allies, [Footnote): Scipio had at that session of the senate proposed a
measure in the utmost degree offensive to Caius Gracchus and his party.
The law of Tiberius Gracchus would have disposed, at the hands of the
commissioners appointed under it, of large tracts of land belonging to
the Italian allies. Scipio's plan provided that such lands should be
taken out of the jurisdiction of the commissioners, and that matters
relating to them should be adjudged by a different board to be specially
appointed--a measure which would have been a virtual abrogation of the
agrarian law. On this account he had his honorable escort home, and on
this account, in all probability, he was mudered.]--so that from so
high a grade of honor he seems to have passed on into the assembly of
the gods rather than to have gone down into the underworld.

4 For I am far from agreeing with those who have of late promulgated the
opinion that the soul perishes with the body and that death blots out
the whole being. [Footnote: The reference here is of course to the
Epicurians. This school of philosophy had grown very rapidly, and
numbered many disciples when this essay was written; but in the time of
Laelius it had but recently invaded Rome, and Amafanius, who must have
been his contemporary, was the earliest Roman writer who expounded its
doctrine] I on the other hand attach superior value to the authority of
the ancients whether that of our ancestors who established religious
rites for the dead which they certainly would not have done if they had
thought the dead wholly unconcerned in such observances [Footnote: This
is sound reasoning as these rites were annually renewed and consisted in
great part of the invocation of ancestors--a custom which could not have
originated if those ancestors were supposed to be utterly dead. This
passage may remind the reader of the answer of Jesus Christ to the
Sadducees, who denied that the Pentateuch contained any intimation of
immortality. He quotes the passage in which God is represented as