Scipio Africanus the Elder

Roman general
Scipio Africanus the ElderRoman general
Also known as
  • Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus
  • Scipio Africanus Major

236 BCE


183 BCE


Scipio Africanus the Elder, Latin Scipio Africanus Major, in full Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus   (born 236 bce—died 183 bce, Liternum, Campania [now Patria, Italy]), Roman general noted for his victory over the Carthaginian leader Hannibal in the great Battle of Zama (202 bce), ending the Second Punic War. For his victory he won the surname Africanus (201 bce).

Family background

Publius Cornelius Scipio was born into one of the great patrician families in Rome; his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been consuls in their day. In 218 bce Scipio’s father, also named Publius Cornelius Scipio, held the consulship in one of the most critical years of Rome’s history. While with him during an engagement on the Ticinus River, the young Scipio made his first appearance in history. According to the Roman historian Livy, the Roman force was outflanked by Numidian cavalry. Seeing his father wounded, the younger Scipio charged forward, an action that allowed Scipio père to escape with his guard of cavalry officers and his young son. This anecdote was also recounted by the historian Polybius on the authority of Scipio’s friend Laelius, and it may well be true.

Nothing is known of Scipio’s boyhood or the date of his marriage to Aemilia, daughter of Aemilius Paullus, consul of 216, who fell at Cannae. Scipio had two sons: Publius, who was debarred by ill health from a public career and who adopted the name Scipio Africanus the Younger, and Lucius, who became praetor in 174. Scipio’s physical appearance is shown on some coins minted at Carthago Nova (now Cartagena, Spain)—which almost certainly bear his portrait—and also probably on a signet ring found near Naples.

Military career

According to Livy, Scipio served as a young military tribune at the disastrous Battle of Cannae in 216. He escaped after the defeat to Canusium (modern Canosa di Puglia, Italy), where some 4,000 survivors rallied; there he boldly thwarted a plot of some fainthearts to desert Rome. Then in 213 he returned to a civilian career by winning the position of curule (“higher”) aedile; the story is told that when the tribunes objected to his candidature because he was under the legal age, he replied, “If all the Roman people want to make me aedile, I am old enough.” Soon family and national disaster followed: his father and uncle were defeated and killed in Spain, where the Carthaginians swept forward to the Ebro River (211).

In 210 the Romans decided to send reinforcements to Spain, but it is said that no senior general would undertake the task and that young Scipio offered himself as a candidate; at any rate, the Roman people decided to invest him with a command there, although he was technically a privatus (not a magistrate). This grant of a military command outside Italy by the people to a man who had not been praetor or consul created an important constitutional precedent. Thus, Scipio was given the chance to avenge the deaths of his father and uncle in Spain, where he hoped not merely to hold the Carthaginian armies at bay and prevent their sending reinforcements to Hannibal in Italy but to resume his father’s offensive policy, to turn back the tide of war, and to drive the enemy out of the Iberian Peninsula. Such a task must have seemed fantastic in 210, but Scipio had the confidence and ability; it was achieved in the next four years.

From his headquarters at Tarraco (Tarragona) in 209, Scipio suddenly launched a combined military and naval assault on the enemy’s headquarters at Carthago Nova, knowing that all three enemy armies in Spain were at least 10 days distant from the city. Polybius relates that Scipio had heard from Spanish fishermen at Tarraco that the water level around Carthago Nova varied daily and that it was especially low in the afternoon. Helped by a lowering of the water in a lagoon, which exposed the northern wall, he successfully stormed the city. This possibly tidal phenomenon, attributed to the help of Neptune, was perhaps enhanced by an offshore wind; at any rate, it increased the troops’ belief in their commander’s divine support. In Carthago Nova he gained stores and supplies, Spanish hostages, the local silver mines, a splendid harbour, and a base for an advance farther south.

