diplomatic post, who handles vast sums of money, adheres to his duty through the mere moral obligation of the oath which he has sworn"; that "amongst the Romans the corrupt official is as rare a portent as is the financier with clean hands amongst other peoples".[112] When the elder Africanus tore up the account books of his brother--books which recorded the passage of eighteen thousand talents from an Asiatic king to a Roman general and from him to the Roman State[113]--he was imparting a lesson in confidence, which was immediately accepted by the senate and people. And it seems that, so far as the expenditure of public moneys was concerned, this confidence continued to be justified. It is true that Cato had furiously impugned the honour of commanders in the matter of the distribution of the prizes of war amongst the soldiers and had drawn a bitter contrast between private and official thieves. "The former," he said, "pass their lives in thongs and iron fetters, the latter in purple and gold." [114] But there were no fixed rules of practice which guided such a distribution, and a commander, otherwise honest, might feel no qualms of conscience in exercising a selective taste on his own behalf. On the other hand, deliberate misappropriation of the public funds seems to have been seldom suspected or at least seldom made the subject of judicial cognisance, and for many years after a standing court was established for the trial of extortion no similar tribunal was thought necessary for the crime of peculation.[115] Apart from the long, tortuous and ineffective trial of the Scipios,[116] no question of the kind is known to have been raised since Manius Acilius Glabrio, the conqueror of Antiochus and the Aetolians, competed for the censorship. Then a story, based on the existence of the indubitable wealth which he was employing with a lavish hand to win the favour of the people, was raked up against him by some jealous members of the nobility. It was professed that some money and booty, found in the camp of the king, had never been exhibited in the triumph nor deposited in the treasury. The evidence of legates and military tribunes was invited, and Cato, himself a competitor for the censorship, was ready to testify that gold and silver vases, which he had seen in the captured camp, had not been visible in the triumphal procession. Glabrio waived his candidature, but the people were unwilling to convict and the prosecution was abandoned.[117] Here again we are confronted by the old temptation of curio-hunting, which, the nobility deemed indecent in so "new" a man as Glabrio; the evidence of Cato--the only testimony which proved dangerous--did not establish the charge that money due to the State had been intercepted by a Roman consul.