by Baker, Simon
For the glorious part they played in Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean, in the wars won and in the numbers of the enemy killed, the family of the Aemilii Paulli joined the Cornelii Scipiones at the forefront of the Roman élite. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus the elder ensured that his family too rivalled them for glory and prestige. His own father had been a consul and a hero from the war against Hannibal. Now he too injected the family name with new glory. In 180 BC Gracchus senior subjugated northern Spain, and three years later crushed an 80,000-strong rebellion in Sardinia. For these achievements Gracchus was considered worthy to marry Cornelia, the most eligible noblewoman in Rome. She was the daughter of Scipio Africanus and the niece of Lucius Aemilius Paullus. In Cornelia the three illustrious families united. They were the three wings of the ancestry of Cornelia’s son, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus the younger, and they came together at Gracchus’s funeral in 154 BC. But despite the families’ extraordinary success in conquering the Mediterranean a question mark loomed over their achievements.
It centred on the uncertainty of what the empire they had built was doing to Rome. Were the wars they had waged really defensive and just, as many claimed, or were they simply naked expressions of the desire for gain? Who really benefited from that gain? The Roman republic as a whole or just a few aristocrats who had profited while holding office? Above all, what effect did winning an empire have on the moral character of Rome? Was it encouraging virtue in its soldiers and leaders, or simply greed and corruption? Indeed, were personal ambition and the pursuit of glory now being set above the interests of the republic and the Roman people? This was the great debate that the conquest of the Mediterranean had ignited. In 146 BC one single event would fan its flames to a roaring blaze.
TURNING POINT: THE SACK OF CARTHAGE
By the end of the year 148 BC, the Third Punic War was going badly for the Romans. The consuls leading the attack on Carthage and the neighbouring countryside had initiated rash assaults, resulting in defeat and failure, while the soldiers themselves were growing idle, greedy and selfish.8 Of the three wars against Carthage, the third was the most controversial and, to many minds back in the metropolis, the Romans were now paying the price. The historian Polybius, who was an eyewitness to the later stages of this war, addressed the nature of the controversy. Opinion in the Mediterranean world, he said, was divided over the Romans’ decision to go to war with their old rival for a third time:
There were some who approved the action of the Romans, saying that they had taken wise and statesmanlike measures in the defence of their empire. For to destroy this source of perpetual menace [Carthage] . . .was the act of intelligent and far-seeing men. Others took the opposite view, that far from maintaining the principles by which they had won their supremacy, they were, little by little, deserting it for a lust of domination.9
The war had been controversial from the very start. Before any decision to launch hostilities was taken, heated arguments divided the Senate. On one side were the doves: they argued vehemently that, far from seeking to destroy Carthage, Rome needed a strong Carthage to act as a counterbalance of power in the Mediterranean. In this way, went their argument, Carthage would actually restrain Rome from becoming so powerful that it gave way to the ‘avarice’ that destroyed ‘honour, integrity and every other virtue’.10 The hawks countered this line of argument by playing on old Roman fears. Carthage, they said, was resurgent and wealthy and would always pose a threat until it was absolutely destroyed. Led by Cato the Elder, this side glossed their case with bright rhetorical brush strokes. The Carthaginians were untrustworthy, degenerate and effeminate child-sacrificers.The suggestion was that they were, in effect, subhuman and should be treated as such. Relentlessly keeping the issue at the top of the agenda, Cato ended every speech he made in the Senate on whatever subject with the statement ‘Delenda est Carthago’ (Carthage must be wiped out).11 In this way he ground down the opposition, and eventually the hawks swayed the majority of the Senate in favour of war. Now all the senators needed was a justification. Establishing this would only make the controversy worse.
A pretext was soon found. Following an inspection of the city of Carthage and surrounding countryside, a Roman commission reported to the Senate an ‘abundance of ship-building materials’ and alleged that Carthaginians had built up their fleet beyond the legal limits set by the treaty of the Second Punic War.12 However, the archaeological and historical evidence for the development of these ancient weapons of mass destruction is inconclusive even to this day. Then, when the Carthaginians did eventually break the treaty in an irrefutable way (by going to war with their neighbour Numidia without the permission of Rome), even here the case against Carthage was far from convincing. There was one simple reason: Rome, acting behind the scenes, had been the one to incite Numidian aggression against Carthage in the first place. But this was by no means the last instance of Roman cynicism. In its diplomacy, too, Rome would bring the controversy of the decision to go to war to an even fiercer pitch of intensity. For the Roman senators were about to violate one of the republic’s most ancient and divine virtues: fides or ‘reliability’ – the ability in political affairs to keep one’s word.
As the Roman war machine geared up for action, with ships shuttling between Italy and North Africa and the number of troops and cavalry deployed swelling to over 80,000, the Carthaginians sent no fewer than three embassies to the Romans in 149 BC. Each of them offered their surrender, each was a desperate bid to prevent war. On the first occasion the Roman consul agreed to peace and to give Carthage its freedom under Roman rule. There was, however, one condition: that the Carthaginians surrender three hundred hostages, specifically the sons of their noblest families. The Carthaginians, in good faith, agreed. Then, when this was done and the flower of their élite had sailed for Rome, the Roman consul in Africa, Lucius Marcius Censorinus, stipulated a further condition: the surrender of 200,000 sets of armour and 2000 catapults. Distraught, the ambassadors returned to Carthage and oversaw the arms being collected by the wagonload and taken to the Roman camp. However, the wily Censorinus had one more trick up his sleeve.
