In those fifty years, a new generation of Roman officers had emerged: ruthless, professional, schooled together in the art of war. They had burned and rampaged their way through Greece, where Scipio’s rival Metellus was now poised to take Corinth, and under Scipio they had brought Rome back to the walls of Carthage. The best of them were here now, those who had not died in battle or were not still in Greece: Ennius, chief of the specialist cohort of fabri engineers; Brutus, a monster of a man with his curved scimitar, so unlike the Roman gladius; and in the plain to the south, the Numidian prince Gulussa and the Scythian princess Hippolyta, both brought under Rome’s wing at an early age and now poised to lead their cavalry in the onslaught against the city’s southern wall. They were all in their fighting prime, hardened, blooded, experienced, exactly what the old centurion Petraeus who had trained them in Rome had wanted.
Scipio took his hand off the sword pommel and gestured at the scene. ‘Tomorrow will be a day for your Histories, Polybius.’
‘If you ever let me write it. I seem to have traded in my stylus for a gladius.’
Scipio cracked a smile. ‘Your day will come. In the afterlife, perhaps.’
‘We should have a good vantage point to view the battle from here.’
Scipio pointed at the red welt on his thigh, a wound that had never properly healed. ‘I didn’t get this from staying behind, did I? The only view I will get will be the tunnel of smoke and spattered blood as I follow Brutus into the attack. As soon as the trumpets sound, I will be at the head of my legionaries.’
‘You know that’s against my advice,’ Polybius said. ‘This army can fight on without a Brutus, but not without a Scipio. And if you follow Brutus, expecting to kill, you’ll be disappointed. The last time I followed him into battle was at Pydna, when he was perfecting the cross-cut with his sword: one cut from the groin to the head, and then, in the same sweep, while the two halves are still standing, another cut across the midriff. One man becomes four pieces. There won’t be any left in your path alive.’
‘I will ask him as a favour to leave me a few. In one piece.’
Scipio put his hand back on his sword pommel and stared out. He had acquired the scar on his leg more than twenty years ago against the Macedonian phalanx, as a junior tribune who always led his men from the front. Fabius well remembered how the old centurion Petraeus had won his greatest honour, the corona obsidionalis, by killing his tribune when he had faltered and by leading his maniple into battle himself, winning the day. He had never let the boys at the school forget it. They may be destined for high rank, to command maniples, legions, armies, but they would always be under the watchful eye of their own centurions, never able to slip up. That was how the Roman army operated. The centurion had taught them well.
A bellowing noise came up from the harbour, and the sound of cursing. They looked down to where a wide-bellied merchant ship had been offloading war supplies onto the wharf. A gang of legionaries with their armour stripped off had been hauling a beast up from the hold, a hoary old elephant covered in welts and scars, its bloodshot eyes flashing up at them each time it swung its head. The optio in charge of the work party yelled and the two lines of men hauled on the ropes again, but the beast refused to budge, and with an angry swoosh of its trunk knocked two men sideways into the water. Then a large Numidian slave in the hold, the elephant-master, cracked a whip against its backside and the beast finally moved, bellowing and hobbling across the planks until it stood tottering on the wharfside, scanning the legionaries balefully as they kept their distance.
Polybius stared. ‘Zeus above. I recognize that backside. That’s old Hannibal, isn’t it? I last saw him at the triumph of your father Aemilius Paullus.’
Scipio nodded. ‘Our friend from the academy in Rome. The last surviving prisoner of the war against his namesake.’
Polybius narrowed his eyes. ‘Was this your idea?’
‘You know what they say about elephants. When they’re ready to die, they go to the same graveyard. Well, this is Hannibal’s home, and it is about to become a graveyard. It was an act of compassion.’
‘Compassion?’ Polybius scoffed. ‘I don’t think the old centurion taught anything about that.’
Scipio grunted. ‘Well, if Hasdrubal taunts us, I can taunt him back. There could be nothing more humiliating for him than to see the last survivor of the glorious Hannibal’s elephant corps hobble through the ruins of Carthage, to collapse and die on the steps of their temple.’
Polybius cast Scipio a wry look. ‘That’s more like it.’
‘Do you remember at the academy in Rome, how Petraeus punished Ennius once by making him sleep in the dung in the elephant’s stable?’
‘For a week. He’s never got rid of the smell.’
‘The centurion has been much on my mind lately, on this of all days. I wish he could have seen us here.’
‘He was a hard taskmaster, but a true Roman,’ Polybius said.
‘He is with my adoptive grandfather now, in Elysium.’
‘He knew he could never be here. His time was another war, with your grandfather against Hannibal. And he died an honourable death.’
‘Fighting an enemy from within,’ Scipio muttered.
‘He died for the honour of your grandfather. For the honour of Rome.’
‘He will be avenged.’
