Scipio Aemilianus

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Scipio Aemilianus stood weeping over the burning city of Carthage in 146 BC. He had just ordered it evacuated, torched, and razed to the ground. He had even ordered the earth plowed over where it once stood. And yet, as Polybius recorded, Scipio shed tears openly for his enemies. When Polybius pressed him to explain, Scipio quoted Homer, then named his own country as the thing he feared most. He was watching Rome's greatest enemy die, and all he could think about was that Rome itself would one day share that fate.

  This was the man Rome called upon twice, in violation of its own laws, to fight wars no one else could win. He carried two war surnames: Africanus, for destroying Carthage, and Numantinus, for defeating a Spanish hill city that had held off Roman armies for nine years. He moved in the company of the greatest intellectuals of his age. He died mysteriously in his bed at home, and the city that owed him so much refused to investigate who killed him.

• 2. Blood and Adoption

  ›

  Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the Roman commander who crushed Macedonia in the Third Macedonian War, brought his two older sons with him to Greece on campaign. Scipio Aemilianus was one of them, and Plutarch wrote that Paullus saw in him a nature "more prone to excellence than any of his brothers." After the Battle of Pydna, the young Scipio went missing during the pursuit of the enemy. Plutarch described the army's reaction: soldiers left their suppers and ran through the camp with torches, searching among the dead. The plain filled with men calling out the name of Scipio. He came back late that night, covered in the blood of the enemies he had killed. He was seventeen.

  Scipio was the biological son of Paullus, but his legal identity came through adoption. His first cousin, Publius Cornelius Scipio, adopted him, and through that act Scipio Aemilianus became the adoptive grandson of Scipio Africanus, the general who had beaten Hannibal in the Second Punic War. On adoption he took the name Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, keeping Aemilianus as a fourth name to signal his biological origin. His elder brother was separately adopted into the family of Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, another famous commander from the Second Punic War, and became Quintus Fabius Maximus Aemilianus. Two brothers, two of Rome's most celebrated military dynasties: the connections would shape everything that followed.

• 3. The First Wars

  ›

  In 152 BC, with Roman armies struggling in Spain, a crisis of recruitment swept through Rome. Rumors of incessant fighting and heavy losses made young men invent excuses to avoid service. Even men eligible for senior officer positions refused to volunteer. The consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus had urged the Senate to make peace with the Celtiberians; the Senate refused and sent Lucius Licinius Lucullus to Hispania instead.

  Scipio Aemilianus asked the Senate to send him to Hispania, either as a military tribune or a legate. He acknowledged it would have been safer to go to Macedon, where he had already been invited to resolve disputes, but said the situation in Spain was urgent. The Senate was startled. Then, shamed by his example, men who had been avoiding service began to volunteer. Scipio went and served under Lucullus. According to Velleius Paterculus, he was awarded the mural crown, given to the first soldier to scale a besieged city wall and plant the standard. Florus recorded that a Celtiberian king challenged him to single combat, and Scipio won, taking the spolia opima, the armor stripped from a commander killed in personal combat, regarded as the highest of all war trophies.

  Those same years of Celtiberian fighting introduced Scipio to a dispute that would haunt him later. His relative Tiberius Gracchus served as quaestor in the Numantine War of 137 BC under consul Gaius Hostilius Mancinus, who became trapped by the enemy and signed a peace treaty. Tiberius negotiated the terms. The Senate rejected the treaty as a disgrace. By Plutarch's account, the people voted to hand over Mancinus bound and naked to the Numantines, but spared the other officers for Tiberius' sake. Scipio used his influence to help save those men, though he was blamed for not saving Mancinus and for not protecting the treaty his kinsman had brokered.

