Scipio Africanus & The Punic Wars Documentary

The man known to history as Scipio Africanus was born as Publius Cornelius Scipio in the city of Rome, most likely in the year 236 BC. Africanus, as we will see, was an agnomen bestowed on him later in life owing to his military accomplishments. His father was also Publius Cornelius Scipio, after whom he was named. The Cornelli Scipiones family, or gens, was one of the most acclaimed families of the Roman Republic. They were a patrician family, meaning they hailed from the old aristocratic families that traced their lineage back to the time of the Roman Kingdom and

early Republic centuries earlier. Several ancestors had served as consul, the highest magistrate of the Roman Republic, during the fourth century BC, while both Scipio’s great-grandfather and grandfather were noted political figures and military commanders between the 290s and the 250s BC. Scipio’s mother was Pomponia of the gens Pomponia. Her people were of the plebeian class of Romans, commoners in olden times, though many such plebeian families had risen to riches and esteem in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. The Pomponia were one such, with many scions of the family serving as tribune of the people and consul

in the fifth, fourth and third centuries BC. Family lore even held that they were descended from a son of one of the rulers of Rome in times gone by, Numa Pompilius. Hence, Scipio was born into a powerful and prominent family within the Roman Republic. Scipio’s entire life would be shaped by the trajectory of Roman politics in the century or so before he was even born. According to Roman mythology, Rome had been founded by Romulus and Remus on the banks of the River Tiber in 753 BC, twins descended from Prince Aeneas of the fabled city of

Troy. In reality, though, archaeologists have revealed that Rome actually emerged from around 1000 BC onwards as several small villages in the vicinity of the Seven Hills of Rome amalgamated together. A Roman kingdom existed early on before the Roman Republic emerged at the very end of the sixth century BC. For another century and a half thereafter it had remained a small city state, controlling little more than the countryside in the immediate hinterland of the city. Rome had even been attacked and sacked by a marauding army of Celts from the Alpine region of northern Italy in 390

BC. Perhaps it was the shock of the Celtic attack on their city state which spurred the Romans to become a more militaristic people, for in the decades that followed they entered into a series of wars against their neighbours in the Latium region of central Italy and then against the Samnites. Thus, by 290 BC, at the end of the Third Samnite War, they had conquered all of central Italy and were expanding north into Tuscany, then known as Etruria, and southwards towards Calabria and the island of Sicily. This century of republican expansion brought the Romans into contact

with new people. Between 280 BC and 275 BC they fought a war in southern Italy against King Pyrrhus of Epirus, ruler of a kingdom that encompassed parts of what are now north-western Greece and southern Albania. He had been called upon by the Greek city states of southern Italy to come to their aid against the growing aggression of the Romans. He won a series of victories over Rome, but with the loss of such forces that he had to eventually abandon the cause, forever ensuring that his name would be remembered through the term Pyrrhic victory, one that

is so costly that it might as well have been a defeat. Rome’s true enemy, though, in the decades before Scipio was born was Carthage. The Carthaginians were a people whose city had been founded in what is now Tunis in Tunisia in North Africa centuries earlier as a colony of the Phoenicians, the great naval and trading power that emerged out of the Levant in the Early Iron Age. While Rome was still a minor city state in central Italy, the Carthaginians were a major power across the Western Mediterranean, with influence and lands in North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia,

Corsica and on the southern coast of Hispania. A Carthaginian explorer, Hanno the Navigator, had even sailed around the western coast of Africa in the fifth century BC. In 264 BC Rome and Carthage went to war in a clash known as the First Punic War, so-named after the Roman term for the Carthaginians. Scipio’s grandfather was prominent in the fighting, leading an expedition to Corsica and Sardinia in the early 250s BC. When the clash ended 23 years later, just a half a decade before Scipio was born, Carthage had been defeated and was forced to cede control over

Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica to Rome. In the process the Roman Republic had become a naval power and the pre-eminent state in the Western Mediterranean. Carthage was not entirely crushed by its defeat in the First Punic War, though it had suffered a major setback. In the aftermath of it, while Scipio was barely an infant, a Carthaginian general, Hamilcar Barca, who had been prominent in the fighting in Sicily in the 240s BC and whose family, the Barcids, were amongst the elite of the Carthaginian oligarchy, convinced his people that they could rebuild their strength by concentrating on Hispania

to the west, where there were valuable mines and many trading port cities and towns. Then, when it was strong enough again, Carthage could exact revenge on Rome. Thus, over the course of the 230s and 220s BC Hamilcar, and later his sons, Hasdrubal and Hannibal, campaigned extensively in southern and western Hispania, preparing their armies and navies for a fresh war to come with Rome. At Rome, members of the Senate, like Scopio’s father, looked on and prepared for the inevitable Second Punic War. We have a number of very useful sources for the history of the Second Punic