Fabius stared at the elephant, suddenly remembering the scene all those years before of the old senator Cato following that swishing tail through the Forum during the triumph of Aemilius Paullus, an act of warning about Carthage that had stunned the crowd to silence; Cato had gone now to the fields of Elysium, but the legacy of his warning lived on in the irascible beast now about to lumber its final steps through a city it had last seen more than seventy years before, when Hannibal had mustered his elephant corps for their extraordinary but ill-fated campaign through Spain and over the Alps towards Rome.
Fabius guessed the thoughts that would be running through Scipio’s mind. The centurion had made them into professional army officers, the first in Rome’s history. Since the Celtiberian War their success in battle had led to more wars, to more conquests; they had not had to return to Rome to endure the tedious succession of civic offices that had been the lot of their fathers and grandfathers. And the men under them, the legionaries, were no longer just civilian levies recruited for one campaign and disbanded when it was over. Those here before the walls of Carthage included men Scipio had fought alongside five, even ten years before: battle-hardened, gnarled, tough. Scipio had seen to that. If the Senate in Rome would not create a professional army, Scipio would do it for them. And he knew that those who had tried to bring Scipio’s grandfather down, those who had ordered the death of the centurion, were driven not just by envy. They feared the power of the army, and the rise of a new breed of generals. Above all, they feared the name Scipio Africanus, now born again.
Fabius remembered the inscription on the elder Scipio’s tomb at Liternum, more than a hundred miles south of Rome near the Bay of Naples, the tomb of a man who had been forced into exile and lived his final years in bitterness. Ingrata patria, ne ossa quidem habebis. Ungrateful fatherland, you will not even have my bones. Fabius watched Scipio’s knuckles turn white as he gripped the railing. The centurion Petraeus was not the only one who would be avenged. And there was something else, something that Scipio never spoke of. Fabius could see the amulet on Scipio’s chest, a little carved eagle on a leather thong, soaked and hardened with the sweat and blood of war. He remembered who had given it to him all those years ago, and he swallowed hard. To become who he was now, consul, general, he had been forced to sacrifice a love that would have destroyed his military career. He had sworn that he would play the game, do what was needed to rise to the top, and then throw off the shackles that had caused him such anguish. He would not go back to Rome as his grandfather had done. This day would be his vengeance; after this he would no longer be enslaved to Rome. He would become Rome.
19
It was a moonless night and the heavens shone brilliantly, a thousand pinpricks that reflected like an undulating carpet of light on the water. Arched high above them in vivid folds of light and colour was the Via Lacteal, the Milky Way, its centre the constellation Sagittarius, the stars outlining the shape of the centaur drawing his bow towards the eastern horizon. Scipio took a deep drink from the wine flagon and passed it to Polybius, who took a mouthful and then passed it back. ‘I remember you teaching me about the Pythagoreans,’ Scipio said, gesturing with the flagon at the sky. ‘About how they think the universe is ruled by divine numbers, and by music. About how for them the number seven is sacred, representing the seven celestial orbits of the sun, the moon and the five planets, and the seven gates of the senses: the mouth, the nostrils, the ears, the eyes.’ He passed the flagon to Fabius. ‘What do you think, Fabius? What does a centurion think when he contemplates the stars?’
Fabius drank deeply, and stared up. ‘I’m not a philosopher, but I can count. If each one of those pinpricks is a star or a planet, then there are many more than seven celestial orbits.’
Scipio smiled at him. ‘You sound like Polybius.’
‘When I was a boy in your household Polybius taught me about astronomy, as well as the world map of Eratosthenes. He said that we needed to know the shape of the world if we were to conquer it, and to know the vastness of the heavens to keep us in our place.’
Polybius looked at the sky. ‘I also told you that the Stoics believe the cycle of the universe will last as long as it takes the stars to resume their original place in the heavens, and then all will be consumed by fire and fall into chaos, and it will begin again. And because everything is in a state of movement, there can be no fixed measure of distance, nor likewise of time.’
Scipio raised his arms in mock frustration. ‘My dear Polybius, I sometimes forget that you are a Greek, and therefore have a weakness for sophistry. I will fix our measure on the walls ahead, and I will not have you saying that an anchored ship and those walls are in constant movement in relation to one another, as Ennius will then be unable to aim his weapons with accuracy.’
Polybius gave a look of feigned surprise. ‘My point was merely that science allows us to contemplate but not to measure our allotted span, and our place in the universe.’
Scipio took another deep draught of wine, and wiped his mouth. ‘In which case I must be a god, for I believe I can measure the allotted span of those in Carthage who dare to confront Scipio Aemilanus, son of Aemilius Paullus and heir of Scipio Africanus.’
‘Spoken like a true general, Scipio.’
Scipio was quiet for a moment, and then squinted up at the sky. ‘Three years ago, when I was still a tribune and an assault on Carthage seemed a distant prospect, I went to sleep under the stars in our camp and had a dream. In it, my adoptive grandfather Scipio Africanus came to me, dressed in a ghostly white robe, like the shroud I remember as a child seeing on his body as it was taken to the funeral pyre. In my dream he took me by the hand and we rose high above the earth, higher than the birds and the clouds, until we were in the heavens themselves. I looked down, and I saw that the city of Rome had become a mere pinprick like the stars, and then it became nothing at all. Surrounding the Middle Sea I saw the inhabited lands of the earth, and beyond that the narrow band of Ocean, frozen at each pole and burning hot in the centre where the sun’s heat is strongest. I saw the convex plane of the earth, and beyond Ocean the outer edge and the stars beyond.’
