But that victory only led to an even greater conflict: the Punic Wars. As Rome grew in strength during the 300s, the prosperous merchant city of Carthage had been rising in North Africa. By the time the Romans conquered Italy, the Carthaginians had pushed their way onto the island of Sicily and would soon be moving over to Spain. The two budding empires inevitably clashed, and for the next hundred years Rome and Carthage battled for control of the western Mediterranean.12
Rome was nearly defeated in 218 when the great Carthaginian general Hannibal invaded Italy, but the stubborn Romans refused to surrender. In fact, they were soon able to spread the conflict throughout the Mediterranean. In an attempt to shut down Hannibal’s supply lines, the Senate sent legions to attack Carthaginian lands in Spain. When they discovered Hannibal sought an alliance with King Philip V of Macedon, the Senate ordered a fleet to Greece. Finally the great hero of the war, Scipio Africanus, led an invasion of the Carthaginian homeland in North Africa. There he defeated Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202. Carthage surrendered.13
Emerging from the crucible of the Punic Wars, Rome was no longer merely a regional power—it had become the dominant power in the Mediterranean. But the Senate resisted taking direct imperial control over the territories they now commanded. The final treaty with Carthage was surprisingly lenient. It stipulated a number of punitive clauses—the Carthaginians owed an annual cash indemnity and were forbidden from fielding an army or a navy—but other than that, Carthage retained its traditional domains in Africa and was free to govern itself.14
The Senate also wanted no part of ruling the Greeks and Macedonians. Having successfully kept Macedon out of the war, the Roman fleet withdrew back across the Adriatic. The plan was to leave Greece to the Greeks but, much to the Senate’s consternation, King Philip V of Macedon intentionally violated a treaty obligation and Rome was obliged to send legions east again. In 197, Philip paid for his provocative miscalculation when the legions crushed him at the decisive Battle of Cynoscephalae. Philip agreed to confine himself to Macedon and not make further trouble. But though Greece was now at their mercy, the victorious Romans declared in 196: “The Senate of Rome and T. Quinctius, their general, having conquered King Philip and the Macedonians do now decree and ordain that these states shall be free, shall be released from the payment of tribute, and shall live under their own laws.” The Romans had not come to conquer the Greeks, but to set them free.15
But though the Senate eschewed direct imperial rule over the “civilized” Carthaginians and Greeks, they showed little hesitation annexing “uncivilized” Spain. Attracted by lucrative silver mines, Rome kept its legions in Spain after the Punic Wars to ensure Spanish silver made its way into Roman temples. Roman conduct in Spain was riddled with double-dealing, extortion, and periodic atrocities. This led to rapid cycles of insurrection and pacification that in turn led the Senate to formally organize the Spanish coast into two permanent provinces: Nearer Spain and Further Spain. In 197, they joined Sicily and Corsica as some of the earliest overseas provinces of the Roman Empire.16
THIS WAS THE world into which Publius Scipio Aemilianus was born in 185 BC. The son of an ancient patrician family, Aemilianus was adopted by the childless head of the Scipione family—making him legally the grandson of the great Scipio Africanus. Adoptions like this were a common way to cement alliances inside the Roman aristocracy, and Aemilianus grew up inside the most powerful family in the most powerful city in the world. Raised to expect a distinguished public career, Aemilianus never doubted that it was his destiny to be a great leader. In time he would serve with distinction in all three of the Republic’s principal imperial spheres—and then serve as one of the principal authors of Rome’s ultimate imperial triumph.17
Aemilianus’s first taste of action came in Greece when his natural father, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, brought his seventeen-year-old son along on campaign to observe how Rome conducted a war. In June 168, Paullus’s legions crushed the Macedonians, deposing its young, ambitious king, Perseus, who had tried to overthrow the hegemony of Rome. He watched as his father seized the Macedonian royal treasury, enslaved upward of three hundred thousand people, and literally erased the Kingdom of Macedon from the map. What had once been the Kingdom of Alexander the Great was now divided into four small republics.18
After this harsh settlement, however, the Senate returned to their habit of ruling with a light hand. They demanded the inhabitants of the four new Macedonian republics continue to pay taxes, but at half the rate they had been paying to the kings of Macedon. If you managed to survive the war and not get sold into slavery, life under the Romans was pretty good.19
In the midst of his conquest, Aemilius Paullus also took a thousand prominent Greeks hostage to secure the good behavior of their kin. Among them was a brilliant politician and scholar named Polybius. A civic leader from the city of Megalopolis, Polybius had counseled neutrality toward the Romans in its wars with Macedon, which was enough to mark him as a dangerous element. But though Polybius was now slated for banishment it would prove a fortuitous calamity. When the Roman senior command passed through Megalopolis, the teenage Aemilianus borrowed books from Polybius, and their subsequent discussions created a friendly bond. Paullus arranged for Polybius to spend his exile in Rome and tutor his son in rhetoric, history, and philosophy.20
Under Polybius’s tutelage Aemilianus embraced a new Greco-Roman spirit that was sweeping the age. The flood of educated Greek slaves into Italy led an entire generation of young nobles to become fully steeped in Greek literature, philosophy, and art. Some more conservative Romans railed against the importation of Greek ideas and believed they eroded the austere virtues of the early Romans. But while young leaders like Aemilianus reveled in Greek culture, they never questioned Rome’s right to rule the world. And despite conservative moral agonizing, there was nothing soft about Scipio Aemilianus, who believed that obedience was taught with a whip hand. He would be in a prime position to be that whip hand when those who chafed under Roman rule began to rise up and the Senate decided to finally teach the Mediterranean obedience.21
WHILE POLYBIUS SPENT his exile in Rome, he came to admire the Roman Republic—or at the very least came to believe that Roman power was irresistible and that his fellow Greeks better get used to it. An energetic observer of the world, Polybius took endless notes and maintained extensive correspondence that allowed him to make a thoroughgoing investigation of these obscure Italian barbarians who were now masters of the universe. Eventually Polybius would write a history of Rome to explain how and why the Romans had risen so far so fast. Polybius argued that beyond their obvious military prowess, the Romans lived under a political constitution that had achieved the perfect balance between the three classical forms of government: monarchy—rule by the one; aristocracy—rule by the few; and democracy—rule by the many.22
According to Aristotelian political theory, each form of government had its merits but inevitably devolved into its most oppressive incarnation until it was overthrown. Thus a monarchy would become a tyranny, only to be overthrown by an enlightened aristocracy, which slid to repressive oligarchy until popular democracy overwhelmed the oligarchs, opening the door for anarchy, and so back to the stabilizing hand of monarchy again. Polybius believed the Romans had beaten this cycle and could thus keep growing when other cities collapsed under the shifting sands of their own inadequate political systems.23