The Storm Before the Storm

But though the Senate eschewed direct imperial rule over the “civilized” Carthaginians and Greeks, they showed little hesitation annexing “uncivilized” Spain. Attracted by lucrative silver mines, Rome kept its legions in Spain after the Punic Wars to ensure Spanish silver made its way into Roman temples. Roman conduct in Spain was riddled with double-dealing, extortion, and periodic atrocities. This led to rapid cycles of insurrection and pacification that in turn led the Senate to formally organize the Spanish coast into two permanent provinces: Nearer Spain and Further Spain. In 197, they joined Sicily and Corsica as some of the earliest overseas provinces of the Roman Empire.¹⁶

THIS WAS THE world into which Publius Scipio Aemilianus was born in 185 BC. The son of an ancient patrician family, Aemilianus was adopted by the childless head of the Scipione family—making him legally the grandson of the great Scipio Africanus. Adoptions like this were a common way to cement alliances inside the Roman aristocracy, and Aemilianus grew up inside the most powerful family in the most powerful city in the world. Raised to expect a distinguished public career, Aemilianus never doubted that it was his destiny to be a great leader. In time he would serve with distinction in all three of the Republic’s principal imperial spheres—and then serve as one of the principal authors of Rome’s ultimate imperial triumph.¹⁷

Aemilianus’s first taste of action came in Greece when his natural father, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, brought his seventeen-year-old son along on campaign to observe how Rome conducted a war. In June 168, Paullus’s legions crushed the Macedonians, deposing its young, ambitious king, Perseus, who had tried to overthrow the hegemony of Rome. He watched as his father seized the Macedonian royal treasury, enslaved upward of three hundred thousand people, and literally erased the Kingdom of Macedon from the map. What had once been the Kingdom of Alexander the Great was now divided into four small republics.¹⁸

After this harsh settlement, however, the Senate returned to their habit of ruling with a light hand. They demanded the inhabitants of the four new Macedonian republics continue to pay taxes, but at half the rate they had been paying to the kings of Macedon. If you managed to survive the war and not get sold into slavery, life under the Romans was pretty good.¹⁹

In the midst of his conquest, Aemilius Paullus also took a thousand prominent Greeks hostage to secure the good behavior of their kin. Among them was a brilliant politician and scholar named Polybius. A civic leader from the city of Megalopolis, Polybius had counseled neutrality toward the Romans in its wars with Macedon, which was enough to mark him as a dangerous element. But though Polybius was now slated for banishment it would prove a fortuitous calamity. When the Roman senior command passed through Megalopolis, the teenage Aemilianus borrowed books from Polybius, and their subsequent discussions created a friendly bond. Paullus arranged for Polybius to spend his exile in Rome and tutor his son in rhetoric, history, and philosophy.²⁰

Under Polybius’s tutelage Aemilianus embraced a new Greco-Roman spirit that was sweeping the age. The flood of educated Greek slaves into Italy led an entire generation of young nobles to become fully steeped in Greek literature, philosophy, and art. Some more conservative Romans railed against the importation of Greek ideas and believed they eroded the austere virtues of the early Romans. But while young leaders like Aemilianus reveled in Greek culture, they never questioned Rome’s right to rule the world. And despite conservative moral agonizing, there was nothing soft about Scipio Aemilianus, who believed that obedience was taught with a whip hand. He would be in a prime position to be that whip hand when those who chafed under Roman rule began to rise up and the Senate decided to finally teach the Mediterranean obedience.²¹

WHILE POLYBIUS SPENT his exile in Rome, he came to admire the Roman Republic—or at the very least came to believe that Roman power was irresistible and that his fellow Greeks better get used to it. An energetic observer of the world, Polybius took endless notes and maintained extensive correspondence that allowed him to make a thoroughgoing investigation of these obscure Italian barbarians who were now masters of the universe. Eventually Polybius would write a history of Rome to explain how and why the Romans had risen so far so fast. Polybius argued that beyond their obvious military prowess, the Romans lived under a political constitution that had achieved the perfect balance between the three classical forms of government: monarchy—rule by the one; aristocracy—rule by the few; and democracy—rule by the many.²²