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Against Rome |
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Back to section iv of this chapter II. Scipio, Rome, 219 - 218 B.C. v The
day after the conversation on Tiber Island, come to the Campus Martius to gather
up his younger brother, Scipio found Lucius pacing beside the drill field,
fuming. “What
kept you?” Lucius demanded. “Salve,
Aulus Pennus,” Scipio said with a wave. His old drill instructor, now
Lucius’s as well, stood nearby watching his boys disperse across the beaten
grass. “Salve,
Publius Cornelius.” He grinned at his old pupil. “I
said, what kept you?” “I’m
right on time,” Scipio said. “You’re too impatient.” “No,
you’re too unpunctual,” Lucius said. “Where’s
Demetrios?” Scipio asked, referring to Lucius’s counterpart to Adonibaal.
But just as he said it, the young Greek appeared from nowhere. He looked
perpetually sulky. But faithful despite his appearance, Scipio knew. Scipio
spent a few minutes visiting with Aulus Pennus. Then: “We’d
better get on home,” Lucius said. “Ave,
Aulus Pennus.” “Gods
be with you, boy.” The old
centurion took a cloth from his belt and used it to clean the blade of the very
real sword that he always planted in the ground while his boys were battling
with their wooden swords. He sheathed the sword. “Maybe
you’ll see some different ways to fight,” Pennus added with a smile. Scipio
had asked him one day: “Aulus Pennus, why do Roman armies always march
straight ahead to fight? Aren’t there other ways?” “The
only other ways I know,” Pennus had replied, “are to fight as a rabble, like
Gauls, or in the old-fashioned Greek phalanx.” Now
the old centurion said, “Keep your eyes open.” Scipio
laughed and raised his hand in farewell. They
began threading their way through groups of boys still wrapping up their
practice. Lucius continued to show his pique. Every few steps he bumped Scipio,
who at first just moved farther away—only to have Lucius close in and do it
again. Still boy enough at seventeen to succumb to the provocation, Scipio began
to bump back. Now
Lucius compounded Scipio’s irritation. “I
told Father about your impiousness on Tiber Island yesterday.” “You
what? How was I impious?” “You
scoffed at the gods, Scipio. That was a plain omen, and you knew it, yet you
scoffed.” Scipio
cuffed Lucius on the ear. “Stop
that!” Rubbing his injured ear, Lucius stood looking defiantly at Scipio, a
fist raised as if to strike. A
familiar voice rang out: “Scipio! Lucius!” “Tata!”
cried Lucius, for a moment clearly forgetting the half-formed sense of dignity
that went with his advancing years as he reverted to the familiar name used by
all Roman children for their fathers. Though obviously not forgetting for a
moment that Scipio had struck him, for he gave Scipio a murderous side-long
look. Their
father, the elder Publius Cornelius Scipio, for whom young Scipio was named,
strode towards them across the field, ignoring the crowds of boys dispersing
around him. In his father, Scipio saw his mature self at thirty-eight: pale gray
eyes, a brief, gray-streaked stubble for hair, deep lines in his less than
handsome face, and the sturdy body carried erectly with economy. Not so
impressive to look at, even in a toga, but his father was an able man, he knew
that. No Marcellus, but able. And when his father took command of legions as
consul, Scipio would finally be old enough to march at his side. That day could
not come soon enough. “Scipio,”
his father said, “what’s this I hear of your impiousness yesterday?” “Father,
I wasn’t being impious. Lucius imagines things.” “Do
not,” Lucius said. “I
won’t have a son who mocks the gods, Scipio. Not acceptable. You know that.” “Honestly,
Father, it wasn’t impiousness. I was being hardheaded and practical. Lucius
and Marcus Livius jumped to the conclusion that the dog in the water was a
wolf—but it truly wasn’t.” “It
was,” Lucius said. “Lucius
says you called him superstitious.” “He
is, Father. He believes the silly things he imagines.” “They
aren’t silly.”. “Don’t
belittle your brother, Scipio. I expect more of you. And a properly pious
attitude is essential. We do not spurn our gods.” “But—” “You
will say no more of this. Am I understood?” “Yes,
sir, you are.” Scipio knew when to retreat. * * * That
winter was full of news about Hannibal, music to Scipio’s ears. Having gained
command of Carthaginian Spain two years earlier, he loomed as more and more a
threat. Talk raged in Rome about the hatred that Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar,
had borne Rome. It was assumed that like father like son, and Rome hung in
nervous suspense. What
was coming? What should Rome do? Indeed,
word out of Spain looked ominous indeed to Scipio and his friends. Hannibal was
clearly consolidating his hold there. Hannibal was recruiting in great numbers.
