Scipio Africanus

By Alexander Acimovic

Scipio Africanus was one of the greatest generals and statesmen of the Ancient World. When he was 18, he saved his father's life in battle during the Second Punic War and later survived the horrific Roman defeat at Cannae.

At the age of 26, he was named Commander-in-Chief of the Roman army in Spain and in 4 years, by daringly storming the city of Cartagena and crushing two Carthaginian armies in battle, conquered almost the entire peninsula for Rome.

After returning to Rome, he leveraged popular support to gain command of an army to invade Carthage. Lacking logistical and material support, he welded, trained and armed a battle-hardened army. Landing in Africa, he delivered a stunning defeat to the Carthaginians with a surprise attack by night and fire. After the famed Hannibal Barca returned to defend his homeland, Scipio and his army utterly defeated the Punic general at the Battle of Zama.

This book, based on exhaustive research of both ancient and modern sources, describes Scipio's life and career in detail, analyzes his military and political strategies and decisions, and illustrates the timelessness of his leadership skills and far-seeing diplomacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 3, 2007
• ISBN: 9780595878727

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Copyright © 2007 by Alexander Acimovic

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ISBN: 978-0-595-43545-6 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-595-87872-7 (ebk)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

MAPS

1

Publius Cornelius Scipio was born in 236 B.C. He was descended from one of the most renowned patrician gens of ancient Rome, the Cornelii. The Scipios were most likely an offshoot from an older line within the gens, possibly the Maluginenses.1 The name Scipio means ‘staff; it is said to have originated when a blind member of the family held onto his son for support; its oldest recorded usage is found in accounts of the early 4th century B.C.

The first surely attested Scipios, brothers named Publius and Lucius, held high office in the mid 4th century; the former was master of horse in 350, the latter was consul in the same year.2 There is considerable confusion about the members of the next generation or two of the family and the offices they may or may not have held,3 but one whom we can identify with certainty is a Cnaeus Cornelius Scipio, whose son, Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, served as consul in 298. Scipio Bar-batus, besides his consulship, served several times as a legate under the legendary Fabius Maximus Rullianus and his son Fabius Gurges, and was also censor, probably in 280;4 he later built the famous Tomb of the Scipios, which can still be seen today on the Via Appia. Following his death he was buried in a magnificent sarcophagus in the center of the Tomb, which is now housed in the Vatican Museum.5 Barbatus’ son, also Lucius, was consul in 259, during the early years of the First Punic War; his tenure included a successful attack upon the Carthaginians in Sardinia and Corsica, for which he was awarded a triumph.6 In 258 he served as censor; after his death he was also interred in the family tomb.7 This Lucius Scipio begat two sons, Cnaeus and Publius, the eldest son of the latter being the Publius of whose life we are writing.

Publius Scipio’s mother was Pomponia of the Pomponii family, an ancient plebeian gens.8 The identity of Scipio’s grandfather on his mother’s side is unclear, as there are several contemporary Pomponii whose separate identities are difficult to untangle.9 As with Roman women in general, especially in this era, unfortunately little specific information is known about Pomponia.

Only an anecdote survives of Scipio’s youth: apparently he was once, while wearing only a tunic, dragged home from the house of a girlfriend by his father. Scipio was not keen on being reminded of the incident, for he said of Naevius, a poet who poked fun at it, Is there an idler knave than this Naevius?10 Other than this, nothing of his upbringing has been passed down to posterity. There were no schools in Rome during this era; education was the responsibility of the family, and Roman senators generally educated their own children. Mothers also played a strong role in the child’s upbringing. Young men were taught to revere the traditions of family, religion and service to the state and studied in language and mathematics, as well as enduring physical training in preparation for their requisite military service. As boys grew older, they would learn first hand from their fathers what service to their country, which was expected of them, entailed.11

The Mediterranean in the 230s and 220s was populated by five powers, many small city-states and numerous, unsettled tribal peoples. The five were these: Rome, who following her victory in the First Punic War controlled the Italian peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica; Carthage, who after her defeat in that war and victory over her rebellious mercenaries had expanded her domains into Iberia; Egypt, ruled by the Ptolemies, with whom Rome had friendly relations dating to 273; Macedonia, ruled by the Antigonids, who since the reign of Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, had been the dominant power in Greece; and Syria, ruled by the Seleucids and the dominant power in Asia Minor, the Northern Levant, and Persia. Domestically, the years between the first two Punic Wars were relatively tranquil ones for Rome. The long conflicts between the patricians and plebs had been settled by the early 3rd century; the magistracies and priesthoods were now split equally, and the system worked smoothly and peaceably.

