It centred on the uncertainty of what the empire they had built was doing to Rome. Were the wars they had waged really defensive and just, as many claimed, or were they simply naked expressions of the desire for gain? Who really benefited from that gain? The Roman republic as a whole or just a few aristocrats who had profited while holding office? Above all, what effect did winning an empire have on the moral character of Rome? Was it encouraging virtue in its soldiers and leaders, or simply greed and corruption? Indeed, were personal ambition and the pursuit of glory now being set above the interests of the republic and the Roman people? This was the great debate that the conquest of the Mediterranean had ignited. In 146 BC one single event would fan its flames to a roaring blaze.
TURNING POINT: THE SACK OF CARTHAGE
By the end of the year 148 BC, the Third Punic War was going badly for the Romans. The consuls leading the attack on Carthage and the neighbouring countryside had initiated rash assaults, resulting in defeat and failure, while the soldiers themselves were growing idle, greedy and selfish.8 Of the three wars against Carthage, the third was the most controversial and, to many minds back in the metropolis, the Romans were now paying the price. The historian Polybius, who was an eyewitness to the later stages of this war, addressed the nature of the controversy. Opinion in the Mediterranean world, he said, was divided over the Romans’ decision to go to war with their old rival for a third time:
There were some who approved the action of the Romans, saying that they had taken wise and statesmanlike measures in the defence of their empire. For to destroy this source of perpetual menace [Carthage] . . .was the act of intelligent and far-seeing men. Others took the opposite view, that far from maintaining the principles by which they had won their supremacy, they were, little by little, deserting it for a lust of domination.9
The war had been controversial from the very start. Before any decision to launch hostilities was taken, heated arguments divided the Senate. On one side were the doves: they argued vehemently that, far from seeking to destroy Carthage, Rome needed a strong Carthage to act as a counterbalance of power in the Mediterranean. In this way, went their argument, Carthage would actually restrain Rome from becoming so powerful that it gave way to the ‘avarice’ that destroyed ‘honour, integrity and every other virtue’.10 The hawks countered this line of argument by playing on old Roman fears. Carthage, they said, was resurgent and wealthy and would always pose a threat until it was absolutely destroyed. Led by Cato the Elder, this side glossed their case with bright rhetorical brush strokes. The Carthaginians were untrustworthy, degenerate and effeminate child-sacrificers.The suggestion was that they were, in effect, subhuman and should be treated as such. Relentlessly keeping the issue at the top of the agenda, Cato ended every speech he made in the Senate on whatever subject with the statement ‘Delenda est Carthago’ (Carthage must be wiped out).11 In this way he ground down the opposition, and eventually the hawks swayed the majority of the Senate in favour of war. Now all the senators needed was a justification. Establishing this would only make the controversy worse.
A pretext was soon found. Following an inspection of the city of Carthage and surrounding countryside, a Roman commission reported to the Senate an ‘abundance of ship-building materials’ and alleged that Carthaginians had built up their fleet beyond the legal limits set by the treaty of the Second Punic War.12 However, the archaeological and historical evidence for the development of these ancient weapons of mass destruction is inconclusive even to this day. Then, when the Carthaginians did eventually break the treaty in an irrefutable way (by going to war with their neighbour Numidia without the permission of Rome), even here the case against Carthage was far from convincing. There was one simple reason: Rome, acting behind the scenes, had been the one to incite Numidian aggression against Carthage in the first place. But this was by no means the last instance of Roman cynicism. In its diplomacy, too, Rome would bring the controversy of the decision to go to war to an even fiercer pitch of intensity. For the Roman senators were about to violate one of the republic’s most ancient and divine virtues: fides or ‘reliability’ – the ability in political affairs to keep one’s word.
As the Roman war machine geared up for action, with ships shuttling between Italy and North Africa and the number of troops and cavalry deployed swelling to over 80,000, the Carthaginians sent no fewer than three embassies to the Romans in 149 BC. Each of them offered their surrender, each was a desperate bid to prevent war. On the first occasion the Roman consul agreed to peace and to give Carthage its freedom under Roman rule. There was, however, one condition: that the Carthaginians surrender three hundred hostages, specifically the sons of their noblest families. The Carthaginians, in good faith, agreed. Then, when this was done and the flower of their élite had sailed for Rome, the Roman consul in Africa, Lucius Marcius Censorinus, stipulated a further condition: the surrender of 200,000 sets of armour and 2000 catapults. Distraught, the ambassadors returned to Carthage and oversaw the arms being collected by the wagonload and taken to the Roman camp. However, the wily Censorinus had one more trick up his sleeve.
A final condition was stipulated before peace could be agreed: the removal of the city of Carthage from the coast to 16 kilometres (10 miles) inland. Censorinus’s argument for this was an extraordinary piece of hypocrisy. The sea, he said, with its prospects for trade, had corrupted Carthage. It had given it ‘a grasping disposition’. Carthage needed to be more like Rome: ‘Life inland,’ he claimed, ‘with the joys of agriculture and quiet, is much more equable.’13 Dumbstruck, the ambassadors broke down in tears of frenzy and mourning. It was impossible to meet this condition without, in effect, destroying the city for ever. It now dawned on them that the Romans had never sincerely intended to come to terms. They had simply sought to gain an advantage in a war that was now – and had always been – unstoppable.
Two years later, the treachery of the Romans at the outset of the war was deemed by many to be the reason for their lack of success in it. The Roman people paid great attention to the rightness of their wars in the building of the empire. ‘When the inception of war seems just,’ ran the logic, ‘it makes victory greater and ill success less perilous, while if it is thought to be dishonourable and wrong, it has the opposite effect’.14 So it was proving to be at the end of 148 BC. But, with the arrival in Africa of a new and iconic general in the spring of the following year, all that was about to change.
To resolve the miserable, grinding stalemate in Carthage, the Roman people and the Senate had turned to a young aristocrat. The credentials of Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus were impeccable. He came from the patrician family of the Cornelii Scipiones; he was the grandson of the consul who fell at the battle of Cannae; the adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus, the victor of the Second Punic War; and the son of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the vanquisher of Perseus in the war against Macedon (see family tree, page 38). Aemilianus had proved his own abilities in the early stages of the war against Carthage. Indeed, leading the fourth legion, he was the only officer who had achieved any significant victories. Now, even though he was thirty-seven, five years below the official age for the office of consul, the demand among the Roman people for him to be elected was so overwhelming that the Senate eventually agreed to make an exception to the traditional laws of the republic and allowed him to stand. Once elected to the consul-ship, his responsibility was simple: to take charge of the war in Carthage and win it.