Hannibal had thrown down a serious provocation: after a siege of nearly a year,
he sacked the Spanish town of Saguntum. It
was frustrating to watch the Senate argue all that winter. When the
thirty-foot-high bronze doors of the Curia Hostilia weren’t closed, Scipio
hung about the entrance, listening to the debates within. “True,”
the senior Consul Lucius Aemilius Paullus said, “Saguntum is eighty miles
south of the Ebro River—the line we drew in agreement with Hannibal’s
predecessor, Hasdrubal the Handsome. But—” “We
can’t leave Saguntum unsuccored,” Scipio’s father said. “I
say war!” said Gaius Flaminius—whose voice might better have kept still.
Flaminius was so unpopular with much of the Senate that if he said black, they
automatically said white. Scipio
squirmed as voices rose in opposition, mostly from Quintus Fabius Maximus and
his faction. Fabius was the first of those to say white. The old man was so
stout he looked like a quinquereme under sail, his broad nose fearsome as the
warship’s ramming beak. “This
is no small Gallic campaign we’re discussing,” said Gaius Licinius Varus.
“And it’s far from our shores.” “This
is Carthage,” said Marcus Atilius Regulus, son of that Regulus who had
died invading Carthaginian Africa in the Punic war over Sicily. Well, that would
be his angle, wouldn’t it? Carthage frightened these flabby, grizzled old men.
Old women, more like. But
the drums of war throbbed strongly all that winter, and Scipio was glad, for the
coming year would see him at last off to his first war, a cadet in the
legions—possibly his father’s legions, in fact, as the elder Publius Scipio
intended to run for consul. The
argument continued into January and February. “War
is now utterly inevitable,” Uncle Gnaeus said late in February, after news had
come of Saguntum. “Carthage, in the form of this Hannibal, has ‘crossed the
Ebro under arms,’ so to speak. It’s true that he has not literally marched
an army across the Ebro River—yet—but the deliberate, brutal sack of
Saguntum, a Roman ally, amounts to the same thing. It’s a torch in a
neighbor’s haystack.” But
while Scipio heard this view supported by speaker after speaker of many of the
great families—Aemilii, Cornelii, Servilii, Caecilii, Pomponii, Papirii,
Furii, not to mention Gaius Flaminius and Scipio’s father Publius Scipio, now
senior consul-elect—still the will of a very small majority of the Senate was
with Fabius—supported by Atilii, Manlii, Marcii, Ogulnii, Laetorii, Fulvii,
Mamillii—who argued that Rome should wait and see Hannibal’s intentions more
clearly. Ought Rome to enter another protracted war with Carthage, they asked,
based on the misfortunes of one very minor ally? And
time passed into spring, much as Scipio knew it had during the debates leading
up to the Punic war over Sicily in his father’s youth. Talk, talk, talk. Scipio
watched it all with fascination, anger, and impatience by turns. “Gods!”
he told Marcus Livius. “It’s war. Let’s fight.” Meanwhile,
the name “Hannibal” hung in every quarter of the city. Reports arrived of
Hannibal’s obvious war preparations and his equally obvious expansionist aims.
