Ancient Rome: The Lives of Great Men

by Mary Agnes Hamilton

Scipio returned to Rome amid scenes of extraordinary enthusiasm and rejoicing. All the way from Rhegium, where he landed, to Rome itself the people came out and lined the roads, hailing him as the man who had saved his country. He entered the city in triumph, marching to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline hill to lay before the altar his wreaths of olive and laurel. Magnificent games were held, lasting for several days, in honour of his victory, and he himself was given the name Africanus.

For the next few years Africanus lived in Rome the life of a private citizen, concerned with politics, giving his spare time to the study of Greek literature, to which he was devoted. This study he shared with many friends, among them Laelius, who had been his devoted lieutenant in the Spanish and African wars, Tiberius Gracchus the Elder, the husband of Scipio’s daughter Cornelia, herself a woman of high character and educated ability; and Aemilius Paulus, whose sister he married and whose nephew was afterwards adopted into the family of the Scipios by the son of Africanus and known as Scipio Aemilianus. As they read the plays, poetry, and philosophy of the Greeks, educated Romans learned that they were not alone in the world. Before them had lived a people who were skilled in all the arts of life at a time when they themselves were rude barbarians, like the Gauls whom they despised.

The Greece of their day, however, was no longer the Greece of the glorious past. Alexander’s great empire, which had extended over half Asia, had fallen to pieces. In Greece itself the different peoples were quarrelling among themselves. Even after the Roman armies had freed the Greeks from Philip of Macedonia, Antiochus of Asia threatened them; at the Court of Antiochus was Hannibal. It was as an envoy from Rome to his Court that Scipio met and talked with Hannibal. Later he went out as assistant to his brother Lucius, when the latter was made commander in the war against Antiochus, and finally defeated him at the battle of Magnesia in Asia Minor.

By no means all educated Romans shared Scipio’s feelings about Greece. On the contrary there were many who thought that the simplicity of the grand old Roman character was being destroyed, while the young men were falling into luxurious and effeminate ways. Marcus Porcius Cato, for example, a man of the utmost uprightness and courage, took this view. He was a hard man himself, and he wanted others to be hard. He could see no difference between a love of beauty and luxury. He saw nothing that was bad in the old order, nothing that was good in the new.

The Scipios, Africanus and his brother, who now bore the name of Asiaticus, were Cato’s particular enemies. He had struggled in the Senate with Africanus over Carthage, for the old man wanted to see the city of Hannibal razed to the ground. He hated Scipio’s Greek ideas. He thought him too proud and self-willed to be a good servant of the State. After the Greek campaign Cato called upon Asiaticus to give an account of the money spent in the wars against Antiochus, suggesting that he had been extravagant. That such a charge should be brought against his brother roused Scipio Africanus to passionate anger. He refused to defend him; the character of a Scipio was its own defence. In the presence of the Senate he tore up the account books which Cato had called for. When Lucius was, nevertheless, condemned Scipio rescued him by force. Thereupon he himself was charged with treason by two tribunes. Even then his haughty spirit did not bend. Instead of pleading his cause he reminded the people that it was the anniversary of the day on which he had defeated Hannibal at Zama. Let them follow him to the Temple of Jupiter and pray for more citizens like himself. The crowd obeyed. No more was heard of the trial.

Scipio’s pride, however, was deeply injured. He had been the idol of Rome in his youth. That he and his brother should be accused before the Roman people was to him an unbearable sign of ingratitude and baseness of mind. He left Rome, shaking its dust from his feet, and retired to the country. There a few years later he died at the age of fifty-three. In his will he ordered that his ashes should not be taken to Rome.

In the same year (183) Hannibal also died. To the last the Romans feared him; Hannibal took poison when he heard that Nicomedes of Bithynia, at whose Court he was, had been ordered to hand him over to Rome.

Scipio Aemilianus

The young man left to carry on the great name of Scipio was the son of Aemilius Paulus and nephew by marriage of Africanus, whose son adopted him into the Cornelian family.

Scipio Aemilianus, to give him the name by which he was always known after this adoption, saw, even more clearly than Africanus had done, both that Rome was changing and what was good and what was bad in the change. He shared in both good and bad. No one saw more clearly than he the baseness of the destruction of Carthage and the cruelty of the sack of Numantia; yet it was he who, as general, had to carry them out. He saw the dangers of the growing contrast between the increasing wealth of the few rich, as treasures poured from all parts of the world into their coffers, and the wretchedness of the poor in Rome; he saw the cruelty, indifference to human life, and love of pleasure that filled men’s minds after a series of successful wars; he saw the old simplicity of life and high devotion to country disappearing and a new selfishness and personal ambition growing up.