The first notice of young Publius Scipio comes during his first military campaign in 218 B.C. War had been declared by Rome and Carthage in the spring of 218, following Hannibal Barca’s seizure of the Iberian city of Saguntum—a city allied to Rome—in 219. Both sides had high hopes for the initial campaign, with no conception of what was to come: a war that involved or engulfed nearly the whole Mediterranean World and for geographic scope, numbers and total commitment of men and nations involved, death, destruction and consequences surpassed any prior conflict. Scipio’s father had been chosen consul and was initially sent to Iberia to assail Hannibal, but when he arrived with his army for a stopover in the allied city of Massilia (modern-day Marseilles) and found that Hannibal had already crossed the Rhone and was headed for Italy, he sent his brother Cnaeus on to Iberia with his fleet and army and returned by sea to Pisa, from whence he marched with new forces through Etruria and northern Italy to intercept Hannibal and the Carthaginians near the foot of the Alps.12

The two armies having happened upon each other near the Ticinus River, a cavalry engagement quickly ensued. Scipio had around him an elite group of cavalrymen posted by his father, but when in the course of the battle he saw his father surrounded by the enemy, with only two or three horsemen near him, and dangerously wounded, he first tried to cheer on his own squadron to go to his father’s assistance, but when he found them considerably cowed by the numbers of the enemy surrounding them, he appears to have plunged by himself with reckless courage into the midst of the enemy. Whereupon, his comrades being forced to charge also, the enemy were overawed and divided their ranks to let them pass. Publius the elder, being thus unexpectedly saved, was the first to address his son as his preserver in the hearing of the whole army.13

Scipio thus won himself widespread acclaim, but ill omens were raised by the rest of the campaign, for the wound sustained by Scipio the father necessitated his absence from active command, and the other consul Tiberius Sempronius Longus, who after arriving from Ariminum with reinforcements assumed the command, was a man bereft of prudence and ignored Scipio’s counsel. Sempro-nius soon led the legions into the ambushes of Hannibal at the Trebia and escaped only after the loss of more than half the army.

Subsequent events did not improve Rome’s war prospects. In 217, a second large army was ambushed and annihilated and its commander, the consul Caius Flaminius, killed by Hannibal at Lake Trasimene. Fabius Maximus was immediately thereafter appointed dictator and proceeded upon the strategy of delay, maneuver, attrition and avoidance of set-piece battles which made him famous. Despite Fabius’ success in stemming the tide of losses, many in Rome, demagogues and senators alike, outrageously reproached him with shirking his duty and avoiding Hannibal out of cowardice. At the elections for 216, there was a general desire for consuls who would engage and defeat Hannibal in a pitched battle, and, though Fabius attempted through the powers of the augural college (of which he was the leading member) to manipulate the electoral proceedings, after some considerable delay, Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro were elected to the consulship. With the aim of confronting Hannibal, the Senate authorized an army of unprecedented size, over 80,000 strong, including approximately 6000 cavalry.14

Although after his recovery from illness Scipio’s father had been dispatched to Iberia as pro-consul, young Scipio remained behind in Rome, where the reputation he had gained by savings his father’s life now helped start his public career. At the elections for 216—probably his first opportunity to run, having likely still been in the field during the prior year’s election—he was chosen to be one of the military tribunes.15 These officers, directly subordinate to the consuls, were assigned extensive responsibilities: they drafted the recruits, divided them up amongst the legions and swore them in; supervised the construction of encampments (inside of which their own tents were adjacent to that of the consul); were authorized to inflict punishments short of execution; and formed part of the military council as an integral link in the chain of command between the consuls and the centurions.16 In this year the task of raising such a massive army must have kept the tribunes very busy.