“Even
with our poor intelligence system,” Uncle Gnaeus said over dinner at his
brother’s house, “how could Rome miss the recruiting of a hundred thousand
men? Or the subjugation of region after region in Spain the past two years. And
there are rumors that he has agents moving about not only in Italy, where you
might expect them, but in Gaul and northern Spain. What do the rumors mean? I
can think of only one thing.” As
could Scipio. Hannibal had very big ambitions. All
around him serious fears of Hannibal mounted. In his present aggressive mode,
might Hannibal be planning more than just a defense of Spain? Would he seek to
build a buffer in Gaul between himself and Rome? Or—and Scipio seldom heard
this fear voiced in anything above a whisper, though he knew it was on every
Roman mind—might Hannibal be planning to attack Rome herself? He could not do
so by sea, everyone believed, but could he by land? It was almost unthinkable,
but— —It
was being thought, on every street corner, no doubt in every Roman home—and
all over Italy, too. “At
every fountain,” Scipio’s mother, Pomponia, said, “grandmothers washing
their laundry are reminding each other that the Gauls sacked Rome not two
hundred years ago.” “I
stopped by the tavern at the crossroads yesterday,” put in his father, “and
heard the grandfathers talking over dice and wine about polishing their dented
old armor. Everyone is worried.” The
female slaves in the Cornelius Scipio household approached their mistress,
trembling, wanting to be told that all would be well. Scipio’s mother, herself
obviously worried, seemed unable to comfort them. Lucius,
who never listened to his tutors, now knew very well who Hannibal was. He went
about pontificating to all who would stand still for it. “Hannibal is the
eldest of Hamilcar’s lion cubs, don’t forget. Everybody knows those cubs
were reared to hate Rome.” It
was Fabius who carried the Senate debate at last: Rome would send a high-level
delegation to Carthage. This delegation, to be headed by Fabius’s elderly
kinsman Marcus Fabius Buteo, a consul nearly thirty years earlier during the
Punic war, would bypass visiting Hannibal, go directly to his masters and demand
the surrender of Hannibal and his staff to Rome, else there would be war. Surrender
Hannibal? “War
with Carthage would be disastrous for Rome,” Fabius Maximus said in the
Senate. “Those who thunder for war are fools. I fought in the Punic war over
Sicily. Carthage almost beat us then. If we’re fools enough to try them again,
I predict we’ll see fighting in Italy, not just in far-off places. The flower
of Roman youth will be the sacrifice on your altar of war. Mark me well, you who
crave it so.” The
old campaigner, no stranger to war, stood there glaring at the packed tiers of
senators, his solid bulk seemingly planted as a barrier. “The
old ram,” Scipio’s father said after the senate session. Scipio could think
of a few other choice words for Fabius. “All
I know,” Uncle Gnaeus said, “is he’s the one cost me my triumph. More like
an old weasel.” As
he had. It was undoubtedly Fabius behind the denial of Uncle Gnaeus’s triumph
rather than Marcus Marcellus—who had professed great respect for Gnaeus, his
consular colleague, even to depicting Gnaeus the victor at Mediolanum on one of
his triumphal parade floats. It had been Fabius maneuvering the Senate to deny
Gnaeus a triumph, of that Scipio had no more doubt than had his uncle. “The
delegates will fail,” Scipio told Marcus Livius one day as they hung about the
Forum hoping to catch wind of something exciting. “That’s
what my father says too,” Marcus Livius said. “But why? Father just brushes
me aside when I ask.” “Carthage
wants another war. It’s that simple.” “Jupiter!”
said Marcus Livius, whose ambitions were a good bit less grand than Scipio’s.
He saw plenty of blood in his future, but the blood he expected was only
metaphorical. Marcus Livius yearned to be a great advocate in the law courts.
Much less martial than Scipio, Marcus Livius had chosen martial Rome’s only
alternative to warfare as a path to distinction. Marcus
Livius was a gentle soul, studious, quiet yet not shy when it came to oratory.
Quite courageous, actually, and a solid friend on whom Scipio could count to
follow his lead even in areas not really congruent with his nature: the drill
field, or the sometimes dangerous martial games that Scipio liked to
play—sneaking into temples at night, raiding friends’ bedrooms, and the
like. Never did he initiate these forays, and Scipio knew he always went with a
thundering heart, but go he did. In
Marcus Livius’s opinion, expressed freely to Scipio, another war might be a
serious distraction from his plans. Certainly he would serve, as every
propertied Roman must, but his dreams were full of rhetoric, not iron; argument,
not blood. Scipio
drummed his fingers while the delegation awaited its departure for the Ides of
March, when the new consuls would take office and the old consuls leave it (for
the present year’s consuls, Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Marcus Livius’s
father, Marcus Livius Salinator, were to be members of the delegation and could
not be ambassadors until they finished their consular terms). Meanwhile, a
conditional declaration of war made its way through the Tribal Assembly. Its use
would depend on the delegation’s outcome. The
other delegates were Gaius Licinius Varus and Quintus Baebius Tamphilus. Both
Livius Salinator and Aemilius Paullus were of the “war faction.” With Varus
a Fabian adherent and Baebius neutral but nervous about Hannibal, having met him
already in a vain attempt to slow the onrush of war, the ambassadors were much
too neatly divided for Scipio’s taste—and it would be Marcus Fabius Buteo
who spoke for them. For
Scipio, preparing his gear for war, all of this was exciting. He hung on the
conversations of his father, Uncle Gnaeus, and their friends, to whose company
he was now admitted, though as a very junior, and silent, partner. Handicapping
how the delegates would stand on war or peace was rife. So
much hinged on them, it seemed. Or did it? Next section of II. Scipio, Rome, 219 - 218 B.C. Back to Top
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