I. Perceiving them all now eager to listen to him, Scipio thus began to speak. “It was old Cato, to whom as you know I was singularly attached, and whom I admired in the highest degree: to whom, either through the advice of both my parents, or from my own prepossession, I devoted myself entirely from my youth; whose conversation never could satiate me. Such was the experience of the man in public affairs, which he had for a long time successfully conducted in peace and war. His manner of speaking too, a facetiousness mixed with gravity: his constant desire also to improve himself and others; indeed his whole life in harmony with his maxims. He was wont to say, that the condition of our country was pre-eminent above all others for this cause. That among other people, individuals generally had respectively constituted the government by their laws and by their institutes, as Minos in Crete, Lycurgus in Lacedemon. At Athens, where the changes were frequent, at first Theseus, then Draco, then Solon, then Clisthenes; afterwards many others. Finally exhausted and prostrated, it had been upheld by that learned man Demetrius, of Phalera. But that the constitution of our republic was not the work of one, but of many; and had not been established in the life of one man, but during several generations and ages. For he said so powerful a mind had never existed; from which nothing had escaped; nor that all minds collected into one, could foresee so much at one time, as to comprehend all things without the aid of practice and time. For which reason, as he was wont, so shall my discourse now repeat the origin of the people; for I have a pleasure in using the very words of Cato. But I shall more easily follow up my proposition in describing our own republic to you, in its infancy, its growth, in its adult, and its present firm and robust state; than if I were to create an imaginary one, as Socrates is made to do in Plato.