After training his army in new tactics, Scipio defeated the Carthaginian commander Hasdrubal Barca at Baecula (Bailen) in Baetica (208); whereas normally the two rear ranks of a Roman army closely supported the front line, Scipio in this battle, under a screen of light troops, divided his main forces, which fell upon the enemy’s flanks. When Hasdrubal broke away, ultimately to join his brother Hannibal in Italy, Scipio wisely declined the impossible task of trying to stop him and decided rather to accomplish his mission in Spain—the defeat of the other two Carthaginian armies still there. This he brilliantly achieved in 206 at the Battle of Ilipa (Alcalá del Río, near Sevilla). Over several days of posturing and light skirmishing between the arrayed armies, Scipio lulled the Carthaginian commanders—Hasdrubal (son of Gisco) and Mago—into a sense of routine. On the day of the battle, Scipio dramatically altered that routine, arriving in full force at dawn and changing the order of his troops so that where he was strong the Carthaginians were weak. He used his Roman veterans to execute a series of audacious flanking maneuvers while his fickle Spanish allies held the enemy’s main forces in place. The Carthaginian armies were destroyed, and Hasdrubal and Mago fled the field. Scipio then secured Gades (Cádiz), thus making Roman control of Spain complete.

After he was elected consul for 205, Scipio boldly determined to disregard Hannibal—already largely contained in southern Italy—and to strike instead at Africa. Once he had beaten down political opposition in the Senate, he crossed to Sicily with an army consisting partly of volunteers, some of whom had also survived the disaster of Cannae and sought to redeem themselves. While preparing his troops, he boldly snatched Locri Epizephyrii, in the toe of Italy, from Hannibal’s grasp, though the subsequent misconduct of Pleminius, the man he left in command of the town, gave Scipio’s political opponents cause to criticize him. In 204 he landed with perhaps 35,000 men in Africa, where he besieged Utica. Early in 203, with the help of Rome’s new Numidian ally Masinissa, he burned the camps of Hasdrubal (son of Gisgo) and his Numidian ally Syphax. Then, sweeping down on the forces that the enemy was trying to muster at the Great Plains on the upper Bagradas (modern Sūq al Khamīs, on the Majardah in Tunisia), he smashed that army by a double flanking movement.

Battle of Zama

Cesari, Bernardino: The Fight Between Scipio Africanus and Hannibal [Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage-Images]Cesari, Bernardino: The Fight Between Scipio Africanus and HannibalFine Art Images/Heritage-ImagesAfter Scipio’s capture of Tunis, the Carthaginians sought peace terms, but Hannibal’s subsequent return to Africa led to their renewing the war in 202. Hannibal was placed in command of an army of many raw recruits and 80 untrained elephants. Scipio advanced southwestward to join Masinissa, who was taking his invaluable cavalry to Scipio’s support. Then Scipio turned eastward to face Hannibal at Zama, having secured the better watering holes and the best terrain. In the first phase of the battle, Scipio largely neutralized the feared Carthaginian war elephants by using skirmishers to draw them into corridors between the densely packed heavy infantry, thus minimizing their impact on the battle. The Battle of Zama also demonstrated that Rome held the advantage in cavalry (especially with the addition of Masinissa’s Numidians) that Hannibal had previously exploited. Taking advantage of the confusion in the wake of the elephant charge, Scipio’s cavalry fell on the Carthaginian horsemen, driving them from the field. At first, Scipio’s outflanking tactics failed against the master from whom he had learned them, because Hannibal widened his lines and did not allow his first two ranks of soldiers to back up, instead pushing them forward and out to the sides, with his veterans at the rear. The issue was decided when the Roman and Numidian cavalry, having broken off pursuit of the Punic horsemen, fell on the rear of Hannibal’s army. Roman victory was complete, and the long war ended; Scipio granted comparatively lenient terms to Carthage and to Hannibal personally. According to Polybius, this battle marked the first time a Roman could envision a global perspective of future empire. In honour of his victory, Scipio was named Africanus.

Late years

In 199 Scipio was censor and became princeps Senatus (the titular head of the Senate). He held this position until his death, the following two pairs of censors having confirmed him in the position. Though he vigorously supported a philhellenic policy, he argued during his second consulship (194) against a complete Roman evacuation of Greece after the ejection of Philip V of Macedonia, fearing that Antiochus III of Syria would invade it; his fear was premature but not unfounded. In 193 he served on an embassy to Africa and perhaps also to the East. After Antiochus advanced into Greece and was thrown out by a Roman army, Scipio’s brother Lucius was given the command against him, with Publius serving as his legate (190); together the brothers crossed to Asia, but Publius was too ill to take a personal part in Lucius’s victory over Antiochus at Magnesia (for which Lucius took the name Asiagenus).