War and Scipio’s role in it. The two foremost are The Histories of Polybius, a Greek historian who lived in the second century BC and was a near contemporary of the events he described in his history of the Roman Republic, and Livy whose Ab Urbe Condita, meaning ‘From the Foundation of the City’, written in the late first century BC, is the most monumental history of the Roman Republic produced in ancient times. These provide detailed accounts of the Punic Wars and Scipio’s role in the second of the conflicts. Unfortunately, several sources which were biographical accounts of Scipio

himself have not survived. The most regrettable such loss is the Life of Scipio written by the second-century AD Greco-Roman historical biographer, Plutarch, while Scipio himself is believed to have written a now lost memoir. Other sources are more fragmentary, yet useful in their own way. The great Roman orator Cicero discussed Scipio’s life in his De Republica. The first-century AD historian Valerius Maximus provided some curious maxims and anecdotes concerning Scipio, though he was somewhat hostile to him as a figure. Finally, the Punica, a Latin epic poem about the Punic Wars composed in the first century AD by

Silius Italicus, features Scipio as a central character, albeit this is a literary work and needs to be handled carefully to extract any historical value from it. The surviving sources do not provide much by way of information on Scipio’s early life, something which makes the loss of Plutarch’s Life of Scipio, which would have given biographical details like this, especially regrettable. Still, we can infer some things about his youth. Within the Scipio household the family lived under Scipio’s father, the pater familias, as Roman society was strongly patriarchal. Formal systems of education were only just beginning to emerge

in Rome and for the most part it was still the responsibility of the father to teach his sons in the ways of subjects such as rhetoric, oratory, the religion and mythology of Rome and Latin grammar. Scipio probably also benefited from the first flushes of the introduction of Greek educational methods to Rome, which are typically believed to have been introduced around the middle of the third century BC by captured Greek slaves such as Livius Andronicus. This would have seen a growing emphasis on Greek prose and poetry and science and the translation into Latin of many of

the classic works of Greek literature, particularly the Iliad and Odyssey, typically ascribed to the poet Homer. Scipio would also have grown up aware of his family’s privileged position, as his grandfather was responsible for building a temple to Tempestates, a goddess of storms and weather. Similarly, his father was progressing in the 230s and 220s BC, as Scipio was growing up, through the cursus honorum, the series of promotions through the different political offices of the Republic. We know this because he became consul of Rome in 218 BC and would have had to have served in the more

junior positions in years gone by in order to have acquired the consulship at that later date. As Scipio entered his mid-teens in the late 220s BC, young manhood by Roman standards, tensions were flaring between the Romans and the Carthaginians. A treaty signed in 226 BC had fixed the River Ebro as the northern border of Carthage’s influence in Hispania, roughly midway between modern-day Barcelona and Valencia in eastern Spain. But in the years that followed, the Romans had breached the terms by acquiring allies very close to the border region and then interfering in the affairs of the

city of Saguntum, which lay south of the Ebro. When Hannibal laid siege to Saguntum and restored it to Carthaginian control in 219 BC, the Romans used this as a pretext for declaring war on Carthage in the following year, even though the city lay inside Carthage’s sphere of influence. So began the Second Punic War. Despite being the aggressor, the Romans had badly miscalculated. Hannibal and his brother Hasdrubal had long been planning for this and Hannibal now headed north where the Carthaginians had organised several alliances with the Gallic Celts and other groups in southern France and the

Alps, while Hasdrubal remained in Hispania to lead the war effort there. In the winter of 218 BC, as the Romans moved their armies to the south of Italy and the coast in preparation for a naval invasion, they suddenly began receiving word that Hannibal had descended on northern Italy with tens of thousands of men and even some war elephants from Africa, having marched over the Alps. Scipio was not of an age to play a prominent role in the war when it broke out in 218 BC. He was, at most, around 19 years of age. This meant

he had been considered an adult for four or five years, as the Romans had nothing comparable to the modern concept of being a teenager. That said, this was also an ageist society in which a person generally needed to be well into their twenties and ideally their thirties or forties before they attained to high political office, the latter of which was a necessary precursor to being appointed to a substantial military command. Therefore Scipio would not rise to a major military position for several years. He did, though, serve as a soldier in the Roman army, which was

still a part-time army made up of Roman citizens in the third century BC. All hands were needed to play their part. After his arrival in Italy, Hannibal won a series of major victories across the peninsula, culminating in the Battle of Cannae on the 2nd of August 216 BC. Here the Romans suffered one of the greatest military defeats in their history. In the aftermath of it, Rome’s allies and many of the cities and towns under its control in Italy and Sicily began abandoning their overlord and allying with the Carthaginians. For a time it seemed that Hannibal

would strike next at Rome itself, but he never felt that he had sufficient resources to take the city. He would consequently spend several years to come campaigning around Italy waiting for the opportune moment. Throughout all of this Scipio served his initial military apprenticeship. His father had been consul in 218 BC and led an army which headed into northern Italy when news of Hannibal’s arrival reached Rome. According to Polybius, he may have saved his father’s life during a clash of Roman and Carthaginian cavalry near modern-day Pavia, though the veracity of this is debated. Two years later,