In or around June of 216, Hannibal moved off from his winter quarters and seized the citadel at Cannae, which was then being used by the Romans as a storage depot. The loss of this place and of all the victuals in it greatly upset the Romans, and the consuls were therefore dispatched to join the army in Apulia and bring Hannibal to battle. Within two days they had come upon Hannibal and pitched their camp nearby his. Varro was most eager to do battle. Aemilius, having greater experience in command, was also in favor of giving battle, but as the area around Cannae was very flat, he wanted to maneuver the battleground to a place better suited to the Roman infantry and less so to the Punic cavalry. However, as the command alternated each day, there was no real chance that Aemilius could stymy his colleague, and so a pitched battle became inevitable. On seventh day after the army’s arrival, August 2, 216, Varro led out the legions. Hannibal, knowing how advantageous for his cavalry the terrain was, drew out his own army in response. The Roman dispositions were as follows: the cavalry was on the wings, Roman cavalry on the right and the Latin allies on the left; the huge mass of heavy infantry filled the space in the center, but their line was deeper and the individual men were closer to one another than was customary; the light infantry was placed in front. Hannibal employed an unusual formation: he too placed his cavalry, of which he had 10,000, on the wings, with his Iberians and Celts opposite the Romans and his Numidians opposite the Latins; his infantry, though, was aligned in a crescent formation: the Libyans, on either end, were slightly withdrawn, and in the center, the units of the Iberians and Celts formed a thin line arching progressively forward to the apex of the crescent. This formation caused the centers of each army to engage before the wings.

At the outset, the Romans, by their sheer weight, forced the thin line of Celts and Iberians backward; as they pushed ever further forward, however, the Roman wings began to funnel into the gap, so that the whole army pushed deeper into Hannibal’s center. When the Romans became so far advanced that the Libyans were now on their flanks, Hannibal ordered these men to turn about and attack. By this time also, the Punic superiority in cavalry had begun to pay dividends: the Celts and Iberians had routed the Romans, had then assisted the Numidians in forcing the Latins to flee, and now assailed the rear of the Roman infantry andencircled them. Although they fought with great gallantry, the Romans were doomed men; the consul Aemilius Paullus, among others, died in the thick of the fighting. By the end of the day, 50,000 Romans had been killed, one of the bloodiest days in human history.17 For the young Scipio, the tactics and dispositions employed both by Hannibal and by the Roman consuls taught a tragically acute lesson; as Sun-Tzu says, it is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.18

Scipio was apparently one of those who after the battle had been unfavorably decided managed to reach the safety of the two Roman camps. There was some argument amongst the ten thousand surviving Romans in the camps over whether to risk an attempt to fight their way out of the camps, through Hannibal’s guards and to safety; eventually, a group from the smaller camp got up the nerve and, in a wedge formation, broke through the surrounding enemy troops and managed to reach the larger camp. From there, a total of 4200 men reached the nearby town of Canusium, where command of the group was entrusted jointly to Scipio and Appius Claudius Pulcher, another military tribune (the Romans who remained in the camps were captured soon after and sold into slavery). Scipio must have distinguished himself in some way to have been chosen for leadership, as some of the officers were considerably older.19

Scipio and Claudius, along with the other two tribunes with them and several compatriots, were conferring as to what action they ought take when one Publius Furius Philus rushed in to warn them that nearby a number of young Roman nobles were plotting to flee their country and seek the embrace of some foreign potentate. While others called for a discussion of the matter, Scipio flew out of the room, and made instantly for the traitorous hideaway; holding a bared sword over the heads of the conspirators, he forced them to swear an oath of allegiance to Rome and commit themselves to his charge.20 Several years later, the ringleader of the group, Lucius Caecilius Metellus, who was then a quaestor, was brought to trial, along with several other conspirators, by the censors; the treachery of the group was exposed, and they were degraded to the lowest class of society, without the right to vote or hold office.21

Presently, Scipio and Claudius took stock of their forces, sent an inventory to the surviving consul, Varro, who was in Venusia, and awaited his orders. Varro responded by removing to Canusium and taking command of the remnants of the defeated army.22 Later, this army was placed under the command of the proconsul Marcus Claudius Marcellus and for the remainder of the year dogged Hannibal in Campania.23

The defeat suffered by the Romans at Cannae was their nadir of the war. The resources of the city and her allies were stretched to their limits; Samnium, Brut-tium, Lucania, Campania, Tarentum and parts of Apulia either revolted and gave their support to Hannibal or were taken by him, although the Latins, Etruscans and Umbrians remained for the most part loyal. In 216, the dictator M. Junius Pera, cobbling together a fresh army, was forced to train and arm some 8000 slaves, whose freedom was purchased for the purpose by the state treasury; to draft men under the minimum legal age for service; and to call upon criminals, whose prison terms were commuted on the condition that they joined the army. In Sicily, the legions were only paid and feed through an outlay by King Hiero of Syracuse, and the Sardinian army also had to be supplied by allied contribu-tions.24 In 215 and 214, Fabius Maximus held the consulship, and in 213 he served as legate to his son the consul. With the employment of his vindicated strategy, the situation was stabilized and Hannibal was stymied in his attempts to gain more victories.

