His cruelty or his clemency might be more or less, as his conviction of the utility of this or that other weapon for dominating men might be strong with him.

Or there might be some variation in the flowing of the blood about his heart which might make a massacre of citizens a pleasing diversion or a painful process to him; but there was no conscience.

With the man of whom we are about to speak conscience was strong.

In his sometimes doubtful wanderings after political wisdom--in those mental mazes which have been called insincerity--we shall see him, if we look well into his doings, struggling to find whether, in searching for what was his duty, he should go to this side or to that.

Might he best hope a return to that state of things which he thought good for his country by adhering to Caesar or to Pompey?
We see the workings of his conscience, and, as we remember that Scipio's dream of his, we feel sure that he had, in truth, within him a recognition of a future life.
In discussing the character of a man, there is no course of error so fertile as the drawing of a hard and fast line.