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Parthagica Directory 09
Page 06
The Consuls now saw that it would be necessary to have recourse to force; but they had no military ability, and their attacks were repulsed with great loss. The younger Scipio Africanus, who was then serving in the army as military tribune, displayed great bravery and military skill, and, on one occasion, saved the army from destruction. Still no permanent success was gained, and Scipio returned to Rome, accompanied by the prayers of the soldiers that he would come back as their commander. In the following year (B.C. 148) the new Consul L. Calpurnius Piso was even less successful than his predecessors. The soldiers became discontented; the Roman Senate and people, who had anticipated an easy conquest, were indignant at their disappointment, and all eyes were turned to Scipio. Accordingly, when he became a candidate for the aedileship for the ensuing year (B.C. 147), he was unanimously elected Consul, though he was only thirty-seven years old, and had not, therefore, attained the legal age for the office.
The written symbol extends infinitely, as regards time and space, the range within which one mind can communicate with another; it gives the writer's mind a life limited by the duration of ink, paper, and readers, as against that of his flesh and blood body. On the other hand, it takes longer to learn the rules so as to be able to apply them with ease and security, and even then they cannot be applied so quickly and easily as those attaching to spoken symbols. Moreover, the spoken symbol admits of a hundred quick and subtle adjuncts by way of action, tone and expression, so that no one will use written symbols unless either for the special advantages of permanence and travelling power, or because he is incapacitated from using spoken ones. This, however, is hardly to the point; the point is that these two conventional combinations of symbols, that are as unlike one another as the Hallelujah Chorus is to St. Paul's Cathedral, are the one as much language as the other; and we therefore inquire what this very patent fact reveals to us about the more essential characteristics of language itself. What is the common bond that unites these two classes of symbols that seem at first sight to have nothing in common, and makes the one raise the idea of language in our minds as readily as the other? The bond lies in the fact that both are a set of conventional tokens or symbols, agreed upon between the parties to whom they appeal as being attached invariably to the same ideas, and because they are being made as a means of communion between one mind and another,-for a memorandum made for a person's own later use is nothing but a communication from an earlier mind to a later and modified one; it is therefore in reality a communication from one mind to another as much as though it had been addressed to another person.
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