The man who would lead their comeback between 216 and 202 BC was Scipio. The key to his success in reversing Hannibal’s achievement was the Romans’ ability to draw on a seemingly endless supply of high-quality manpower. Although the Italian allies of Rome in the south defected to Hannibal, many others remained loyal, and it was from these and other allied communities throughout Italy that Rome created new armies. With them at their disposal, the Romans now adopted a different tactic altogether. They allowed Hannibal free rein in the south of Italy to try to raise a coalition of new forces, and meanwhile set out to defeat the Carthaginians in Spain. The plan was to prevent a second invasion and to stop Hannibal from acquiring much-needed reinforcements from abroad. At the age of just twenty-six, Scipio took New Carthage, won over many Spanish tribes and drove the Carthaginians out of Spain altogether. Such was his popularity that, despite opposition from the Senate in Rome, the charismatic and highly motivated young general was then able to raise another army of volunteers and set his sights on the one feat the Romans had not achieved during the First Punic War: an invasion of North Africa.
With Hannibal and his army recalled to Carthage to help defend the country, Scipio finally came to face to face with the great Carthaginian general at Zama, about 120 kilometres (75 miles) from Carthage, in 202 BC. At a meeting with his adversary, Hannibal attempted to negotiate a peace. Scipio refused. The Roman knew that the advantage was now with him. As the lines of the battle drew up, he and his army knew too what to expect from a fight with the Carthaginians. When, for example, Hannibal released the elephants the Romans, under orders from Scipio, stood firm and allowed them to pass through clearly marked lanes in their formation. Then, when the two sides joined battle, the envelopment tactic was used, but this time it was Hannibal and the Carthaginian army who were trapped inside. With some 20,000 Carthaginian deaths and only 1500 Roman losses, the battle of Zama brought about a stunning Roman victory and concluded the Second Punic War beyond all expectation. Rome’s extraordinary comeback was capped by the terms of the peace. Carthage was allowed to retain the territory in Africa that it had held before the war, but its overseas empire was taken away for ever. It was forced to surrender its fleet and its elephants, to pay 10,000 talents (250,000 kilograms or 245 tons) of silver in indemnity and, crucially, to agree, in a way similar to a nuclear non-proliferation treaty today, never to re-arm or declare any war without permission from Rome.
Zama marked a key turning point. While Carthage lost a western Mediterranean empire, Rome – now master of the two new provinces of Spain and the sole power in the region – gained one. For his inspired leadership and brilliance in warfare Publius Cornelius Scipio was honoured with the name ‘Africanus’. He was not the only one who bathed in glory. For their instrumental part in winning the west the ancient aristocratic family of the Cornelii Scipiones shot to pre-eminence among the Roman élite. So, one branch of young Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus’ family tree was thus established. However, it was another of his ancestors who would go on to match Scipio’s conquest of the western Mediterranean. He would do so by concluding the conquest of the Greek east.
The strategy by which Rome came to dominate the east between 197 and 168 BC was a little different from that used in the west. In the aftermath of the Punic Wars, the signs of an empire were plain to see. Roman garrisons and standing armies were now dotted around Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and Spain; taxes from these provinces were being raised; and the annually elected Roman office holders allotted to govern those provinces immediately began to exploit their mineral wealth for the benefit of Rome. In the east, by contrast, the Roman Senate took a slightly more subtle, gradual and diplomatic path to asserting Rome’s supremacy.
The eastern Mediterranean was at this time made up of a series of kingdoms. They were known as the ‘successor kingdoms’ of Alexander the Great, because the dynasties that ruled them were founded by Alexander’s Greek generals when the great conqueror died and his vast but brief empire collapsed. One of these kings, Philip V of Macedon, had already incurred the anger of Rome. He had taken advantage of the republic’s weakness after Cannae and made an alliance with Carthage. By 197 BC, with Carthage subdued, Rome was in a position to declare war proper on Philip. The excuse it chose was a familiar one: the defence of its Greek friends who were being tyrannized by him. Within the year Philip was defeated at the battle of Cynoscephalae and Rome had won the right to dispose of his kingdom as it saw fit. Instead of making the kingdom of Macedon a province of the republic, however, the Roman commander in the region attended the Isthmian Games at Corinth, received the rapturous welcome normally accorded to Greek kings, and cleverly declared Greece now to be ‘free’. Then he withdrew his army.
Another opportunity for such Roman generosity soon presented itself. When the Greek king, Antiochus of Syria, expanded his Seleucid kingdom with attacks on Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and northern Greece, the Roman army returned to the region again with the stated purpose of aiding the Greek cities under threat. Antiochus was defeated at the battle of Magnesia in 190 BC, his kingdom was returned to its former limits and the Greek lands he had overrun were allocated to Rome’s loyal allies in the war. Then, once again, the Roman troops were evacuated. Although both these brief wars gave the impression that freedom and autonomy remained with the Greek cities of the east, the reality was quite different. The consequence of Roman intervention was that the Greek cities were now bound by an unspoken obligation to Rome. In exchange for their ‘freedom’ the Greek cities of the east owed Rome their loyalty.7
The actions of one king, however, would provoke Rome into letting the mask of its benevolent eastern policy slip. When Philip V’s son Perseus came to the throne he sought to re-establish the prestige and authority of the Macedonian kingdom in the region. Through interventions in the local wars of Greece, he duly won influence and widespread popular support among the Greek city-states. His gain in influence, however, was to the cost of Rome’s and in the eyes of the Roman Senate that was simply unacceptable. A new excuse for a ‘just war’ was devised and hostilities were declared in 171 BC.
At first Perseus’s Macedonian phalanx was successful. By June 168 BC, however, the close-packed battle formation of infantry soldiers that had conquered the known world under Alexander the Great was fighting its last battle. At Pydna on the northeast coast of Greece the Roman legions of Lucius Aemilius Paullus won a decisive victory; 20,000 Macedonians were killed and 11,000 were taken prisoner. The once-mighty Greek kingdom was broken up into four republics loyal to Rome; it was only a matter of time before Macedonia became a Roman province in its own right. King Perseus himself, the last royal descendant of Alexander, was captured and taken to Rome. Here he was paraded as a trophy of Rome’s dominion in the eastern Mediterranean. The stage on which the prisoner walked was the triumphal procession of Lucius Aemilius Paullus; the triumphant general was the future great-uncle of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus the younger.
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.