1If I were to deny that I am moved by longing for Scipio, how rightly I should do so let the wise decide, but certainly I should be lying. 1For I am moved at being bereft of such a friend as, I believe, there will never be again, and as, I can assert, there certainly never was before. 1But I have no need of medicine: I console myself, and above all with this consolation, that I am free from that error by which most people are tormented at the passing of their friends. 1I think nothing bad has happened to Scipio; 1it has happened to me, if anything has happened; 1and to be grievously tormented by one's own misfortunes is the mark of a man who loves not his friend but himself.
11As for him, who would deny that he has fared splendidly? 11For unless he had wished to pray for immortality, which he never had in mind at all, what did he not attain that it was right for a man to pray for, he who as a young man at once surpassed by incredible merit the highest hopes his fellow citizens had held of him even as a boy; 11who never stood for the consulship, yet was made consul twice, the first time before the legal age, the second at the proper time for himself, but almost too late for the state; 11who, by overthrowing two cities most hostile to this empire, wiped out not only present wars but future ones too?
11What shall I say of his most gracious manners, of his devotion to his mother, his generosity to his sisters, his kindness to his own people, his justice towards all? 11You know them. 11And how dear he was to the state was shown by the grief at his funeral. 11What, then, could the addition of a few years have profited him? 11For old age, even though it is not burdensome, as I remember Cato arguing with me and with Scipio the year before he died, nevertheless takes away that freshness in which Scipio still was even now. 12Therefore his life was such, either in fortune or in glory, that nothing could be added to it; 12and the swiftness of his death took away the sense of dying.
12About the manner of his death it is hard to speak; 12you see what people suspect: yet this may truly be said, that for Publius Scipio, out of the many days he had seen in his life most thronged and most joyful, the most glorious was that day when, on the dismissal of the senate, he was escorted home towards evening by the conscript fathers, the Roman people, the allies and the Latins, on the day before he departed from life, so that from so lofty a height of honour he seems to have reached the gods above rather than those below.