by now entering his twenties, he began his ascent within Roman politics when he was elected as a military tribune, an important junior military office and a stepping stone to the Senate one day. He would continue to perform middling roles like this in Rome in the years to come as the city weathered the storm after the disaster at Cannae in the late summer of 216 BC. Meanwhile, his father and several other members of his extended family were engaging in a campaign which would catapult Scipio himself to great heights within the Republic before long. Even as Hannibal

was arriving in Italy, Scipio’s uncle was leading a military expedition to Hispania. Over the next several years he, Scipio’s father and several other family members oversaw this military campaign, which was the direct equivalent of Hannibal’s campaign within Italy. Their work in Hispania concentrated on securing a base of operations in the Catalonia region and then pressing south-westwards towards Murcia and Cordoba. As they did so, the Scipios became the de-facto leaders of the Roman war effort in the course of the 210s BC. In Italy, and in the absence of his father and uncle in Hispania, Scipio emerged

as a representative for his family in the capital, In 213 BC he was elected as an aedile, a prominent magistracy responsible for the civic management of Rome, including ensuring that the city was supplied with all the resources it needed, a task which had become especially important in the context of the war and Hannibal’s rampaging around Italy. By then he was married to Aemilia Tertia. She was the daughter of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, a figure who had been consul in 216 BC and died commanding at the Battle of Cannae. The marriage was a political one and there

may have been some significance to Scipio marrying her after Cannae and thus staking a claim to being the political successor to his deceased father-in-law. They would have five children together, three sons, Gnaeus, Lucius and Publius, and two daughters, Cornelia the Elder and Cornelia the Younger. His sons would go on to have modest political and military careers, though his foremost descendants would actually be his grandsons from Cornelia the Younger’s marriage. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus would emerge as the pre-eminent social reformers within the politics of Rome in the 130s and 120s BC. Despite their many children, Scipio

was not faithful to his wife, a not unusual occurrence within a society where promiscuity, infidelity and divorce were common. Several ancient sources attest to his numerous affairs both as a young man and later in his life, with Aemilia generally turning a blind eye to those which occurred at home in Rome itself. We know some little bit about the many who was about to emerge as one of Rome’s greatest generals. Scipio was clear possessed of a great intellect, somebody who was perceived as both cultured and skilful as a politician and commander. In time he would also

reveal himself to be a ruthless character, one who was able to undermine his rivals towards his own ends. Conversely, he could almost paradoxically be merciful and accommodating of Rome’s enemies when he felt displaying some sympathy towards the defeated was a judicious policy in the long run. Clearly he had a common touch as well, or at least some charm which won him the respect and admiration of his troops. It is difficult to say with certainty what he looked like. A bronze bust of a bald, clean-shaven man in middle age, with noticeably piercing eyes, one which dates

to the first century BC and was discovered at the town of Herculaneum, which was buried along with Pompeii during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 BC, was previously believed to be of Scipio, but this view has been revised and many now think this to be a portrait of an Egyptian priest of the goddess Isis. Conversely, a marble bust found near the Scipio family tomb in Rome may be of Africanus. The nose is broken off and the eyes, following a Roman sculptural tradition, are non-descript, but we get the impression of a strong man with a

serious demeanour, his face clean-shaven in line with Roman fashion and with short, curly hair. This was the figure that in 211 BC was suddenly catapulted into a very prominent position within the Roman military. Both his father and uncle were killed that year while campaigning in Hispania at twin battles fought at the Baetis River during a successful Carthaginian counter-offensive in the wider Andalusia region. Initially a more senior Roman political figure, Gaius Claudius Nero, was sent to Hispania to deal with the emergency created by the defeat at the Battle of the Baetis River. But just a few

months later a decision was made in Rome to appoint Scipio to oversee the campaign in Hispania. This was a highly unusual move. Scipio was still only 25 or 26 years of age, far too young under normal circumstances to acquire such a command and certainly so for a figure who had never served as a consul or seemingly been a member of the Senate. The exception was most likely made owing to both the unusual circumstances of the Second Punic War, where many generals had either died or been disgraced by the events at Cannae and elsewhere in Italy,

and also owing to personal loyalties amongst the Roman troops in Hispania to the Scipio family. When Scipio arrived at Hispania in 210 BC the Roman military effort there was in disarray after the setbacks of the previous year. After a period of regrouping, he launched a fresh offensive, prioritising the capture of the important port town of New Carthage or Carthago Novo, the site of modern-day Cartagena. This was achieved during a siege in 209 BC. The success was accomplished when Scipio sent divisions of his men to wade across the bay in low tide and enter an undefended

part of the town. This gave rise to a subsequent myth that Scipio was favoured by the gods and had been sent a message from Neptune, the God of the Sea, during the battle. Having capture Carthago Novo, he won over some of the local Iberian Celts and other allies of the Carthaginians by sparing the prisoners he took of them in the town and sending them back to their people with offers of generous terms if they switched sides and joined the Romans. In the two years that followed he extended this programme of gaining allies, not just in

Hispania, but also by travelling across the Mediterranean for some time to North Africa to negotiate with the Numidian tribes there, particularly the leader of one of the main contingents of these Berber peoples by the name of Massinissa. Throughout Scipio argued with the Iberians and the Numidians that the Carthaginian cause was doomed, as Hannibal had spent years stationed in Italy after Cannae without ever managing to strike a decisive blow against Rome. Scipio’s campaign in Hispania culminated in the spring of 206 BC in the Battle of Ilipa in the Andalusia region of south-western Spain, near modern-day Seville.

