Who was Scipio Africanus?

The boy at the Ticinus

Scipio was born around 236 BC into the Cornelii, one of Rome’s oldest patrician families. Scipio is Latin for a staff, and the family had carried the name for generations. In 218 BC his father, also Publius, was consul when Hannibal came down from the Alps. At the river Ticinus, in the first clash in Italy, the consul was wounded and cut off, and his seventeen-year-old son charged in and pulled him out. Polybius had the story from Scipio’s lifelong friend Laelius (Polybius 10.3). Livy knew a rival version that gave the credit to a Ligurian slave, and said he hoped the son’s version was true (Livy 21.46).

The command nobody wanted

In 211 BC his father and his uncle were both killed in Spain, and nobody stepped forward to replace them. The voters gave the command to Scipio, about twenty-five and never a consul. In 209 BC he stormed New Carthage, today’s Cartagena, Carthage’s capital in Spain, in a single day, sending men across a lagoon at low water. He told his troops that Neptune had shown him the way (Polybius 10.11).

Among the captives was a young woman of great beauty. Scipio returned her untouched to her fiancé, a Celtiberian chief named Allucius, and handed him the ransom her parents had brought as a wedding gift (Livy 26.50). “The Continence of Scipio” became a favorite subject of European painters. By 206 BC, after his victory at Ilipa near Seville, Carthage had lost Spain, its silver mines and its recruits.

Africa and Zama

Consul in 205 BC, Scipio wanted to take the war to Africa. Old Fabius Maximus warned the Senate it was reckless. Scipio went anyway in 204, landed near Utica and won over the Numidian prince Masinissa and his cavalry. Carthage called Hannibal home. In 202 BC, near Zama, the two met. Scipio left lanes in his lines for Hannibal’s elephants and let his cavalry finish the battle from behind, as told in why Hannibal lost.

Scipio came home to a triumph and a new name. Livy says he was the first Roman general to be named after a people he had conquered (Livy 30.45).

A hero in trouble

Fame made enemies. Consul again in 194 BC, he went east in 190 with his brother Lucius to fight King Antiochus III, who was sheltering Hannibal; Lucius won at Magnesia and took the name Asiaticus. Back in Rome, Cato and his allies accused the brothers over money from Antiochus. Polybius says Scipio brought the account book into the Senate and tore it up before the senators (Polybius 23.14). Summoned to answer on the anniversary of Zama, Livy says, he invited the people to follow him up to the Capitol and give thanks instead, and they did (Livy 38.51).

He withdrew to his farm at Liternum, on the coast of Campania, and died there around 183 BC, close to the year Hannibal took poison. Tradition says he had his tomb inscribed: ungrateful fatherland, you shall not have my bones (Valerius Maximus 5.3.2). More than two centuries later Seneca stayed at the villa and marveled at its small, dark bath, the plain life of a man who had saved Rome (Seneca, Letters 86).

His long shadow

His daughter Cornelia became the mother of the Gracchi brothers, Rome’s great reformers. His adoptive grandson, Scipio Aemilianus, destroyed Carthage in 146 BC. Cicero made Africanus the guide in the Dream of Scipio, appearing to that grandson to show him the heavens and how small Rome looks from them (On the Republic 6). And Italians still sing about him: their national anthem, written in 1847, opens with Italy waking and putting on Scipio’s helmet.