He paused, drinking again from the flagon. ‘My grandfather pointed down, and showed how the inhabited parts are scattered and small, and how as you move away from the Middle Sea those inhabited places become fewer and more widespread as if separated by the spokes of a wheel, and how few who live in those areas can communicate between themselves or know of each other’s existence. He turned to me, and said this: What places can you name beyond the desert of Africa, or the Ganges in India, or the isles of Albion? Yet you see here that those places exist, and account for the larger part of the world. Who in those places will ever know your name? You see, therefore, the narrow bounds in which your fame will spread. He pointed to where the boundaries of nations that we fight and die for were no longer visible, where all that could be seen was sea and land. And how long, even in these inhabited parts where they know you, will they speak your name? The memory of your fame will be broken like that of all men, by devastation and fire and flood, by the ravages of time and war.’
Scipio took a deep breath. ‘I looked up, away from the earth and towards the heavens. There were stars we never see from down below, constellations and galaxies vast beyond our imagining, far surpassing the earth in magnitude. I had observed Sagittarius the night before, as clear as on this night, and when I looked to the stars I suddenly saw my father, Aemilius Paullus, riding across the heavens on a ghostly horse just like the centaur with his bow, as Aemilius Paullus is shown on the monument to the Battle of Pydna that is now in the sacred enclosure at Delphi. I yearned to join him, to ride with him, but as I stretched out my arms he only seemed to recede, galloping forever beyond my reach. I turned to Africanus, and asked him how I could ride alongside my father across the heavens. At first, he asked me a question: Do you hope for the future of Rome, or are you contemptuous of it? Will you know shadow and decline, or will you rise above Rome as you are now risen above the world, and see your future mapped out before you?’
‘How did you reply?’ Polybius asked quietly.
‘I told him that I did not know, that I could only know when I stood on the ruins of Carthage. He said that triumphs are hollow if they are only built on the praise of others. To the wise, the mere consciousness of noble deeds is ample reward for virtue. Statues of victors need clamps of lead to hold them to their pedestals, or else they will topple and fall. The greatest triumphs are soon enough graced by mere withering laurels, which dry and crumble to dust, as short-lived as the memory of the people. If you live your life for the esteem of the people, you will become disappointed, embittered in old age.’
Scipio paused. ‘I asked him again how I might reach my father. This time he answered me directly, that the way was justice and sacred observance, things of greatest value to Rome; that is the way to heaven. He said that everything people will say of me will be confined to the narrow regions they inhabit. Virtue alone can draw a man to true honour, not the opinions of others. Praise in speech is buried with those who die, and lost in oblivion to those who come afterwards.’
‘Your legacy of personal honour from your grandfather is a heavy burden for you, Scipio, but a worthy one,’ Polybius said solemnly. ‘You were dreaming the thoughts that have guided your life. These were the virtues that first drew me to you when I was brought as a captive from Achaia and made to be your teacher.’
‘In my dream, my grandfather said that there is music, a special sacred note that can open up a way to heaven,’ Scipio said. ‘But those who are not yet ready cannot hear it, just as they cannot look at the sun.’
‘You were remembering our visit when you were a boy to the Pythagoreans,’ Polybius said. ‘We joined them outside Corinth, watching the sun rise
and feeling its warmth, wondering if we too were feeling the divine spirit enter our bodies.’
‘Africanus said that in heaven were all the things that great and excellent men desire; and so, he asked, Of what worth is earthly glory that across space and time is so limited? Look up to heaven, and you will no longer be restricted by having your thoughts of well-being based on that which men alone can bestow. From up here, you move about like a god, for that is what the gods are, the souls of those of us who have risen above the world as you are now, who can contemplate men and their battles as the gods did over the plain of Troy, divining the fates of Hector and Achilles and Priam as if they were pieces on a gaming board.’
‘And did he say how you were to conduct yourself before you reach heaven?’
‘If I keep my soul ready, aloof and contemplating my actions, I will be safe, but if I surrender to the temptations of bloodlust and power I will be no different from those who have surrendered themselves to the vices of drink and women.’
‘Those like Metellus whom you despised as a boy in Rome,’ Polybius said.
Scipio pointed up to the stars. ‘In my dream we were up there above the orb of the earth, and then my grandfather pointed down to a place by the sea and it was as if that place rushed up to me, so fast was our descent, and I saw a city as if from the clouds, dust-shrouded and on fire. He said: Do you see that city, which I brought to heel for Rome, but which now renews its old hostility and cannot remain quiet? Soon you will return to that place, and have the chance to earn that agnomen that you have inherited from me, Africanus.’
Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage Page 26