Meantime, in Rome, Scipio’s political opponents, led by the elder Cato, launched a series of attacks on the Scipios and their friends. Lucius’s command was not prolonged; the generous peace terms that Africanus proposed for Antiochus were harshly modified; and the “trials of the Scipios” followed. On the trials the ancient evidence is confusing: in 187 an attack on Lucius for refusing to account for 500 talents received from Antiochus (as war indemnity or personal booty?) was parried, and in 184 Africanus himself may have been accused but not condemned. In any case, his influence was shaken, and he withdrew from Rome to Liternum in Campania, where he lived simply on a villa (country farm) of modest size, cultivating the fields with his own hands; Lucius Annaeus Seneca later contrasted the villa’s small and cold bathroom with the luxurious baths of his own day. Scipio had not long to live, however; embittered and ill, he died in 184 or 183, in virtual self-imposed exile from his country and its capital. He is said to have ordered his burial at Liternum and not in the ungrateful city of Rome, where his family tomb lay outside, on the Appian Way.

The legend of Scipio

Such was Scipio’s impact upon the Romans that even during his lifetime, legends began to cluster around him; he was regarded as favoured by Fortune or even divinely inspired. Many believed not only that he had received a promise of help from Neptune in a dream on the night before his assault on Carthago Nova but also that he had a close connection with Jupiter. He used to visit Jupiter’s temple on the Capitol at night to commune with the god, and later the story circulated that he was even a son of the god, who supposedly had appeared in his mother’s bed in the form of a snake.

Polybius thought that this popular view of Scipio was mistaken and argued that Scipio always acted only as the result of reasoned foresight and worked on men’s superstitions in a calculating manner. But Polybius himself was a rationalist and probably underestimated a streak of religious confidence, if not mysticism, in Scipio’s character that impressed so many of his contemporaries with its magnanimity and generosity. Thus, although Polybius had an intense admiration for Scipio, whom he called “almost the most famous man of all time,” the existence of the legend, a unique phenomenon in Rome’s history, may indicate that Polybius’s portrait is too one-sided.

Significance and influence

A man of wide sympathies, cultured and magnanimous, Scipio easily won the friendship of such men as Philip V, king of Macedonia, and the native princes of Spain and Africa while he secured the devotion of his own troops. Though he was essentially a man of good planning and practical action, he may also have been something of a mystic in whom contemporary legend, at any rate, saw a favourite of Jupiter as well as a spiritual descendant of Alexander the Great. Scipio was one of the greatest soldiers of the ancient world; by his tactical reforms and strategic insight, he created a new army that defeated even Hannibal and asserted Rome’s supremacy in Spain, Africa, and the Hellenistic East. He had a great appreciation of Greek culture and enjoyed relaxing in the congenial atmosphere of the Greek cities of Sicily, conduct that provoked the anger of old-fashioned Romans such as Cato. Indeed, he was outstanding among those Roman nobles of the day who welcomed the civilizing influences of Greek culture that were beginning to permeate Roman society. His Greek sympathies led him to champion Rome’s mission in the world as protector of Greek culture; he preferred to establish Roman protection rather than direct conquest and annexation. For 10 years (210–201) he commanded a devoted army at the people’s wish. His position might seem almost kingly; he had been hailed as king by Spanish tribes, and he may have been the first Roman general to be acclaimed as imperator (emperor) by his troops. But, though he was convinced of his own powers, he offered no challenge to the dominance of the Roman nobility ensconced in the Senate except by normal political methods (in which he showed no outstanding ability). Reaction against his generous foreign policy—with possible clemency to Hannibal after Zama—and against his encouragement of Greek culture in Roman life led to his downfall amid personal and political rivalries. His career, however, had shown that Rome’s destiny was to be a Mediterranean, not merely an Italian, power.

Scipio’s influence outlived the Roman world. Great interest was shown in his life during the early Renaissance, and it helped the early humanists to build a bridge between the classical world and Christendom. He became an idealized perfect hero who was seen to have served the ends of Providence. Petrarch glorified him in a Latin epic, the Africa, which secured his own coronation as poet laureate in 1341 on the Capitol, where, some 1,500 years earlier, the historical Scipio used to commune in the temple of Jupiter.

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