Lucius Aemilius Paullus

Aemilius Paullus destroyed the kingdom of Macedon in an hour at Pydna and watched two of his own sons buried in the week of his triumph. He was the son of the consul killed at Cannae, which is the fact every Roman account of him begins from. He was praetor in Spain, consul in 182, and campaigned in Liguria; he was in his sixties and out of office when he was elected consul a second time in 168 specifically to finish the war against Perseus of Macedon, which two previous commanders had let drag on. He restored discipline in an army that had been allowed to argue with its officers, and refused to let his troops be lectured on strategy by civilians in Rome. At Pydna in June 168 the Macedonian phalanx pushed his line back until the ground broke its formation, and the legions went into the gaps with swords; Paullus said afterwards that he had never seen anything more frightening than the phalanx coming on. Twenty thousand Macedonians died and the kingdom of Alexander's successors ended. On the Senate's orders he then devastated Epirus, enslaving a hundred and fifty thousand people, which he carried out without recorded objection. His triumph lasted three days; his two youngest sons died within days of it, one before and one after, and he told the Roman people that having feared the envy of fortune for the state he had paid for it in his own house. He was a Hellenist who took Perseus's library home for his surviving sons, one of whom was adopted out and became Scipio Aemilianus. He was censor in 164. He was said to have taken nothing for himself out of the Macedonian treasure beyond the books. The spoils he sent to Rome were so large that direct taxation of Roman citizens was suspended for more than a century.

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