Five thousand with Marcellus. Twenty thousand with Lucullus. Thirty thousand with Caecilius Metellus. Thirty-five thousand with Pompeius. Thousands and thousands more with Popillius Laenas, with Mancinus, with Aemilius Lepidus: the casualties of the Spanish campaign fill the cemeteries of Rome. Ships sail away filled with life and return with the only certain fruit of Spain: death. It’s Charon’s armada. Mothers shriek from the rooftops; sisters march through the streets, rending their garments. The senators are insulted wherever they appear. Rome is weary of Spain: Spain threatens life, order, the very future of Rome.
And Spain is Numantia.
He, Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus is chosen to subdue Numantia.
* * *
YOU are a man with weaknesses and insecurities. You look at yourself in mirrors and do not see what others say they see in you. You are going to die this very year, but your mirrors reflect a young man eighteen years of age, perfectly combed and curled, plucked and perfumed, who every day caresses his neck in order not to find, not even on waking up, the smallest bristle there. You have set yourself the task of being perfect twenty-four hours of each and every day. But your body is nothing but a metaphor for your spirit. From the time you were a child, you have been troubled, even to the point of nightmares, by the separation of soul and body. You live with that division without resolving it totally, you put yourself to sleep in order to believe that both are one and the same thing; but all you have to do is stare into a mirror, knowing that it reflects a lie, in order to know that it isn’t true. That reflection is another. And that other is also divided, if not between body and mind then between past and present, appearance and reality. You will soon be sixty-seven. In the mirror you see a boy of eighteen.
You know your own insecurities. What? Could there be any security greater than that of being the grandson of Scipio Africanus, the victorious hero of the Second Punic War, the conqueror of Hannibal? You are his grandson, but only by adoption, and the mirror confirms that. You are someone else. You inherited nothing. In other words, you cannot be sure that through heredity your gifts will come to you naturally, biologically. Your grandfather Scipio Africanus says that to you every day from heaven: You will have to conquer the inheritance of our lineage on your own. The name Scipio is still not yours by right. You will have to earn it. You will have to emulate our virtues, be worthy of them. And to be worthy of the Scipios means as well to be worthy of Rome. In any case, simply by being a citizen of the capital of the world you would already have that obligation.
You see your image as an eighteen-year-old in the mirror your fifty-seven-year-old hand is holding, and you admit that everything, not only the stain of adoption, conspires against your obligation to be great. You’re apathetic. You learn with difficulty. It’s true that your adoptive family has subjected you to the rigors of the best patrician education, which is Greek. You have studied rhetoric, sculpture, and painting. You have learned to hunt, ride, and take care of your dogs. But your inclinations are not toward the disciplines but toward the pleasures. On horseback, in a forest, chasing a wild pig, with the dogs bringing up the rear, you are a happy boy. You add the pleasure of the other bodies to your own. That of the captured animal, whose cadaver you revive by embracing it. The cold nose, the warm spittle, the melancholy eye of a hound are your body reflected in another body that never thinks of the soul. Does a dog have a memory? Does a dog pass sleepless nights thinking about the divorce of its body from its soul? You pat the neck of your lead dog. It throbs in peace with itself. It is a single thing. You are two. You touch your neck. It has no bristles that would make it ugly, either at dawn or at nightfall. What you do have is a fear of uncertainty. Where does your soul begin, where does your body end? In the tremor of your body, the union of your mind and your guts? You exile the life of your flesh to south of your neck. But your head is left empty, divorced.
Son of consuls and censors, your true father, Lucius Aemilius Paulus, divorced your mother, Papiria, two months after your birth, as if you were the cause of the divorce. Abandoned, you and your brother, you were both adopted — by different families. How lucky you were to enter the clan of the Scipios, to inherit the fame of the conquerors of Hannibal and Perseus. Secretly unlucky, as your inheritance divided your soul from your body even more. Will you someday learn to whom you owe your spirit, to whom your flesh? You will deliver flesh to play, hunting, galloping, indiscriminate sexual love, the company of dogs that do not suffer as you do …
A Greek prisoner is delivered to your house, Polybius of Megalopolis, once leader of the Achaean League, the last effort for the independence of his nation. Your family chose him as a slave because they wanted to read his books. That’s how Polybius earned the protection of the Scipios. At first you avoided his company. He spent his time in the library, you in the stables. The tension between the two of you began to grow. He was fifteen years older than you but still young and goaded by the memory of his military experience in Greece. You laughed at him: bookworm, effeminate, owner of his head only, not his body. You didn’t need him. In those days you wanted to break a wild black stallion which had come from Africa along with other presents from Prince Jugurtha, nephew of Masinissa, ally of Rome and your family since the wars against Hannibal. What happened was foreseeable. The horse threw you. Polybius mounted and broke him. On the librarian’s bare chest you saw the scars left by Roman lances. Polybius’s chest was the map of his homeland.
“I will teach you to speak and comport yourself so you will be worthy of your ancestors.”
That is what this man, to whom you owe everything, said to you. In him, matter and thought, Greece and Rome, were united. He was not your lover, only your teacher, your mentor, your father. He calmed your anguish about the divided world, which had been the legacy of your childhood and the succubus of your nights. The sentiment your animal strength was already expressing, the power of your body, he reconciled, harmonized, infused with thought and reason: To honor Rome. To serve her. To obtain for your nation glory, fame, and military triumph.
But Rome had no books, only sentiments. Her literature did not exist; it was only rhetoric. The urns of triumph had to be filled, like the cask of the body, with the wine of thought and with poetry. Polybius taught you to think and speak like a Greek in order to act like a Roman. Hand in hand with him, you visited the Garden of Epicurus, Zeno’s stoa, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and Plato’s Academy. In the garden you learned to think and speak pleasure; in the lyceum you learned to moderate pleasure; in the stoa you discovered you were imperfect, although perfectible through virtue; and in the academy you learned to question everything. For example, though Polybius thought the logic of history was the unity of the world through Rome, thanks to the support that Fortune gave your country, he would instantly doubt his own assertion. History, he would say, has not only logic but meaning, and meaning consists in teaching us to withstand integrally the vicissitudes of Fortune by reminding us of the disasters of others. You will recall that lesson for your own campaigns. Your pride in what you are learning and in the person teaching it to you leads you one day to ask Polybius: “What shall we name our school?”