Scipio Aemilianus

Scipio Aemilianus destroyed Carthage and Numantia, and was the central figure of Roman public life in the middle of the second century BC. Born in 185 BC, he was the son of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the victor of Pydna, and was adopted into the Cornelii Scipiones as the grandson by adoption of Scipio Africanus, who had beaten Hannibal. He fought beside his father at Pydna in 168 BC at seventeen, and served in Spain, where he killed an enemy champion in single combat. He was in Africa as a military tribune during the Third Punic War and distinguished himself repeatedly while his superiors floundered. In 147 BC the people elected him consul, disregarding the legal minimum age, specifically to finish the war. He built a mole across the harbour, tightened the siege, and took the city street by street in six days of fighting in 146 BC. Carthage was burned for days and the survivors — perhaps fifty thousand of an original population many times that — were sold into slavery. Polybius, who was present, records that Scipio wept as it burned and quoted Homer on the destined fall of Troy, saying he feared the same fate for Rome. In 134 BC he was elected consul again to end the long Spanish war, and starved Numantia into surrender after an eight-month blockade in 133 BC. He gathered around him the Scipionic Circle, including Polybius and the playwright Terence, and was a patron of Greek learning in Rome. He opposed the land reforms of his brother-in-law Tiberius Gracchus. He was found dead in his bed in 129 BC, and murder was widely suspected.

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