Scipio Africanus

Roman general

• Born: 236 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Rome (now in Italy)
• Died: 184 or 183 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Liternum, Campania (now Patria, Italy)

Scipio’s military victory over Carthaginian forces in Spain and North Africa, brought about by his genius as strategist and innovator of tactics, ended the Second Punic War and established Roman hegemony in the Western Mediterranean region.

Early Life

Publius Cornelius Scipio, known as Scipio Africanus (SIHP-ee-oh ahf-rih-KAY-nuhs) or Scipio the Elder, was born to one of the most illustrious families of the Roman Republic; his father, who gave the boy his name, and his mother, Pomponia, were respected citizens of the patrician dynasty of the gens Cornelii. At Scipio’s birth, Rome had begun to show its power beyond the boundaries of Italy, and the young nation was starting to strive for hegemony west and east of the known world. Coinciding with expansion outward was Rome’s still-stable inner structure; nevertheless, the influence of the Greek culture had begun a softening, or rounding, of the Roman character.

Scipio’s early life clearly reflects this transition. His lifelong sympathy with Greek culture made him somewhat suspect in the eyes of his conservative opponents, who accused him of weakening the Roman spirit. On the other hand, as a patrician youth, he must have received early military training, for Scipio entered history (and legend) at the age of seventeen or eighteen, when he saved his father from an attack by hostile cavalry during a skirmish with the invading forces of Hannibal in Italy in 218.

His military career further advanced when Scipio prevented a mutiny among the few survivors of the disastrous Battle of Cannae in 216. As a military tribune, the equivalent of a modern staff colonel, he personally intervened with the deserters, placed their ringleaders under arrest, and put the defeated army under the command of the surviving consul.

In 211, another serious defeat for Rome brought Scipio an unprecedented opportunity. In Spain, two armies under the command of his father and an uncle had been defeated, and the commanders were killed. Although he was still rather young—twenty-seven according to the ancient historian Polybius—and had not served in public office with the exception of the entry-level position of curulic aedile (a chief of domestic police), Scipio ran unopposed in the ensuing election and became proconsul and supreme commander of the reinforcements and the Roman army in Spain.

His election attests the extraordinary popularity that he enjoyed with the people of Rome and later with his men. So great was his reputation, which also rested partly on his unbounded self-confidence and (according to Polybius) a streak of rational calculation, that people talked about his enjoying a special contact with the gods. A religious man who belonged to a college of priests of Mars, Scipio may himself have reinforced these adulatory rumors. Whether his charisma and popularity were further aided by particularly “noble” looks, however, is not known. Indeed, all the extant representations of him, no matter how idealized, do not fail to show his large nose and ears, personal features that do not detract from the overall image of dignity but serve to humanize the great general.

His marriage to Aemilia, the daughter of the head of a friendly patrician family, gave Scipio at least two sons and one daughter, who would later be mother to the social reformers Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus.

Life’s Work

Arriving in Spain, Scipio followed the strategic plan of continuing the offensive warfare of his father and uncle and thus trying to tear Spain, their European base, away from the Carthaginians. After he had reorganized his army, Scipio struck an unexpected blow by capturing New Carthage, the enemy’s foremost port, in 209. A year later he launched an attack on one-third of the Carthaginian forces at Baecula, in south central Spain. While his light troops engaged the enemy, Scipio led the main body of Roman infantry to attack both flanks of the Carthaginians and thus win the battle. Hasdrubal Barca, the Carthaginian leader, however, managed to disengage his troops and escape to Gaul, where Scipio could not follow him, and ultimately arrived in Italy.

The decisive move followed in 206, when Scipio attacked the united armies of Hasdrubal, the son of Gisco, and Mago at Ilipa (near modern Seville). Meanwhile, his generous treatment of the Spanish tribes had given him native support. Scipio placed these still-unreliable allies in the center of his army, to hold the enemy, while Roman infantry and cavalry advanced on both sides, wheeled around, and attacked the Carthaginian war elephants and soldiers in a double enveloping maneuver that wrought total havoc.

Scipio’s immediate pursuit of the fleeing enemy succeeded so completely in destroying their forces that Carthage’s hold on Spain came to a de facto end. After a punitive mission against three insurgent Spanish cities and the relatively bloodless putting down of a mutiny by some Roman troops, Scipio received the surrender of Gades (Cádiz), the last Carthaginian stronghold in Spain.

When Scipio returned to Rome, the senate did not grant him a triumph. He was elected consul for the year 205, but only his threat to proceed alone, with popular support, forced the senate to allow him to take the war to Carthage in North Africa rather than fight an embattled and ill-supported Hannibal in Italy. In his province of Sicily, Scipio began with the training of a core army of volunteers; uncharacteristically for Roman thought, but brilliantly innovative in terms of strategy, he emphasized the formation of a strong cavalry.

In 204, Scipio landed in North Africa near the modern coast of Tunisia with roughly thirty-five thousand men and more than six hundred cavalry. He immediately joined forces with the small but well-trained cavalry detachment of the exiled King Masinissa and drew first blood in a successful encounter with Carthaginian cavalry under General Hanno.

