes of the people, instigated by Cato, demanded that Lucius should be called to account by the Senate for the sums of money received from Antiochus, and the spoil, which they alleged he had not paid faithfully over to the public treasury.

The Senate met, and Lucius, standing before them, took a roll from his bosom. "Here," he said, " is the account of all the moneys I have received and paid."

"Read it," said the senators.

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"He shall not put such an affront on himself," said Africanus, and snatching the roll from his hand he tore it in pieces.

It was a foolish act of passion, and only excited more suspicion. Another tribune, named Marcus Nævius, indicted Africanus himself, but merely accused him of overweening presumption unfit for a citizen; of having acted towards his brother more like a dictator than a legate; and of having received his son from Antiochus ; besides the old stories about Syracuse and Locri.

66 Romans," ," said Scipio, "this is the anniversary of the battle of Zama; it ill becomes us to spend it in wrangling. Come to the temple and return thanks."

Every creature followed him except the tribune and the crier, and no one ventured to accuse him again. But the investigation of Lucius' accounts was insisted on; he was found guilty, and was about to be thrown into prison till he should pay an enormous fine. Scipio, with his usual vehemence, rescued him from the officers of the law, and went off to his own estate at Liternum, not far from Naples. The hostile party now insisted that a day should be fixed for the trial of this presumptuous offender; but one of the tribunes, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, who had hitherto been an enemy to the brothers, came forward and said, that to treat Publius Scipio as an enemy was a dishonour to the Roman people. Was no merit to become a sanctuary to great men? If Publius Scipio were brought to Rome, he should, as tribune, stop the trial; and as to Lucius, he would never see a Roman general imprisoned in the very dungeon whither he had himself brought the enemies of Rome.

This speech brought the people of Rome back to their senses. Moreover, in exculpation of Lucius, it was found that his whole property was far less than the fine imposed on him, and such a subscription was raised, that his for

tune would have been made had he not chosen to accept no more than enough for his maintenance. However Cato, as censor, at the next review deprived him of the horse with which he appeared as a patrician and a senator, because of the story of the bribes of Antiochus ; at the same time taking away other horses, because their masters were too fat to serve in battle.

Scipio showed his gratitude to Gracchus by giving him, plebeian as he was, his beautiful, learned, and excellent daughter Cornelia as a wife; but the Roman ingratitude he could not forget, and he never returned to the city, but spent his latter days on his estate at Liternum, and there died in 183, when only forty-eight years old, desiring to be buried there instead of in the grand sepulchre of his family. His statue, however, adorned it, together with that of his brother Lucius.

His younger son grew up unworthy; the elder was very much respected, but was too sickly for public life, and having no children, adopted the son of one of his sisters, who had married an Æmilius. This son, known as Publius Cornelius Scipio Æmilianus, completed the conquest of Carthage, and won for himself a second time the title of Africanus. But it was Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, as she loved to be called, who was the brightest glory of the great Scipio family, the representatives of Roman manners, just at the turning-point between rudeness and luxury, and of Roman valour, before bravery in self-defence had entirely degenerated into lust of conquest.

JUDAS MACCABÆUS.

B.C. 190-180.

THE roll of Worthies would be so utterly incomplete without the mention of the noble Jew whom our ancestors seem to have respected and admired most of all, that we must not omit his biography, although most of it has been anticipated in the Golden Deeds; and after having seen the vain endeavours of such men as Agis, Cleomenes, and Hannibal to raise up a falling state, to awaken dormant patriotism, and infuse new life into decaying limbs, it may be well to contemplate another patriot, who perished, indeed, but who did not fail, and who awakened new life as they could not do, for the very reason that he had to do with a living body, they with a dead one.

The victory of Scipio Asiaticus at Mount Sipylus had resulted in Antiochus of Syria being obliged to send his son, of the same name as himself, to be educated at Rome. There Antiochus Epiphanes, or the Illustrious," as he surnamed himself, remained for thirteen years, and became imbued with admiration for the grand and stately simplicity of the citizens. There was a reaction in his mind from the Eastern pomp that the Syro-Greeks affected, and he became thoroughly Latinized, lived on free terms with the Romans of his own age, wore the same dress, esteemed those homely practical offices by which they rose to the highest dignities as far superior to

his family's royalty, and even became enthusiastic for the Roman gods, infinitely preferring the Jupiter of the Capitol to the Grecian Zeus with whom he was identified. From his residence at Rome he was recalled, B.C. 175, by his brother Seleucus, the reigning monarch, who, wanting to employ him, sent his own son, a mere boy, to serve as a hostage in his stead; but on his journey homeward, at Athens, he was met by the tidings that Seleucus had been poisoned by a favourite named Heliodorus, in the hope of obtaining the throne while both the heirs were out of the way.

Upon this Antiochus turned aside to the King of Pergamus in Asia Minor, whom he induced to assist him with his forces; and, entering Syria, he met with no opposition, but peaceably obtained possession of that most beautiful and luxurious of the Greek cities planted in the East-Antioch.

There his Roman customs soon brought him into contempt among the minds so long accustomed to connect power with pomp. Had he been a great man, really able to appreciate and transplant the grandeur of simplicity, it would have been a critical experiment; but he was a mere hot-headed dissolute youth, and it was the freedom, not the severity, of Roman manners that he imitated, and without any discretion. With almost despotic power in his hands, he would go from street to street in the white toga of a candidate for office, soliciting votes; and having got himself elected as ædile or tribune, would cause such matters as would have come before those magistrates at Rome to be brought before him, by which proceeding he made himself simply ridiculous in the eyes of the satirical Greeks of Antioch. They resented, too, his custom of mingling freely with all companies, and his delight in conversing with craftsmen in gold and gems. Moreover, he was a drunkard, and would be seen in the