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Back to section vii of this chapter II. Scipio, Rome, 219 - 218 B.C. viii At
last, to Scipio’s great relief, both consuls sailed in early June, though he
had to endure what seemed endless partings from those staying behind. Scipio’s
mother did not weep at his going when the long-delayed day finally came to go,
and she saw husband and son off to war. She did not weep for one reason, Scipio
knew, for he knew his mother. The daughter of the former Consul Manius Pomponius
Matho, as Roman a Roman as one could ask for, would put a brave face on her
son’s departure no matter what. Pomponia
embraced her son, then her husband, then her son again, holding to him for a
long moment, and promised to write. Scipio
saw that look in her eyes, the look he’d been seeing frequently of late. The
look said she was fighting back tears at the passage of her eldest son beyond
his youth and his mother’s stern but loving protection. She knew, as did he,
that he was no longer hers. But the look stayed constant, and except for the
eyes, her face remained pleasant. Scipio suspected that the tears would come
only after they had gone, when she could retire to her most private chamber,
send away her maids. He felt a stab of guilt, though he knew it wasn’t wrong
for him to go. No,
it was Lucius who wept at parting, probably in sheer frustration at being too
young to go himself. Scipio actually ached for his brother as, red-faced, Lucius
tried his best to hide his tears, stammering his goodbyes, deeply embarrassed to
be caught behaving childishly when he was almost fourteen. The
hardest to console, however, was Adonibaal. He begged to be taken along. “Please,
Domine,” he cried, trying hard not
to weep. “I could be of so much help to you.” “No,
Adonibaal. Look at yourself, thin as a vine—you’re not soldier material, you
know. You couldn’t protect yourself, let alone me,” Scipio said. “Besides,
I’m going to be a soldier, and I have to act as one. I can’t have my slave
washing my feet and tucking me into bed. I want to sleep on the cold ground, eat
bread singed in the campfire, march all day, get blood on my sword!” The
day before departure, Scipio and Marcus Livius spent time watching Lucius train
on the Campus Martius with hundreds of other boys and young men. They stood with
their old drill instructor, Aulus Pennus, watching Lucius and the others
practice with their wooden swords. “Mind
the things I taught you,” Pennus said. “Rome
will have need of you in the ranks again, Aulus Pennus,” Scipio said. “Not
me, I’m an old man.” “Be
ready,” Scipio said. Pennus
looked his age—in the fifties—precisely as a centurion should. Coupled with
his deliberate speech and steady eye, the lines of his face and hands
established his wisdom and authority beyond doubt. The scars on his arms and
face would tell any new recruit that here was a man who’d faced the enemy,
sword in hand, and fought. Scipio knew that Pennus had served numerous
times in Italian Gaul and first bloodied his sword in the middle years of the
first war with Carthage. With another such war now in the offing, Scipio had no
doubt Rome could use the centurion’s skills again—on the day that Scipio
became a commander, he’d certainly want Pennus at his side. Scipio
could hardly wait, impatient even of these goodbyes so important to his family.
When he and his father strode away from home towards the Campus Martius to
commence moving the army north to Pisae, where they would take ship, he did not
look back. *
* * Over
the last month and more, dispatches had come from Italian Gaul bearing to the
consul’s ears—and thus to Scipio’s, who seldom left his father’s
side—the sorry tale of Roman colonies attacked. The
colonists had slipped away from their beleaguered colony in the night. The
soldiers formed a square around the civilian colonists, and off they marched.
They’d fended off attack after attack as they fled as far as Mutina. Safely
inside her walls, they watched the Gauls dance around the town—a fearsome
sight, but the Gauls were so poor at siege work that there was little threat of
a direct assault. Then
the praetor peregrinus, Lucius Manlius Vulso, tried coming to their aid from
Ariminum with a few thousand soldiers. The Gauls ambushed him twice as he passed
through deep forests and harassed him all the way past the holdouts at Mutina,
who would later report their despair as he fled beyond them, disappearing in the
direction of Tannetum, thirty-five miles to the northwest. Humph,
was Scipio’s reaction. Manlius Vulso was no better a soldier than his father
had been in Africa with Marcus Atilius Regulus. He’d lost hundreds of good
Roman legionaries, only to end up cornered himself in Tannetum. Then
Gaius Atilius Serranus appeared with Publius Scipio’s first legion up from
Rome. Scipio felt a sour taste on learning that Serranus had been good enough
that he managed to rout the Gauls, rescue the colonists, and escort them back to
their colonies. He even rescued three envoys that the colonial commissioner,
Gaius Lutatius Catulus, had sent out of Mutina to parley with the Gauls. Oh,
why did it have to be Serranus, Scipio’s father’s political foe, prospering
on his father’s troops? Serranus, of all people. Next section of II. Scipio, Rome, 219 - 218 B.C. Back to Top
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