The World

The Scipiones personified the machismo, aggression and discipline of Rome, prizing pietas (piety), dignitas (prestige) and, above all, virtus, what we call virtue. The very concept of virtue derived from vir (man), god-fearing virile decency was male: men ruled the familia, the household. Noble fathers organized their daughters’ marriages to other grandees; it was easy for men to divorce and they did so often.^* Women were sub manu – under the hand: they could technically be executed by their fathers and husbands and were expected to display pudicitia, chastity and fidelity, to ensure the bloodline of their children, while running the home and keeping out of politics – though of course they exerted power behind the scenes. Once the childbearing was done, it is clear they enjoyed affairs with other nobles and even sex with slaves – provided they did not flaunt their pleasures. The familia included the family’s slaves, who were expected to be loyal to the dominus (master) and his household even more so than to the state. Domestic slavery, male and female, always involved sexual predations by masters – and mistresses. The killing of slaves by masters was entirely legal. In a slave-owning society, with as many as 40 per cent of the population enslaved, family and slavery were entwined. But slaves were often educated, sometimes revered and loved by their masters. They were frequently freed and freedmen could become citizens, later even potentates.

Rome’s success was, its people believed, owing to the favour of chief god, Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Roman religion was not one of doctrine, improvement or salvation but one of ritual and lifestyle, based on sacrifices to a pantheon to ensure success and prosperity. Only later did Romans believe that Jupiter had offered them ‘empire without limit’. Rome’s growth was marked by monumental building – starting with the gigantic Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill – as well as its Senate-house and later amphitheatres and theatres. Baths came later: austere Scipiones had small baths in their villas, but ‘they smelt of camp, farm and heroism,’ claimed the philosopher Seneca later. With empire came cleanliness.

At the beginning of the century, Lucius Scipio Barbatus (Beardy) helped defeat a coalition of Italian rivals, but more importantly he was the first definitely known consul, a man of a new, free republic who, dying in 280, boasted on his grandiose tomb of victories and virtus. His two sons, both of them consuls, fought the Carthaginians, but Gnaeus was captured and thereafter nicknamed She-Ass.

Now Beardy’s grandsons Publius Cornelius Scipio and his brother Gnaeus arrived in Spain to find they had been outmanoeuvred by Hannibal in a duel between two republics – but also between two families.

SCIPIO, HANNIBAL AND MASINISSA

In spring 218 BC, Hannibal marched his elephants and 46,000 troops over the Alps and into Italy. Most of the elephants perished, but along the way he picked up new allies, the Gauls of southern France. Leaving some troops in Spain commanded by Gnaeus, Publius Cornelius Scipio, the consul, ferried his army back to Italy to meet Hannibal. Accompanied by his twenty-year-old son, another Publius, the future Africanus, he tried to stop Hannibal at Ticinus, where he was severely wounded, and again on the Trebbia River where the other consul was killed in a rout. In spring 217, Hannibal crossed the Apennines, losing an eye to infection, and tore into central Italy.

Chastened, the Romans elected Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (Warty) as dictator on a programme of attrition and harassment rather than pitched battles. But when the Romans mocked the dictator’s courage, calling him Cunctator – Delayer – the consuls massed an army of 80,000 to confront Hannibal. At Cannae, the Carthaginians surrounded and slaughtered as many as 70,000 legionaries at a rate of a hundred a minute. The younger Scipio, now elected tribune, was in the thick of the fighting and helped save the last 10,000 survivors, but it remains the greatest Roman defeat. The aristocratic consul Lucius Aemilius Paullus was killed; afterwards Scipio married the dead consul’s daughter, Aemilia, the very definition of an ideal Roman girl.

Hannibal collected the signet rings of the dead equites or knights and sent his brother Mago to Carthage where he dramatically cast them on to the floor of the Council. But when Maharba, his Berber cavalry commander, urged him to storm Rome, Hannibal refused. ‘You know how to conquer, Hannibal,’ said Maharba, ‘but not how to clinch victory.’ Instead Hannibal sent reasonable peace terms to the Senate, implying that his expedition was to force Rome to acknowledge Carthaginian Spain and probably return Sicily, not to conquer Italy.