After the death of Hasdrubal the previous year, Scipio faced an army of Carthaginians led by Hannibal’s brother Mago and another Barcid clan member, Hasdrubal Gisco. The ancient accounts differ on the size of the forces involved, and in any event ancient Greek and Roman historians were notorious for often exaggerating the size of armies. These limitations aside, it is generally accepted that Scipio and the Romans were outnumbered by the Carthaginians, with the Italians numbering perhaps around 50,000 men to some 65,000 North Africans. Both sides had strong contingents of allies fighting for them and the skill of the

infantry in both instances is hard to gauge. What we do know is that Scipio won a decisive victory here, splitting his forces and attacking two Carthaginian camps before they could co-ordinate their efforts. In the rout that followed, the Romans were said to have destroyed over half of the Carthaginian army. Whether this is accurate is difficult to say, but regardless the claim indicates that a momentous victory had been won. With this the campaign in Hispania was all-but won and while some units remained here to continue laying siege to the towns that remained under Carthage’s control, thoughts

in Rome now largely turned to North Africa. Back in Italy, Hannibal was still campaigning around the peninsula, over a decade after he had first arrived there. In Rome the Senate debated the merits of trying to campaign directly against him in Italy. On balance it was decided that the best approach was now for an army to be sent to North Africa and to campaign there around Carthage itself in much the same way that Hannibal had done so in Italy around Rome for so many years. This would serve both to draw Hannibal out of Italy in order

to defend his homeland and also strike a potentially decisive blow against Carthage in North Africa. Scipio was the man chosen to lead the Roman expeditionary force across the Mediterranean, with a special dispensation made for him to be elected as consul in 205 BC in order to do so, he being approximately ten years too young to hold the office in just his early thirties. There appears to have been some reluctance to grant him the role and the leader of the Senate, Quintus Maximus, campaigned unsuccessfully to be given the position himself. Thereafter Scipio proceeded to Sicily, where

he seized a number of strongholds that were in Carthage’s hands and began maximising his fleet to convey thousands of Roman troops across the Mediterranean to Africa. Scipio spent much of 205 BC in Sicily and so his campaign in North Africa only really commenced in 204 BC. He spent the first year or so here strengthening his alliance with Massinissa, while also trying to take the port of Utica to the west of Carthage itself. After he won an important victory at the Battle of the Great Plains in 203 BC, there was no option but for Hannibal to

return to Africa with his military veterans from Italy, any hopes of an aggressive strategy on the part of Carthage now gone, and a desperate need to defend the city of Carthage from Scipio’s armies emerging. The Second Punic War was decided in an epic battle on the plains to the southwest of Carthage in a place known as Zama. This was at some point in 202 BC. After victory at the Battle of the Great Plains and Hannibal’s return to North Africa, Scipio had adopted a cautious policy, with he and his Numidian allies devastating the countryside around Carthage

and trying to implement a naval blockade at sea at the same time, the goal being to cut off Carthage’s food and supply lines and force them to surrender. Aware that defeat was inevitable if he did nothing, Hannibal elected to gather what forces he could muster and to march southwest from Carthage to meet Scipio in the field. When they clashed at Zama the Carthaginians again probably outnumbered the Romans, Polybius’ account of this has not survived and we are almost entirely reliant on Livy, who did not provide precise numbers. Therefore, historians have tried to extrapolate from ancillary

information, conjecturing that Scipio had somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 troops. Hannibal did probably have in excess of 40,000 men, but a large number of these were little more than raw recruits. Moreover, the use of war elephants by Hannibal backfired here, as these were repulsed on their initial attack and while charging away from the battlefield they broke through the lines of their own forces. Scipio’s cavalry then charged to take advantage of the disorder this had created, before the Roman infantry, fighters who were superior to the Carthaginians in nearly every respect, moved in to finish the clash.