• 4. The Destruction of Carthage

  ›

  Cato the Elder ended every speech with the same words: "Carthage must be destroyed." The phrase had been a rhetorical ritual for years by the time Rome finally acted on it. In 150 BC, Carthage appealed to Scipio Aemilianus to mediate between them and the Numidian prince Massinissa, who had been encroaching on Carthaginian territory with Roman backing. After the Second Punic War, Rome had required Carthage to seek Roman permission before defending itself militarily. When Carthage fought back against the Numidians, Rome declared this a treaty violation and went to war in 149 BC.

  In the war's early stages, the Romans lost repeatedly. Scipio was serving as a military tribune and distinguished himself again and again: covering the army's retreat after a failed assault into the city itself, rallying cavalry to repel a Carthaginian night attack on the camp of consul Censorinus, preventing a foraging ambush, driving off a surprise attack on a fort protecting Roman supply ships with a clever stratagem, and checking a Carthaginian counter-attack at Nepheris. By 147 BC he was elected consul, still below the legal minimum age for the office. He was assigned to Africa without the customary lottery.

  After what the sources describe as a year of desperate fighting by the city's defenders, Scipio took Carthage. Around 50,000 survivors were taken prisoner, roughly one-tenth of the city's population. Following the Senate's orders, he had the city evacuated, burned, leveled, and plowed under. He received a Triumph on his return to Rome, and the agnomen Africanus was now his by personal right, not just by adoption. Pliny the Elder recorded that he was also awarded the grass crown during the African campaign, the rarest military honor Rome gave.

• 5. Numantia's Nine-Year Hold

  ›

  The Celtiberians of Numantia held off Roman armies for nine years. The city occupied terrain with strong natural defenses, and the army Rome had sent to subdue it had grown demoralized and undisciplined. In 134 BC the citizens elected Scipio consul a second time, deciding he was the only man who could end it.

  Scipio's first task was to rebuild the army itself. He banned luxuries the troops had come to expect. He imposed a regimen of constant physical work: all-day marches, building camps and fortifications and then demolishing them, digging ditches and filling them in again. When he judged the army ready, he avoided the direct route to Numantia, refusing to play into the guerrilla tactics the Numantines had perfected. Instead he swung through the territory of the Vaccaei, who had been supplying the city with food. He was ambushed several times. In one ambush near a difficult river crossing, forced onto a longer route without water, he marched his men at night when it was cooler and dug wells that produced bitter water. Some horses and pack animals died of thirst; his men survived. He passed through the territory of the Caucaei, who had broken their treaty with Rome, and declared they could return safely to their homes.

  Back near Numantia, he received reinforcements from Numidia: Jugurtha, son of the Numidian king, arrived with archers, slingers, and twelve elephants. Scipio built a siege circuit nine kilometers long around the city. The wall stood three meters high and two and a half meters wide. An embankment of the same dimensions surrounded the adjoining marsh. On the River Durius, he built two towers, mooring between them large timbers fitted with knives and spear heads, kept in constant motion by the current to prevent anyone slipping through. Numantia starved. Some defenders killed themselves. Scipio sold the survivors into slavery, destroyed the city, and kept fifty men for his triumph in Rome. He received the agnomen Numantinus.

• 6. The Scipionic Circle

  ›

  Velleius Paterculus wrote that Scipio kept two men of genius constantly with him, at home and in the field: the Greek historian Polybius and the Stoic philosopher Panaetius. The wider group around him numbered between fifteen and twenty-seven philosophers, poets, and politicians, and included Roman satirists and comedy writers such as Lucilius and Terence alongside Greek intellectuals.

  Polybius mentioned traveling with Scipio to Africa to explore the continent. Gellius credited Scipio with the purest Latin diction of any man of his time. Cicero placed him among the orators who were emphatic but never strained their lungs or shouted, and recorded a number of Scipio's puns, noting his sense of humour. Scipio is also the central figure in Cicero's dialogue De re publica, particularly the section known as the Somnium Scipionis, the Dream of Scipio, in Book VI.