A final condition was stipulated before peace could be agreed: the removal of the city of Carthage from the coast to 16 kilometres (10 miles) inland. Censorinus’s argument for this was an extraordinary piece of hypocrisy. The sea, he said, with its prospects for trade, had corrupted Carthage. It had given it ‘a grasping disposition’. Carthage needed to be more like Rome: ‘Life inland,’ he claimed, ‘with the joys of agriculture and quiet, is much more equable.’13 Dumbstruck, the ambassadors broke down in tears of frenzy and mourning. It was impossible to meet this condition without, in effect, destroying the city for ever. It now dawned on them that the Romans had never sincerely intended to come to terms. They had simply sought to gain an advantage in a war that was now – and had always been – unstoppable.
Two years later, the treachery of the Romans at the outset of the war was deemed by many to be the reason for their lack of success in it. The Roman people paid great attention to the rightness of their wars in the building of the empire. ‘When the inception of war seems just,’ ran the logic, ‘it makes victory greater and ill success less perilous, while if it is thought to be dishonourable and wrong, it has the opposite effect’.14 So it was proving to be at the end of 148 BC. But, with the arrival in Africa of a new and iconic general in the spring of the following year, all that was about to change.
To resolve the miserable, grinding stalemate in Carthage, the Roman people and the Senate had turned to a young aristocrat. The credentials of Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus were impeccable. He came from the patrician family of the Cornelii Scipiones; he was the grandson of the consul who fell at the battle of Cannae; the adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus, the victor of the Second Punic War; and the son of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the vanquisher of Perseus in the war against Macedon (see family tree, page 38). Aemilianus had proved his own abilities in the early stages of the war against
Carthage. Indeed, leading the fourth legion, he was the only officer who had achieved any significant victories. Now, even though he was thirty-seven, five years below the official age for the office of consul, the demand among the Roman people for him to be elected was so overwhelming that the Senate eventually agreed to make an exception to the traditional laws of the republic and allowed him to stand. Once elected to the consul-ship, his responsibility was simple: to take charge of the war in Carthage and win it.
With that aim in mind, Aemilianus returned to North Africa, brought discipline back to the army and adopted a new strategy for the war. He ordered the Roman campaigns in the interior to be abandoned. All Roman units were now to focus on taking the city first by siege, then by assault. During the summer of 147 BC he created an impregnable seal around Carthage to prevent any reinforcements and provisions from reaching the city. On the land approaches, he ensured that a double wall of earthworks was built across the isthmus in just twenty days. On the harbour side, he was no less ambitious. In order to block up the entrance to the port, a barrier was created by depositing 15,000 cubic metres (52,000 cubic feet) of rocks and boulders. Siege engines were then placed on top of the wall rising out of the sea. Despite some brave Carthaginian resistance and attacks, the city was effectively made watertight by the winter. Aemilianus spent the next few months clearing up pockets of resistance in the country, and when spring came again in 146 BC, he and his army were ready to take the city. To help them, new recruits arrived from Italy. One of those green soldiers was Aemilianus’s seventeen-year-old cousin, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus.
As a close relative, Tiberius shared Aemilianus’s tent and table. The boy was, after all, not only Aemilianus’s cousin, but also his brother-in-law; earlier Aemilianus had married Tiberius’s elder sister Sempronia. But the two men had more in common than family. The war presented both of them with a unique opportunity to prove themselves. For Aemilianus, holding the annual consulship gave him a limited window of time to silence his critics. In his youth he had avoided taking the proper route to success in politics and had once confided in his friend and tutor, the historian Polybius: ‘Everyone regards me as a quiet and lazy person with no share in the energetic character of a Roman because I do not choose to plead cases in court. They say that the family does not need the sort of representative that I am but someone just the opposite. That is what hurts me most.’15 His single year as consul and general in charge of the war in Carthage was his one shot at the big time, his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prove himself worthy of his family, to renew the fame of the Cornelii Scipiones. Glory was there for the taking so long as the weight of expectation did not get to him first.
Much too was expected of his cousin. Since his father’s death, Tiberius, along with his sister and younger brother, had been brought up by their renowned mother Cornelia, the daughter of Scipio Africanus. She had ensured that Tiberius had received the best Greek education in rhetoric and philosophy; it suited the young man’s intelligent, generous and idealistic nature. But she had also fired him with ambitions for a glorious career and a desire to excel in the Roman virtues of self-discipline and courage. As a result, although gentle, thoughtful and by no means a natural fighter like his cousin Aemilianus, Tiberius was a fiercely determined young man.16 This latter quality would prove an asset during his summer in Carthage.
