When Scipio saw the trouble and anxiety caused by this hasty action, he invited the people to meet him, and spoke with such pride and confidence of his youth and the duty entrusted to him and the war which he was to conduct that he awakened and renewed all the former enthusiasm, and filled his hearers with a more sanguine hope than is usually suggested by trust in promises or by inference from established facts. Scipio, indeed, did not merely deserve admiration for his genuine qualities, but from his youth upwards he had been endowed with a peculiar faculty for making the most of them. When he gave counsel to the people, he founded it on a vision of the night or an inspiration seemingly divine, either because he was in some sort influenced by superstition, or because he expected that his wishes and commands would be carried out readily if they came with a kind of oracular sanction. In very early life he began to create this impression, and as soon as he was of age, he would do no business, public or private, till he had gone to the Capitol and entered the temple, generally sitting there for a time alone and apart. By this habit, which he maintained all through his life, he gave support, either of set purpose or by accident, to a belief held by some that he was of divine parentage, and he thus revived a similar and equally baseless story, once current about Alexander the Great, that he was the son of a huge serpent, which had often been seen in the house before his birth, but glided away at the approach of any one and disappeared from sight. Scipio did nothing to discredit these wonders; in fact, he indirectly confirmed them, for, if he asserted nothing, he did not deny anything. Livy, xxvi. 18-19. He was still very young, nevertheless he had already made people feel confidence in him. In Spain, although he began with a bad failure since he allowed Hasdrubal to cross the Pyrenees with his army and march to Italy to assist Hannibal, his Spanish campaign was ably carried out and his capture of New Carthage was a bold and brilliant exploit. When the time came to choose a general, after the Metaurus, to attack Hannibal at home, every one in Rome felt that Scipio was the man. He would finish the war. There was, indeed, no serious rival; the long struggle had worn the older generals out. Some of the old-fashioned senators distrusted Scipio. He was too cultivated; too much interested in Greek literature and too young. But he was the idol of the people, who adore success, and was nominated by acclamation.