At the end of the day, the Carthaginians had been soundly defeated and total victory was now within Scipio’s reach. Victory at Zama made Scipio’s success in North Africa inevitable and Rome’s triumph over Carthage a foregone conclusion. Nevertheless, the Carthaginians continued to hold out behind the walls of their city, and Scipio, who was concerned that he would be recalled home to Rome before he achieved total victory, agreed to enter peace negotiations. This points to one of the perennial issues of Roman politics during the era of the republic, the manner in which successful generals were constantly undermined

by their political rivals at home while they were away campaigning. In this case Scipio’s principal rival was Cato the Elder, who we will hear more about later. Fearing total destruction if their city walls were breached, the Carthaginians agreed to humiliating peace terms in 201 BC. They were to be stripped of all their overseas territories, with Rome now becoming the dominant power in Hispania. Additionally, some of their North African lands were granted to Rome’s allies in the region, while it was stipulated that the Carthaginian fleet could henceforth not exceed ten warships. A huge indemnity of 10,000

silver talents, some 330 tonnes of the precious metal, was to be paid to Rome by Carthage over a period of 50 years. Thus, the peace terms imposed at the end of the Second Punic War left Rome as the hegemonic power in the Western Mediterranean and Carthage reduced to little more than a city state in North Africa under the thumb of Rome militarily and financially. Scipio returned to Rome as the all-conquering hero, the greatest general in the republic’s history. When he arrived home he was the centre of the Roman triumph, held to celebrate victory in the

war. These triumphs were civil and religious parades that were held in Rome throughout its history. Victorious commanders were garlanded in religious ceremonies, parades were held, slaves taken from the defeated enemy were marched through the streets of the city and riches taken from the conquered land were offered at the Temple of Jupiter and other Roman deities. They were not too dissimilar to what a royal coronation would have looked like in medieval or early modern London or Paris, a massive display of colour and people. In honour of his victory, Scipio was granted his famous agnomen, Africanus. These

agnomens were bestowed names like modern-day cognomens. Many other Roman generals in centuries to come would be honoured just like Scipio, notably a member of the Julio-Claudian imperial family two centuries later who was granted the agnomen Germanicus in recognition of his role in expanding Rome’s borders into Germania. It has also been theorized that Scipio may have been the first Roman general to have the title of Imperator bestowed upon him. We know that the term was applied to Aemilius Paulus, a Roman general who was campaigning against the Lusitanians in western Hispania around what is Portugal today. This

occurred around 190 BC, at the beginning of what would be nearly two centuries of Roman efforts to fully conquer western and northern Iberia after seizing the south and east from Carthage at the end of the Second Punic War. Given the appearance of the term in 190 BC, it has been speculated that it may have been first conferred on Scipio after Zama and then gained traction in the century that followed. This has a major constitutional and linguistic significance. Imperator means ‘commander’ in Latin and is hardly an unusual term to describe a Roman general. However, it is

also the word from which the term ‘emperor’ derives, as when he created the Roman Principate or Empire in 27 BC, Caesar Augustus adopted the title of Imperator on a permanent basis. Many of his successors did too and over time, in more recent centuries, Imperator became anglicised as ‘emperor’. Thus, Scipio might have been the first figure bestowed with the title from which the modern word ‘emperor’ originates. With the end of the war, and having celebrated his triumph back in Rome, Scipio had to return from these giddy heights to become an ordinary citizen and politician once again.

In 199 BC he gained election as one of the censors for that year. This was a peculiar magistracy, one which was deemed to be a great social honour for the occupant, yet at the same time did not involve an enormous amount of power. The holders were responsible for maintaining the records of Roman citizens, an important enough task at a time when grants of citizenship were still restricted to people who could trace their lineage to the city itself and was only bestowed on others, even within Italy, for acts of considerable service to the state. The censors

also had a loosely defined role in regulating public morals in Rome, a task from which the modern concept of censoring something comes from. He held the office of censor for 18 months and was also acknowledged for a time as princeps Senatus, the leader of the Senate, an honorary title in recognition of his war service. Finally, in 194 BC, he was elected as consul of the Republic again for another year. Scipio appears to have made some efforts during this time to enact social and economic reforms, not merely to acquire offices as marks of empty prestige. This

was based on a number of emerging problems within the Republic which would bedevil its politics over the next century or so, specifically the widening gap between the Roman elites and the poor and the growing dissatisfaction of the Italian subject peoples who were expected to play an ever-growing role in the Roman state without the privileges that Roman citizens held. Many of the disillusioned were military veterans and Scipio became one of the first major generals of the Republic to set up a land redistribution programme to reward veterans. This was a practice which had been engaged in by

the Republic for over two centuries, but the scale of the veteran land programme was novel in Scipio’s case. That said, he did not seek to use his support amongst the veterans or the promise of rewards in the shape of lands and wealth as the basis for building up a party of followers, and unlike later figures like Cornelius Sulla and Julius Caesar in the first century BC, Scipio never attempted to use his popularity and prestige as a means of aggrandizing himself or undermining the Republic’s institutions. These were years in which the hero of the war with

