Scipio Africanus Conquers Roman Spain
Scipio took New Carthage in a single day in 209 BC at the age of about twenty-five, holding a command no Roman that young should have had. His father and uncle had both been killed in Spain in 211 BC, and the senate found nobody willing to take the province; Scipio volunteered and was given a proconsular command by a vote of the assembly without ever having held the consulship, which was unconstitutional and was done anyway. Spain mattered because it was where Carthage recruited and paid for its armies, and three separate Carthaginian forces were operating there. His first move was against the base rather than the armies. New Carthage held the treasury, the hostages taken from the Spanish tribes, the arsenal and the harbour, and it was garrisoned by a thousand men because all three field armies were ten days away. He marched some 500 kilometres in a week, attacked the walls to fix the defence, and sent a party across the lagoon on the north side at the hour the water was low — which he had learned from local fishermen and presented to his troops as a gift from Neptune. He then released the Spanish hostages to their tribes without ransom, which brought several over to Rome. Baecula followed in 208 and Ilipa in 206, where he inverted his own order of battle to put his best troops against the enemy's weakest. He crossed to Africa in 204 and beat Hannibal at Zama. His treatment of the hostages is the part worth noticing. He returned them without conditions, refused a captured woman offered to him and restored her to her betrothed, and made a policy out of what his contemporaries treated as spoils — which is why Spanish tribes changed sides and why Polybius devotes so much space to him.
- Year: 210 BCE
- Category: Military