  Scipio's cultural position was contradictory in a way that made him distinctive. He was openly philhellenic, surrounding himself with Greek thinkers and admiring Greek culture. Roman traditionalists criticized this enthusiasm, arguing that Hellenisation was corrupting Roman life through alien influences. Yet Scipio simultaneously supported the old Roman customs and ancestral virtues those same traditionalists championed. When he was censor, Gellius recorded, Scipio gave a speech urging the people to follow the customs of their forefathers. He criticized practices he found contrary to ancestral usage, including adoptive sons counting toward their adoptive father's paternity rights in ways he considered a manipulation. He held both the Greek future and the Roman past at the same time.

• 7. Politics and the Gracchi

  ›

  In 142 BC Scipio served as censor and tried to restrain what he saw as growing luxury and moral looseness in Roman society. In 139 BC, Tiberius Claudius Asellus, a plebeian tribune whose knighthood Scipio had stripped during the censorship, accused him of high treason. The speeches Scipio gave in his defense were considered brilliant, though they no longer survive. The satirist Lucilius, who belonged to Scipio's own circle, wrote a mocking verse at Asellus' expense.

  The break with the Gracchian movement came gradually. Scipio's brother-in-law Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus pressed as plebeian tribune for a law to redistribute land to the poor. Scipio disagreed with the methods, though the Encyclopaedia Britannica suggests he was not aligned with the optimates, the faction that supported aristocratic interests. Plutarch wrote that Scipio's disagreement might not have turned fatal if Scipio had been in Rome during the political crisis; he was in Hispania fighting the Numantine War when Tiberius was murdered. On hearing of the death at Numantia, Scipio quoted from the Odyssey: "So perish also all others who on such wickedness venture." When he returned to Rome and was asked publicly what he thought about the killing, his answer made clear his disapproval of Tiberius' program. The crowd, who had never interrupted him before, began to heckle him.

  Italy's allies then brought Scipio a different political problem. The Gracchian land commission, which included Tiberius' brother Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, was resurveying land across Rome's territories. Owners who lacked deeds sometimes lost orchards and farm buildings. The allies complained about the lawsuits and chose Scipio to represent them. Because they had served in his wars, he accepted. He did not attack the Gracchian law itself in the Senate, but argued that the commission lacked the confidence of the litigants and that the cases should go before a court. The Senate agreed and appointed consul Gaius Sempronius Tuditanus as judge. Tuditanus found a pretext to launch a war in Illyria instead. The people grew furious with Scipio, accusing him of siding with the allies against them after they had twice elected him consul in defiance of the law.

• 8. A Death Without Verdict

  ›

  Scipio Aemilianus died at home, in his bed, sometime around 129 BC. He had no visible wound, but Plutarch wrote that his body, lying exposed for all to see, gave everyone who looked at it some suspicion of what had happened. The anger of the Roman people toward Scipio was so strong at the time that they blocked any serious investigation, fearing that Gaius Sempronius Gracchus might be implicated.

  Appian laid out the possible authors: Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, and her daughter Sempronia, who was Scipio's wife, might have acted to prevent him from repealing the Gracchian land law. Appian also mentioned the possibility of suicide, and recorded that some slaves testified under torture that unknown persons had been brought through the rear of the house by night and had suffocated him. Plutarch added that the heaviest suspicion fell on Fulvius Flaccus, who had publicly attacked Scipio in a speech to the people that same day. Gaius Papirius Carbo was also accused, and the orator Lucius Licinius Crassus later named Carbo in a trial as a party to the killing.

  Modern historians have concluded there is no strong evidence for anything other than natural causes. The ancient sources recorded every rumor they could find but reached no verdict. The man who had watched Carthage burn and wept for its people, who had recited Homer over the news of his brother-in-law's murder, and who had kept Polybius and Panaetius at his side through decades of war, died in circumstances his own city chose not to examine. The orator Lucius Licinius Crassus, who later prosecuted Carbo for the killing, was himself cited by Cicero as among the great Roman orators of the generation that followed Scipio.