The like demand was raised by Varus as the governor--self-nominated, it is true--of Africa, seeing that the war was to be waged in his province.

Lastly the army desired for its leader the propraetor Marcus Cato.

Obviously it was right.

Cato was the only man who possessed the requisite devotedness, energy, and authority for the difficult office; if he was no military man, it was infinitely better to appoint as commander-in-chief a non-military man who understood how to listen to reason and make his subordinates act, than an officer of untried capacity like Varus, or even one of tried incapacity like Metellus Scipio.

But the decision fell at length on this same Scipio, and it was Cato himself who mainly determined that decision.
He did so, not because he felt himself unequal to such a task, or because his vanity found its account rather in declining than in accepting; still less because he loved or respected Scipio, with whom he on the contrary was personally at variance, and who with his notorious inefficiency had attained a certain importance merely in virtue of his position as father-in-law to Pompeius; but simply and solely because his obstinate legal formalism chose rather to let the republic go to ruin in due course of law than to save it in an irregular way.