Carthage also earned a particular reputation for his piety and religious devotion, showing an especial veneration for both Jupiter and Mars, the equivalents of Zeus, the King of the Gods, and Ares, the God of War, in the Greek mythological and religious system. The Romans had very thin distinctions between the priestly classes and the wider citizenry and a leading political figure like Scipio could also become a minor priest. In Scipio’s case he is believed to have done so, as a priest of Jupiter, in the 190s BC. He was also a major patron of several of the most

prominent temples in the centre of Rome. In his own time, it was already established that Scipio might have the gift of some sort of prescience that was a mark of being favoured by the gods and which accounted for some of his exceptional successes in his military campaigns. Both Polybius and Livy mention such a belief amongst the Romans, claiming that the same might have been a sign of the favour with which the gods viewed not just Scipio but the wider Scipio clan. Another major feature of Scipio’s personality was his admiration for Greek culture. This was an

understandable development for an educated Roman. For all their virtues as a military people and their later acumen for engineering and governance, the Romans were hardly a highly cultured people, unlike their neighbours to the east. Long before Alexander the Great had conquered much of the known world in the fourth century BC, the Greeks had developed a sophisticated culture where the disciplines of history, philosophy, geography, anthropology, biology, political science, mathematics, medicine, drama, poetry and much else besides had begun to emerge. By way of contrast, the Romans had a decent culture of producing comedic plays by the third

century BC and were interested in history, but their culture was lacklustre by comparison with their Greek rivals to the east. Scipio was one of the first prominent Romans to unashamedly embrace Greek culture, speaking and writing Greek and adopting Greek literary forms in his own writings. This was criticised by many Roman aristocrats who rebuked such adherents of Hellenic culture for their abandonment of Roman traditions, but Scipio was ahead of his time. Over the next two centuries Rome would conquer the Greek Eastern Mediterranean militarily, but the Greeks would conquer Rome culturally, with virtually all aspects of Greek

culture becoming popular in the Western Mediterranean. That this process was able to occur was owing to Rome’s ever greater level of entanglement with the Eastern Mediterranean. As far back as Pyrrhus of Epirus’ intervention in southern Italy, the Greeks had been involved in the wars of the Romans and the Kingdom of Macedon was at war with Rome for a time during the Second Punic War. Almost as soon as the war with Carthage was over in 201 BC, Rome was pulled into new conflicts in Greece and elsewhere. There were reasons for this beyond Roman aggression. In the

decades after the death of Alexander the Great his empire had fragmented into numerous states ruled over by his leading generals. Of these the Kingdom of Macedon, the Seleucid Empire in Syria and the Levant and the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt were the most powerful. However, dozens of other smaller states emerged over time, such as Bithynia and Pergamum in Asia Minor and associations or leagues of city states in Greece proper like the Aetolian League and the Achaean League. As these powers waged constant wars against one another they began appealing to the might of Rome in the west

to form alliances with them. This ensured that Rome was drawn into a growing number of conflicts in the Eastern Mediterranean from the 190s BC onwards and would eventually end up becoming a major player there in the course of the second century BC. As it did, it brought more and more Romans into contact with Greek culture and a cultural osmosis occurred. This eastern drift would eventually involve Scipio personally, as he was soon appointed to oversee a war against the Seleucids in the east. The Seleucid Empire was the largest of the successor states which emerged out of

the civil wars that followed the death of Alexander the Great and the fragmentation of his empire in the late fourth century BC. Its founder, Seleucus, was a more minor commander under Alexander, though by the time the Wars of the Diadochi, or Wars of Alexander’s Successors, ended in the 280s BC he had established himself as the ruler of lands stretching from the Levant around Syria eastwards through Mesopotamia and Persia to Bactria and modern-day Pakistan. The Seleucid Empire had experienced varying fortunes in the decades that followed, losing some of its territories, that is until Antiochus III, sometimes

known as Antiochus the Great, came to the throne in 223 BC. While Rome was fighting the Second Punic War with Carthage, Antiochus was reclaiming many of the lost territories of the Seleucids. By the dawn of the second century BC, he had clearly emerged as the most powerful ruler in the Eastern Mediterranean, a situation which led him to view the Romans engaging in a fresh war with the Kingdom of Macedon between 200 BC and 197 BC as a clear act of provocation, the Seleucids holding that Greece was within their sphere of influence and that the Romans

should restrict themselves to controlling the Western Mediterranean. The Romans did not agree and a cold war followed, which erupted into the Roman-Selecuid War in 192 BC, after the Aetolian League of Greek city states convinced Antiochus to intervene to restrict Rome’s growing power on the Greek mainland. Scipio was soon appointed as a legate with military powers in the east, an appointment facilitated by his brother being consul for the year 190 BC. With this Scipio took ship to lead a Roman army again, this time against a broad coalition of Greek states in the east. One curious element

of this was that it once again involved him clashing with Hannibal. Carthage, which was well and truly in decline after the Second Punic War, had meekly agreed to join the war as a Roman ally. However, Hannibal was long gone from his homeland. Around 195 BC, most likely in response to pressure from Rome, he had been exiled from Carthage. He soon turned up at the court of Antiochus III and so when Rome went to war with the Seleucids in 192 BC, they were faced with the prospect of facing their greatest foe on the field of battle