Tiberius joined Aemilianus’s staff to learn the art of war, to study his actions and follow his example. However, this war also presented him with a chance to get his foot on the political ladder known as the cursus honorum, the annual electoral competition for honours. Since in ancient Rome political and military careers were not separate as they usually are today but entwined as one, ambitious young men needed to have served in a number of campaigns before they could stand for even the lower offices in the hierarchy of magistracies. But there was much more to building a political career than simply notching up one military campaign after another. As Aemilianus himself was known to observe, power in Rome began with earning integrity. An ancient aristocratic code followed on from this: ‘Dignity of rank,’ said Aemilianus, ‘arises from integrity, the honour of holding office from dignity, supreme authority from holding office, and freedom from supreme authority.’17 Liberty to do what one wished was the value most cherished by Roman aristocrats. It was the very essence of the free republic. But how to set foot on such a daunting, political path? How to begin building such character? How to emulate one’s ancestors? As Aemilianus and his officers made the final preparations for the assault on Carthage, Tiberius found out.
There is no record of what Aemilianus told his officers before battle, but it is easy to imagine that it centred on an old theme. The battle ahead was about liberty and justice winning out over tyranny. It was about decent Roman values surpassing the treachery and deceitfulness of the Carthaginians. It was, in short, about civilization vanquishing decadence and corruption. With the final assault on Carthage, 120 years of war, hatred and suspicion would come to an end. The questions of who controlled the ancient world and how it was to be run would at last be unambiguously answered. As incentives for his officers to show valour in a conflict of such proportions, perhaps Aemilianus reminded his entourage too of the usual decorations. Ancient Romans awarded acts of bravery not primarily with medals but with crowns, bracelets, necklaces and miniature spears. Depending on the nature of the achievement, the crowns took different names and forms. Some were of grass, some of oak leaves, others of gold. Only one, however, fitted this momentous occasion. The Mural Crown was to be awarded to the first person to scale the walls of the city.
Perhaps with this in mind, Tiberius and his unit waited in the dawn light for the horns to blare. With his thirst for glory contending with terror, Tiberius was about to experience his first taste of war. Then the signal came. The Romans broke cover, quickly set timbers, scaffolding and siege engines against the city wall, and took on the 30,000 Carthaginian defenders. Against the shower of arrows, spears and weighted nets trapping the Roman climbers below, Tiberius’s unit began the long scramble up the city wall some 9 metres (30 feet) wide and 18 metres (66 feet) high. Despite the swathes of Roman casualties crashing to the ground around him, Tiberius achieved what perhaps had seemed impossible: he became the first to lead his detachment to the top of the wall of Carthage. But as soon he and his men were over, they would have realised that the fight had only just begun. They now faced the enemy in gruelling, mechanical hand-to-hand combat. In the moment of his great triumph Tiberius found himself in hell.
The horrific conflict lasted six days and nights. Once inside the city, killing squads advanced house by house, narrow street by narrow street. They cut and stabbed their way from the Forum of Carthage along three streets and forced the enemy back on to Byrsa, the citadel. When the determined Carthaginians, fighting for survival, began attacking the Romans with missiles from the roofs of their close-packed houses, the Romans captured the first few tenements, murdered their occupants and mounted the roofs too. Throwing planks over the narrow alleyways, they continued to wage the war from rooftop to rooftop, leaving a trail of mutilated corpses in their wake or tossing them to the streets below. Then, amid the cries, shrieks and animal-like groans, Aemilianus raised the intensity of the brutal assault and ordered the streets to be set on fire. The booming noise stepped up the confusion. Houses came crashing down and the elderly, the wounded, women and children were forced out of their hiding places.18
Squads of Roman ‘cleaners’ now attempted to bring order to the scenes of frenetic activity. They cleared away the bodies of the dead and wounded alike, mixing them with the rubble and sweeping them into holes in the ground. The streets needed to be clear to make way for the cohorts of army and cavalry charging forward. Horses trampled over the dismembered limbs and severed heads that remained in their way. This warfare was a far cry from the bloody field engagements of Hannibal, or the naval clashes of the First Punic War. It took the horror to another level. At all costs, however, Rom
an discipline had to be sustained. Although the troops were rotated in order to maintain the ferocity of their attack, Aemilianus, snatching morsels of food and sleep whenever he could, worked around the clock.19
By the seventh day the Romans’ efforts had paid off and 50,000 exhausted, starving Carthaginians approached Aemilianus bearing garlands of the god of healing, Asclepius, a signal that they wished to surrender in exchange for their lives. Aemilianus agreed. After the respite, the Roman army focused its full force on the sacred Temple of Eshmoun. This was situated at the height of the citadel and it was the fortified bolt-hole to which Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian general, and a defiant army of nine hundred defenders had retreated. The Romans surrounded it and for some time were unable to penetrate the temple’s natural defences. The grind of war – fatigue, want of food and fear – eventually forced the Carthaginians on to the roof. There was nowhere left to turn. When Hasdrubal, realizing that they were doomed, secretly deserted, Aemilianus was quick to drive home the advantage. In full view of the rebels, he staged the abject surrender of their cowardly leader before him. After that demoralizing spectacle it was only a matter of time before the rebels, including Hasdrubal’s wife and children, gave up hope and threw themselves to their deaths in the fire enveloping the temple below.20