The World

It was Rome’s African ally King Masinissa who provoked the Carthaginians into breaking their treaty. That meant war, and the Romans turned to a young Scipio, rich, cultivated, grand, a superb orator and patron of a circle of Greek intellectuals, a man who prided himself on exercising both a mind admired for wit and a body for its buffness. In 149 BC, the twenty-six-year-old Scipio Aemilianus^* led the Roman army to Africa, accompanied by his old Greek tutor Polybius, who was fascinated by expanding Roman power and the new connections between east and west. Elected consul, still only twenty-eight, Scipio, aided by Masinissa, defeated the Carthaginians and then cut off the city from the sea. After Roman prisoners had been skinned and dismembered on the walls, he stormed the city. Carthaginians burned themselves to death in their temples. The Romans slaughtered thousands, the troops flinging bodies off buildings which they set on fire – a dystopia confirmed by archaeology. As they watched, Polybius wept. ‘All cities, nations and powers,’ he said, ‘must like men meet their doom.’ The fall of a great city has a special poignancy. It is like the death of a piece of ourselves.

‘This is glorious,’ agreed Scipio, ‘but I have a foreboding that one day the same doom will be pronounced upon my own country.’ He razed the city, selling 80,000 of its citizens into slavery and returned as Rome’s reigning hero. Polybius, going home to Greece to write a world history, saw the opening of a new act – the age of symploki or interconnectedness: ‘In earliest times, history was a series of unrelated episodes but from now on history becomes an organic whole,’ he wrote. ‘Europe and Africa with Asia, and Asia with Africa and Europe.’ And the greatest Afro-eurasian continental powers would be built by two families.

 

 

* The assembly annually elected two suffetes – leaders who ruled in peace – and a commander-in-chief or a committee of generals, and a Council of 104 to judge and punish them. Generals were given political autonomy, but if they failed they were crucified. The suffetes were members of the Council of the Mighty – the Adirim, 300 grandees – who had special influence. When suffetes and generals and even the Mighty could not decide, the People were consulted.

* The myth of Rome’s foundation revolved around two brothers abandoned in infancy and raised by a she-wolf, an image of nurture and ferocity that Rome adopted as its symbol. One brother, Romulus, had killed the other, Remus, in a feud over the borders of the city and became the first king of his eponymous city – a timeless homily on the tragedy of family power.

* All Rome’s major offices, consuls, praetors, tribunes, were elected: office holders were elected by various assemblies of citizens, either the Centuriate, Tribal or Plebian assemblies, often meeting at the Comitum of the Forum. By the time much of Italy had been conquered, the electorate contained as many as 900,000 voters, but many fewer – 30-50,000 – actually voted; bribery was rife; factional violence endemic. These citizens – the males, not women and not slaves – elected two consuls annually who served as political and military leaders. Consuls were virtually always patricians (noblemen), while its Senate, filled with 600 patricians (resembling the Carthaginian Council of the Mighty), instructed the consuls and in times of crisis appointed dictators to rule for short periods. These patricians wore the national dress, the toga, a white garment with a purple border for office holders (hence the word candidate, from candidatus, meaning a man who wore the white toga of election campaigns). There was a growing tension between the patrician oligarchs and the people, the plebeians, whose elected tribunes could intervene and veto laws.

* In order to divorce his wife a man just said, ‘Take your things for yourself.’ Noble marriage was often political, but not always. There were cases where happily married couples were forced to divorce and make political marriages. Babies were born at home, and many women died in childbirth. Where Caesarean section was undertaken, the mother always died, even if (as with Scipio) the baby was saved. Imperfect babies were rejected and exposed. Most noble women had their babies breastfed by enslaved wetnurses. In the aristocracy, both girls and boys were educated, but the status of girls was shown by the fact that they were often given the family name – Cornelia in the case of Scipiones – with a number. A relationship between a man and a woman without marriage was called concubinatus. Concubine came to mean a non-married woman, a junior wife or, more often, an enslaved girl in the harem of a potentate.