yet again. He had lost his spark though. By the time Scipio arrived in the east, Hannibal had lost several naval battles for the Seleucids, while the Romans and their allies, which included the island of Rhodes and the Kingdom of Pergamum in Asia Minor, had already secured control over the Aegean, and were taking the battle to Antiochus and Hannibal in what is now western Turkey. Hence, Scipio arrived during a fortuitous time. He began his command in the east by sending envoys to Antiochus proposing peace terms which the Seleucid ruler received with disdain. Essentially Scipio was demanding

that the Seleucids acknowledge Roman influence in Greece and amongst the Greek islands, while also withdrawing from much of Asia Minor and ceding lands there to some of Rome’s allies like Pergamum, all while paying a large war indemnity to Rome. Unsurprisingly, he decided to risk continuing the war. It would prove to be an unwise decision. Not long afterwards, in either December 190 BC or January 189 BC, Scipio’s forces met with Antiochus’ near the town of Magnesia in Asia Minor. Historians tend to agree that the Romans were outnumbered considerably by the Seleucids, with perhaps somewhere around 40,000

men against some 60,000 on Antiochus’ side. By then, however, the Romans were already the most professional and effective infantry army in the known world, and despite his numerical weakness, Scipio inflicted a decisive victory over Antiochus at Magnesia. The Seleucid cavalry had operated well and damaged the Roman flanks. Ultimately the Roman centre lines had pushed onwards and broke the Seleucid composure. Some 10,000 or so Seleucid soldiers were lost and Antiochus and his remaining forces fled from the field. With defeat at the Battle of Magnesia, Antiochus entered into more concerted negotiations with Scipio and his envoys. These

events are narrated at great length by Livy in his enormous history of the Roman Republic, where suggestions arise that Antiochus tried to bribe Scipio in order to have him negotiate better peace terms for the Seleucid Empire. Scipio proved incorruptible in this instance and terms were once again put forward similar to those proffered before the Battle of Magnesia, specifically that the Seleucids would withdraw east of the Taurus Mountains, a move which would effectively remove them from Asia Minor altogether and leave Greece and western Turkey as a potential sphere of Roman control. Antiochus eventually accepted, and the

war came to an end in 188 BC as the terms were finalised with all parties. Despite its victory, Rome did not step in as the new pre-eminent power in Greece and Asia Minor. Instead, it expanded the territories of several of its allies that had fought with it in the war and, in so doing, began to create client states or vassals of a kind that would form the basis of much of Roman power and administration in the Eastern Mediterranean for two centuries to come. One of the terms of the peace agreement which was negotiated between the

Romans and the Seleucids at the end of the war was that Antiochus would hand over a number of individuals to the Romans, chief amongst which was Hannibal. The Carthaginian general had no intention of being placed at the mercy of his sworn enemies and left the Seleucid Empire for Armenia, a large kingdom in the Caucasus which would have a long history as a buffer state on Rome’s eastern border between it and Parthia in centuries to come. There he is understood to have been warmly received by King Artaxias I. It was the beginning of several years of

an itinerant existence as he moved from one royal court to another in the east, with Roman diplomats never far behind to tell his new host that Rome wished for Hannibal to not be made welcome. Aware that the Romans were the emerging power in the Eastern Mediterranean, several of Hannibal’s benefactors caved to diplomatic pressure and expelled him from their courts. Thus, between 188 BC and 183 BC he appears to have moved between Armenia, Crete, Pergamum and Bithynia. He was in the Kingdom of Bithynia in what is now north-western Turkey in the late 180s BC when he

died. Some ancient sources suggest he was poisoned through some Roman plot, or even drank poison himself to avoid being handed over to the Romans, though many modern historians argue that these were simply colourful stories invented by figures like Livy and Appian, anxious to have some dramatic end to their recounting of Hannibal’s life. Scipio would live long enough himself to meet with the kind of political ostracisation which his great Carthaginian rival had suffered years earlier. For decades Scipio had been a rival of Cato the Elder. The two men had been born within a few years of

each other, but there the similarities ended. Cato hailed from a prominent plebeian family, unlike Scipio who came from a patrician family. Where Scipio was a devotee of Greek culture, Cato preached the virtues of traditional Roman life and composed a famous work, De Agri Cultura, ‘On Farming’, a work of both agricultural commentary, recipes and a miscellaneous assortment of statements on Roman life and customs. He had also been a supporter of Fabius Maximus during the Second Punic War and had campaigned for him to be appointed to lead the campaign to North Africa that Scipio was eventually given

control over. Thus, there was a lot of history between Scipio and Cato. Now, when Scipio returned to Rome from the east, he found that Cato had drummed up support for placing Scipio on trial for allegedly having exceeded his authority in the Eastern Mediterranean and for prolonging the war in order for himself and his family members to enrich themselves to an extraordinary extent. A kind of show trial in the Roman Senate played out over the next several months as Cato tried to bring about his rival’s downfall, to little avail. For his part, Scipio retired from the