Failing to capture the key port of Utica, Scipio built winter quarters on a peninsula east of the stubborn city. One night early the next spring, he led his army against the Carthaginian relief forces under Hasdrubal and King Syphax, who had broken an earlier treaty with Scipio. The raid was successful, and the camps of the enemy were burned. Now Scipio followed the reorganized adversaries and defeated them decisively at the Great Plains. The fall of Tunis came soon after.

Beaten, Carthage sought an armistice of forty-five days, which was granted by Scipio and broken when Hannibal arrived in North Africa. Hostilities resumed and culminated in the Battle of Zama. Here, the attack of the Carthaginian war elephants failed, because Scipio had anticipated them and opened his ranks to let the animals uselessly thunder through. Now the two armies engaged in fierce battle, and, after the defeat of the Carthaginian auxiliary troops and mercenaries, Scipio attempted an out-flanking maneuver that failed against the masterful Hannibal. In a pitched battle, the decisive moment came when the Roman cavalry and that of Masinissa broke off their pursuit of the beaten Carthaginian horsemen and fell on the rear of Hannibal’s army. The enemy was crushed.

After the victory of Zama, Scipio granted Carthage a relatively mild peace and persuaded the Roman senate to ratify the treaty. When he returned to Rome, he was granted a triumph in which to show his rich booty, the prisoners of war (including Syphax), and his victorious troops, whom he treated generously. It was around this time that Scipio obtained his honorific name “Africanus.”

There followed a period of rest for Scipio. In 199 he took the position of censor, an office traditionally reserved for elder statesmen, and in 194 he held his second consulship. An embassy to Masinissa brought Scipio back to Africa in 193, and in 190 he went to Greece as a legate, or general staff officer, to his brother Lucius. In Greece, the Romans had repulsed the Syrian king Antiochus the Great and prepared the invasion of Asia Minor. Because of an illness, Scipio did not see the Roman victory there.

At home, their political opponents, grouped around archconservative Cato the Censor, attacked Scipio and his brother in a series of unfounded lawsuits, known as “the processes of the Scipios,” concerning alleged fiscal mismanagement and corruption in the Eastern war. Embittered, Scipio defended his brother in 187 and himself in 184, after which he left Rome, returning only when the opposition threatened to throw Lucius in jail. Going back to his small farm in Liternum in the Campania, Scipio lived a modest life as a virtual exile until his death in the same year or in 183. His great bitterness is demonstrated by his wish to be buried there instead of in the family tomb near the capital.

Significance

The military victories of Scipio Africanus brought Rome a firm grip on Spain, victory over Carthage, and dominion over the Western Mediterranean. Scipio’s success rested on his great qualities as a farsighted strategist and innovative tactician who was bold enough to end the archaic Roman reliance on the brute force of its infantry; he learned the lesson of Hannibal’s victory at Cannae. His newly formed cavalry and a highly mobile and more maneuverable infantry secured the success of his sweeps to envelop the enemy.

On the level of statesmanship, Scipio’s gift for moderation and his ability to stabilize and pacify Spain secured power for Rome without constant bloodletting. His peace with Carthage would have enabled this city to live peacefully under the shadow of Rome and could have prevented the Third Punic War, had the senate later acted differently.

Finally, Scipio never abused his popularity to make himself autocratic ruler of Rome, although temptations to do so abounded. At the height of his influence in Spain, several tribes offered him the title of king; he firmly refused. After his triumph, the exuberant masses bestowed many titles on the victor of Zama, but he did not grasp for ultimate power. Unlike Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus served the Roman state; he did not master it. He is perhaps the only military leader of great stature who achieved fame as a true public servant.

Bibliography

Eckstein, Arthur M. Senate and General. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Generally scrutinizes who had the power to make political decisions. Chapter 8 illuminates various aspects of Scipio’s struggle with the senate. Includes a good, up-to-date bibliography.

Goldsworthy, Adrian. The Punic Wars. London: Cassell, 2000. Each of the wars is described in detail; provides background to the conflict as a whole and its context in military history.

Hart, B. H. Scipio Africanus: Greater than Napoleon. 1926. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994. Readable, well-balanced biography emphasizes the subject’s military achievements. Scipio is judged sympathetically and praised for tactical innovations and rejection of “honest bludgeon work.” Contains many helpful maps.

Haywood, Richard M. Studies on Scipio Africanus. 1933. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973. Revises the account by Polybius, who rejected old superstitions about Scipio but made him more calculating and scheming than Haywood believes is justified. The bibliography is still useful.

Lancel, Serge. Carthage: A History. Translated by Antonia Nevill. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997. Detailed study of Carthage from its founding and rise in the early centuries of the first millennium to its defeat and Roman absorption by the end of the period.

Scullard, Howard H. Roman Politics 220-150 B.C. 2d ed. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with Scipio’s influence on Roman politics and place his career in the context of political and dynastic struggle for control in the Roman Republic. Shows where Scipio came from politically and traces his legacy. Contains appendix with diagrams of the leading Roman families.

Scullard, Howard H. Scipio Africanus in the Second Punic War. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1930. An in-depth study of Scipio’s campaigns and military achievements, highly technical but readable and with good maps. Brings alive Scipio while dealing exhaustively with its subject.

Scullard, Howard H. Scipio Africanus: Soldier and Politician. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970. General study and excellent, comprehensive biography. Carefully balanced and well-researched work. Written with a feeling for its subject, which makes it interesting to read. Contains useful maps.