2. "Do you see that city, which was brought through me into subjection to the Roman people, but now renews its old hostility, and cannot remain quiet,"--and he showed me Carthage from a high place full of stars, shining and splendid,--"against which you, being little more than a common soldier, are coming to fight? In two years from now you as Consul will overthrow this city, and you will obtain of your own right the surname which up to this time you hold as inherited from me. When you shall have destroyed Carthage, shall have celebrated your triumph over it, shall have been Censor, and shall have traversed, as an ambassador, Egypt, Syria, Asia, and Greece, you will be chosen a second time Consul in your absence, and will put an end to one of the greatest of wars by extirpating Numantia. But when you shall be borne to the Capitol in your triumphal chariot after this war, you will find the State disturbed by the machinations of my grandson. [Footnote: Tiberius Gracchus, whose mother, Cornelia, was the daughter of the elder Africanus.] "In this emergency, Africanus, it will behoove you to show your country the light of your energy, genius, and wisdom. But I see at that time, as it were, a double way of destiny. For when your age shall have followed the sun for eight times seven revolutions, and these two numbers [Footnote: The Pythagoreans regarded seven as the number representing light, and eight as representing love. Seven was also a perfect number, as corresponding to the number of celestial orbits (including the sun, the moon, and the five known planets), the number of days in the quarter of the moon's revolution, and the number of the gates of sense (so to speak), mouth, eyes, ears, and nostrils. Eight was a perfect number, as being first after unity on the list of cubes; and Plato in the _Timaeus_ speaks of eight celestial revolutions--including that of the earth--as unequal in duration and velocity, but as forming, in some unexplained way, a cycle synchronous with the year.]--each perfect, though for different reasons--shall have completed for you in the course of nature the destined period, to you alone and to your name the whole city will turn; on you the Senate will look, on you all good citizens, on you the allies, on you the Latini. You will be the one man on whom the safety of the city will rest; and, to say no more, you, as Dictator, must re-establish the State, if you escape the impious hands of your kindred." [Footnote: See _De Amicitia_ § 3, note.] Here, when Laelius had cried out, and the rest of the company had breathed deep sighs, Scipio, smiling pleasantly upon them, said, "I beg you not to rouse me from sleep and break up my vision. Hear the remainder of it."