Scipio is next noticed during the elections for 213 B.C., when he stood for the post of curule aedile. The duties of this magistracy included supervision of the markets, the food supply, and public buildings and areas, as well as holding public games and festivals; the office was considered a stepping-stone for a man hoping to attain the consulship.

The atmosphere at a Roman election was somewhat similar to that of an American presidential convention of the 20th century. The entire body of eligible voters was assembled on the Campus Martius in a temporary, enclosed, unroofed structure called the Saepta, in which the citizens were divided according to their voting units (either tributa or centuriata, depending on which magistrates were to be elected) and interference from non-voters was prevented. The candidates, all dressed in special white togas, stood together on a platform for the electors to see; they were not allowed to speak or campaign during the actual voting. The assembly was presided over by a consul or praetor in his curule chair; tribunes of the plebs and augurs were on hand to ensure that proper legal and religious procedures were followed.25 Scipio’s candidacy was not unopposed, for when he mounted the platform, the tribunes protested that his youth made him ineligible for the office; to this Scipio replied loudly that, If all the citizens want to make me aedile, then I am old enough. Hearing this, the electors loudly voiced their support and rushed to cast their votes, and the tribunes desisted.26 Although Scipio was indeed not old enough, it was common for traditional restrictions to be set aside during the Second Punic War, as the extenuating circumstances demanded the eligibility of all capable men.

Scipio was duly elected, along with Marcus Cornelius Cethegus. The games were held by Scipio and his colleague in an extensive style and repeated on a second day. They also distributed measures of oil throughout the city.27

At some time prior to 211, Scipio was inducted into a religious college called the Salii, which was dedicated to Mars. The members of the college performed ritual war dances in honor of Mars on the 1st, 9th, and 23rd days of every March, and on an appointed day every October. During these parades the dress was as follows: each Salian wore a cloak with scarlet stripes and a purple border covered by archaic Bronze Age armor and adorned with a conical helmet and sword; in one hand he carried a staff, in the other a sacred shield, the form of which dated to King Numa Pompilius in the 7th century. On each of the appointed days, a procession of the college members marched through the city beating their shields with their swords; at certain places they stopped and performed a dance to flute music while singing an ancient tune. After the parade concluded, a banquet was held for those involved. The celebration of March 1st officially began a month of religious observance and marked the start of the Roman military campaign season, which was closed by the October ceremony.28

At some point during these years, Scipio also married Aemilia Tertia, daughter of the consul Lucius Aemilius Paullus who died at Cannae. Shortly after their marriage, the couple had two sons, Publius and Lucius.29

2

In 210 B.C., Publius Cornelius Scipio was elected pro-consul and commander-in-chief of all Roman forces in Iberia. It was a decisive event, both in the course of the war and in Scipio’s life. If before describing this occasion, however, we may first embark on a short digression, it will be to our substantial benefit to know the course of the war in Iberia prior to Scipio’s assumption of the command there.

Although neither of the two warring nations in the Second Punic War was located in or near the Iberian peninsula and the most destructive and famous battles during the early part of the war took place in Italy, Spain was a pivotal theater in a war which engulfed most of the Mediterranean world. Carthage, whose natural strength, inherited from their Phonecian forebearers, lay in the nautical sphere and whose armies were composed primarily of mercenaries, had between the First and Second Punic Wars conquered and consolidated control over the settled regions of Spain, consisting of the southern and eastern coastal areas and the Baetica region. Two years prior to his invasion of Italy, Hannibal had assumed command of the large Punic army in Spain, succeeding his brother-in-law Hasdrubal, and had used Spain as the supply base and beginning point for his invasion of Italy. Throughout the war, Spain continued to serve as the primary Punic source and depot of money, mercenaries and supplies. Its importance to the Carthaginians’ ability to wage war was paramount, which motivated the sustained Roman attempt to defeat the Punic army in Spain.

When Cnaeus Scipio, who, as noted, had been sent there by his brother in 218, arrived in Iberia, he immediately set about consolidating a Roman foothold in the country. After landing at the allied Greek city of Emporium, he proceeded