CHAPTER FIVE

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A WIDER WORLD

The descendants of Barbatus

SCIPIO BARBATUS BUILT his tomb on a grand scale, and over the next 150 years around thirty of his descendants joined him there. The Scipio family included some of the most famous names of Roman history, as well as its fair share of also-rans and ne’er-do-wells. Eight of their epitaphs survive more or less complete, and several of those commemorate the kind of Romans usually hidden from history: the ones who did not quite make the grade or who died young, and the women. ‘He who has been buried here was never surpassed in virtus. Just twenty years of age, he was entrusted to the tomb – in case you ask why no political office was entrusted to him,’ the text on one sarcophagus of the middle of the second century BCE explains slightly defensively. Another has to fall back on the achievements of the young man’s father (‘his father crushed King Antiochus’). But others had more to boast of. The epitaph of Barbatus’ son proclaims: ‘He captured Corsica and the city of Aleria, and in gratitude dedicated a temple to the Gods of Storms.’ A storm had nearly wrecked his fleet, and this was his thank offering to the appropriate gods for the happy outcome.

Other members of the family would have had even greater boasts. Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, a great-grandson of Barbatus, was the man who in 202 BCE secured the final defeat of Hannibal: he invaded the Carthaginian’s home territory in North Africa and at the Battle of Zama, near Carthage, routed his army, with some help from Hannibal’s elephants, who ran amok and trampled over their own side. Africanus’ grave lay on his estate in South Italy and became something of a pilgrimage site for later Romans. But it is almost certain that among the memorials in the family tomb were once those of his brother Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus, the man ‘who crushed King Antiochus’ of Syria in 190 BCE; his cousin Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Hispallus, a consul in 176 BCE; and his grandson Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus. An adopted member of the family, Aemilianus invaded North Africa and finished Africanus’ work: in 146 BCE he reduced the ancient city of Carthage to rubble and sold most of its surviving inhabitants into slavery.

The careers of these men point to a new world of Roman politics and expansion over the third and second centuries BCE. These are some of the key players, famous or infamous, in the series of military campaigns that gave the Roman Republic control over the whole Mediterranean and beyond. Their rather cumbersome names nicely sum up that new world. Barbatus presumably points to the bearer’s appearance, and Aemilianus is a reference to the man’s natural father, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, but Africanus, Asiaticus and Hispallus (from his father’s service in Spain,Hispania) reflect the new horizons of Roman power. One reasonable way of translating ‘Scipio Africanus’ would be ‘Scipio hammer of Africa’.

These were military men. But there was more to the Scipios than that. As anyone would have realised who spotted the statue of the Roman poet Quintus Ennius proudly displayed, alongside those of Africanus and Asiaticus, on the elegant façade of the family tomb, they were also in the thick of the Roman literary revolution, sponsors and patrons of the first generation of Roman literature. This was no coincidence. For the origin of literature at Rome was closely connected with Roman overseas expansion: ‘The Muse imposed herself in warlike fashion on the fierce inhabitants of Rome,’ as one second-century BCE author described it. The beginning of empire and the beginning of literature were two sides of the same coin.

For centuries, Romans had used writing for various purposes: public notices, rules and regulations, claims of ownership scrawled on a pot. But it was increasing contact with the traditions of the Greek world, from the mid third century BCE, that was the catalyst to the production and preservation of literature as such. It was born in imitation of Greek predecessors, and in dialogue, competition and rivalry, at a moment that speaks for itself. In 241 BCE, just as Roman soldiers and sailors were finally winning Rome’s first overseas war, in the predominantly Greek island of Sicily, somewhere back home a man called Livius Andronicus was busy adapting into Latin, from a Greek original, the first tragedy to be shown in Rome – which was staged the very next year, in 240 BCE.

The background and output of Livius Andronicus are typical of the cultural mix of this early writing and of its writers. He produced Latin versions not only of Greek tragedies but also of Homer’s Odyssey; he had been enslaved as a prisoner of war, probably from the Greek city of Tarentum in South Italy, and later freed. A different mixture is seen in Fabius Pictor, the Roman senator who wrote the first history of Rome; Roman born and bred, he nevertheless composed his work in Greek, only later translated into Latin. The earliest literature actually to survive in any bulk, written around the turn of the third and second centuries BCE – the twenty-six comedies of Titus Maccius Plautus and Publius Terentius Afer (‘Plautus’ and ‘Terence’ from now on) – are carefully Romanised versions of Greek predecessors, featuring hapless love stories and farcical tales of mistaken identity often set in Athens but also sprinkled with gags about togas, public baths and triumphal parades. Terence, who lived in the early second century BCE, was reputed to be another ex-slave, originally from Carthage.

As the statue on the outside of the tomb suggests, Scipio Africanus was one of the sponsors of Ennius, most famous for his multivolume Latin epic poem on the history of Rome from the Trojan War until his own day, at the beginning of the second century BCE, and another South Italian, fluent in Latin, Greek and his native Oscan (a reminder of the linguistic variety of the peninsula). Aemilianus flaunted even stronger literary interests, in both Latin and Greek. He had such close connections with Terence that inventive Roman gossips wondered whether he had ghostwritten some of the plays. Wasn’t the Latin just too elegant for someone of Terence’s background? And Aemilianus was known to have the Greek literary classics on the tip of his tongue. As Carthage went up in flames in 146 BCE, one eyewitness spotted him shedding a tear and heard him quoting from memory an apposite line on the fall of Troy from Homer’s Iliad. He was reflecting that one day the same fate might afflict Rome. Crocodile tears or not, they made their point.

29. A Roman plate of the third century BCE features an elephant carrying a fighting tower on her back with her calf behind. Whatever the dubious military advantage they gave, elephants soon became a powerful presence in the Roman popular imagination.

That eyewitness was the closest of Aemilianus’ literary friends and connections, a Greek historian, resident in Rome, by the name of Polybius. A shrewd observer of Roman politics at home and abroad, with a unique perspective on Rome from the inside and the outside, he hovers over much of the rest of this chapter – as the first writer to pose some of the big questions that we shall try to answer. Why and how did the Romans come to dominate so much of the Mediterranean in such a short time? What was distinctive about the Roman political system? Or as Polybius sternly put it: ‘Who could be so indifferent or so idle that they did not want to find out how, and under what kind of political organisation, almost the whole of the inhabited world was conquered and fell under the sole power of the Romans in less than fifty-three years, something previously unparalleled?’ Who indeed?