city of Rome itself to his country estate and tried to make it clear that he was above such petty factional politics. Scipio spent the final years of his life living primarily at his villa at Liternum in the Campania region of Italy, south of Rome towards Neapolis and Pompeii. A Roman colony had only been founded here a decade earlier and the Scipios must have played a part in its early development. At Liternum Scipio largely remained aloof from Roman politics, believing he had played his part fully in civic life, while his rival, Cato, would spend another three

and a half decades at the forefront of Roman politics, eventually becoming the grand old man of the Senate. Scipio is believed to have written a series of memoirs or histories of some kind while at Liternum, though unfortunately these have not survived down to modern times, nor indeed has a separate history of his father’s career which was subsequently composed by Scipio’s elder son. The memoirs are understood to have been written in Greek, again emphasising Scipio’s appreciation for Hellenistic culture. The details of Scipio’s last years and death are surprisingly hazy for such a prominent figure in Rome’s

history. It is agreed that he must have lived until 185 BC and most classical scholars tend to argue that it was two years later, in 183 BC, when he died. Presumably there must have been a lot of news about his passing floating around Rome, the famous general of Zama still being something of a living legend in the capital. Nevertheless, without any account of this, we are left to speculate. It is not even clear where he was buried. It is possible that he was simply laid to rest at his estate at Liternum. Three centuries later, the

Roman politician, educator, orator, philosopher and tragedian, Seneca the Younger, came into possession of Scipio’s former villa and he was of the belief, expressed in one of his letters, that an altar there had been erected back in the second century to mark the resting place of the great Scipio Africanus. Others suggest his remains were taken to Rome and buried there. The most likely location would be the Tomb of the Scipios, the ancestral mausoleum of the family, first established by Scipio’s great-grandfather around 300 BC. This lay on the southern outskirts of the city at the time, near

the famous Via Appia, or Appian Way, the road leading from Rome southwards towards Neapolis. The tomb is still intact today, though most of the sarcophagi were very badly damaged or entirely lost when the tomb was rediscovered in the late eighteenth century, making it impossible to determine if Scipio was interred here alongside his ancestors. The decade or so either side of Scipio’s death, in the 180s and 170s BC, was actually one of the last periods of relative restraint on the part of the Roman Republic. Despite constant calls for Rome to involve itself in wars in the

Eastern Mediterranean, the Senate in Rome tried to resist becoming overly entangled in the Greek east for many years, allowing the various Greek states to largely maintain their independence. A turning point came with the Third Macedonian War, fought between 171 BC and 168 BC. At the end of this, the Romans replaced the Kingdom of Macedon with client states that were little more than Roman vassals. This was the beginning of a century of sustained expansion which would make Rome master of the Eastern Mediterranean by the end of the 60s BC, conquering great powers like the Seleucid Empire

and the Kingdom of Pontus. This expansion also came with exceptional violence, peaking in 146 BC when the city of Corinth was completely levelled to the ground in Greece by the Romans. Carthage was not spared either. In the course of the 150s BC, Cato the Elder, Scipio’s old nemesis in the Senate, who long outlived Africanus, had taken to ending all his speeches in the Roman governing council by declaring Carthago delenda est, “Carthage must be destroyed.” When the Carthaginians, who had never recovered from their defeat at Scipio’s hands a half a century earlier, had the misfortune to

respond to an attack by the Numidians, Rome’s ally in North Africa, in 149 BC, Rome declared war. The Third and final Punic War would end three years later with the destruction of the city of Carthage, the enslaving of its inhabitants and the sowing of salt over the ruins of the city so that nothing would grow there in what is widely acknowledged as one of the first clearly documented acts of genocide in history. Scipio Africanus was the pre-eminent general of the Roman Republic during its glory days in the third and second centuries BC, before the republic’s

military commanders, like Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian, became too powerful and ultimately destroyed it in the first century BC. Scipio belonged in many ways to a more traditional era of Rome’s history, when its culture was still rooted in plain Roman pursuits and when it was just emerging as a major Mediterranean power. He and his family were central to that process, playing a leading role in victory over the Carthaginians in both the First and Second Punic Wars. Scipio himself concluded all of this with his campaign in North Africa, victory at Zama and ending of the

Second Punic War in 201 BC. In this sense, the Punic Wars could even be seen as a clash not just between Rome and Carthage, but also between two families, the Barcids of Hamilcar Barca, his brother Mago, and his sons Hasdrubal and Hannibal, and the Scipios of Rome. No two figures epitomised this clash of individuals within the wider Punic Wars than the rivalry between Scipio and Hannibal. Ironically, Hannibal has perhaps left behind the more lasting legacy in historical lore on account of his march with his elephants over the Alps and descent on Rome in 218 BC,

yet it was his nemesis, Scipio Africanus, who was much the more successful of the two in the long run and catapulted Rome towards domination of the Western Mediterranean and then the known world at the end of the third century BC. What do you think of Scipio Africanus? Was he one of the greatest generals of the ancient world, or was he overshadowed by Hannibal, despite ultimately defeating the Carthaginian commander? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.