ZAMA

OPPOSING FORCES

By the time they faced each other on the sun-scorched sands of Zama the Mediterranean powerhouses of Rome and Carthage had been at war with one another for 62 years (although there were stretches of ‘peace’). Yet while tensions in the region had always made a decisive encounter between these two titans inevitable, the timing of this one in 202 BCE was accelerated by flagrant Carthaginian opportunism.

Since audaciously crossing the Alps and descending into northern Italy in 218 BCE, Hannibal’s army had terrorised the peninsular relentlessly, inflicting a series of catastrophic defeats upon a dumbstruck Rome that saw Carthage gain the advantage in the early years of the Second Punic War. Yet Rome refused to surrender in the face of these crushing setbacks, somehow holding its nerve following the almost total evisceration of an entire army at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BCE. Critically for the future of this mammoth tussle, one of the few Romans to escape Hannibal’s trap at Cannae was a promising young soldier named Publius Cornelius Scipio.

Born into an Etruscan family in 236 BCE, Scipio was seemingly destined for a life serving Rome on the battlefield due to his lineage. His father, with whom he shared a name, had served as consul (the highest elected position in the Roman Republic), and in 218 BCE he took his 18-year-old son with him when he marched to confront Hannibal’s newly arrived force in northern Italy. In the winter of that year the Romans faced their invaders at the Battle of Ticinus, a