Scipio Africanus

This article is from Military History Matters issue 114

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Julius Caesar is generally considered Ancient Rome’s foremost general and politician: ‘the greatest Roman of them all’, as Shakespeare has it. Yet most of Caesar’s great successes were against second-rate opponents, and even during his struggle with Pompey in Greece in 48 BC, he enjoyed the great advantage of centralised command, while his rival was hamstrung by a bickering political entourage.

Nor was Caesar much of an innovator. He took hold of a first-class military machine and used it to great effect, but his war-making was not notable for significant developments in logistics, strategy, or tactics. He was a great improviser when he needed to be, but he did not devise a new military system.

Publius Cornelius Scipio (236-183 BC), on the other hand, was the first Roman commander to bring the legion to maximum proficiency and employ it in ways that had never before been attempted; in effect, he turned a somewhat clumsy part-time militia into a well-oiled professional machine capable of rapid movement and complex manoeuvre.

A succession of stunning battlefield successes between 209 and 202 BC destroyed the power of Carthage and terminated Hannibal’s long campaign in Italy. Actually, it did more: it set Rome on the path to world empire.

When Scipio was first dispatched as the new Roman commander in Spain in 210, the Roman Empire amounted to little more than Italy and Sicily, and much of this was under enemy occupation. By the time of his death, Rome was fully launched on the campaign of imperial conquest that would, in just over a century, create an empire extending from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, from Germany to the Sahara.

Of all Roman politico-military leaders – and they were invariably both – Scipio Africanus probably has the best claim to be regarded as the true founder of the empire. In this regard, he may be compared with leaders like Alexander and Napoleon – not simply soldiers, but also empire-makers.

Yet, in other ways, Scipio was very different from other empire-makers, in that he served a constitutional government, and was constrained, resisted, and finally brought down by political enemies inside the Roman aristocracy.

In this regard, Marlborough is perhaps a parallel. If one man can be said to have launched Britain on the struggle for global empire, it is he; but he eventually lost his command and was removed from public life through the manoeuvres of political enemies.