One of the legionaries at the entrance to the tent entered and spoke quietly to the centurion in charge of the guard, who turned to Polybius. ‘It seems there is a man here to see you. He claims to have come by fast galley from Pella. He’s a Macedonian, named Phillipus.’
At the mention of the name, Polybius jumped up and went out of the tent, followed by the legionary. A few minutes later he returned, his face solemn. ‘Phillipus is one of my informants. He works on Metellus’ staff as an interpreter for the Thracian mercenary commander, who knows little Latin, so he hears everything that goes on in the Roman army headquarters in Macedonia. It seems that four days ago Metellus defeated and killed Andriscus in a big battle, at Pydna.’
‘At Pydna?’ Scipio exclaimed. ‘The same place where my father Aemilius Paullus celebrated his victory? The battle where I was first blooded?’
Polybius looked at Scipio grimly. ‘My informant tells me that Metellus deliberately chose the battleground to try to overshadow your father’s achievement. Andriscus’ army was a ragtag force, and the battle was a massacre. But Metellus is presenting it as a great victory, as the final conquest of Macedonia, as if he has finished what your father left undone twenty years ago. He brags to his officers that both the Scipiones and the Aemilii Paulli make a great scene of going to war, but after winning an easy battle or two they run back home with their tails between their legs because they haven’t got the guts to finish the job. He’s talking about you, of course. And there’s more. He’s dismantled the monument at Dion, the bronze horsemen by Lysippos representing Alexander the Great’s companions who died at the Battle of Graviscus. He’s boasting that it will far overshadow anything your father brought to Rome. He says that, unlike the wealth that he claims your father took for his own coffers, he will give the bronzes to the people and set them up in a new temple precinct dedicated to Jupiter and Juno that he will have built on his own expense on the Field of Mars.’
Scipio stood up, his fists bunched, trying to control his rage. ‘The Battle of Pydna was one of the greatest Roman feats of arms ever, a battle against the largest Macedonian phalanx ever fielded. And if Metellus is referring to my father leaving without annexing Macedonia as a province, that was because Aemilius Paullus was following the express order of the Senate. It was also his own instinct, proved right, that the pacification of Macedonia would take a permanent Roman garrison, one that the Senate would not allow either. He was not coming back with his tail between his legs, nor was my grandfather from Zama. They were both obeying orders from Rome. And as for the Graviscus monument, my father and I visited it after the battle to lay wreaths, to honour Alexander’s companions. We would never have dreamed of desecrating their memory by removing it. Metellus has shown his true character by what he has done. He is no soldier of Rome.’
Fabius spoke quietly. ‘You are right, but you need to be careful not to sound too defensive. As far as the legionaries out here are concerned, the news means that a few more amphorae of wine will be cracked open tonight, so, whatever you say, this news will be a cause for celebration. Few of the legionaries have reason to despise Metellus as we do.’
‘And it’s a reason for you to return to Rome,’ Polybius said, addressing Scipio. ‘You’ve done all that you can out here. You’ve won the corona civilis and the corona obsidionalis. In Spain and in Africa you’ve made up for all those years when there was no war in the offing. No one doubts your courage or your leadership. But you are still just a military tribune. You must return to Rome to take up your seat in the Senate and make your mark. Only then will you be given a legion or an army to command. And this news increases the odds against you, again. Metellus will celebrate a huge triumph and try to overshadow you. You must show yourself as a successor not only to your grandfather and your father but also to Cato, to the cause that he made his own. And you must remain on your guard. Metellus may believe he now has no need to try to arrange for your disappearance as he did ten years ago, when Andriscus was his ally and you were in the Macedonian forest. But if he feels threatened again, if he sees you rise up in the Senate and gain popular support, then you must beware. Fabius, you must remain with Scipio at all times. I have already arranged for my informant to make his fast galley available for your passage to Rome. You will be there before Metellus returns from Macedonia, and you should seize the chance to make your mark. Drum those words of Cato into the people. Carthago delenda est. Carthage must be destroyed. If there is going to be a final conquest of Carthage, it is a Scipio who should be standing in triumph on the temple platform. The people should know that, and you are the one to tell them. Go now.’
PART SIX
CARTHAGE
146 BC
18
Fabius stood with his feet apart on the wooden platform high above the harbour, his helmet held against his left side and his right hand grasping the pommel of his sword. The old scar on his cheek was throbbing, as it always did before a battle. He took a deep breath, savouring the few moments he had here alone. The sun had not yet risen above the jagged mountain of Bou Kornine across the bay to the east, its twin peaks etched against the red glow of dawn like a giant bull’s horns. To the south, the pastel blue of the sky seemed to merge with the horizon, a smudge of dull red that obscured the arid hills and low plain leading up to the coast. For days now a wind had blown in from the desert that covered everything in a fine red dust, making their eyes smart and their throats burn. Today it had abated, and he was able to take in lungfuls of air without coughing. The tang of dust was still there, a coppery taste, and it made his veins pound as if he had just drunk a draught of wine, quickening his pulse. It tasted like blood. It tasted like war.
It had been an extraordinary time since he and Scipio had returned from Africa to Rome, leading to Scipio’s election as consul and his return to Africa as a general a little over a year previously. Election to the highest office at his age had been unprecedented, but showed the urgency with which Rome had finally been persuaded to regard the threat of Carthage. Almost fifty years of lobbying by Cato had paid off, aided in his final years by Polybius and then by Scipio. After returning to Rome, Scipio had finally thrown himself into the political fray, having seen that the death of Cato might make his own efforts critical in swinging opinion in favour of war. To Scipio’s huge satisfaction, it had not been the power of his gens and his political manoeuvring that had won the day, but rather his military reputation; and that had been the reputation not of a patrician who had risen swiftly to high command, of a man such as Metellus, but instead of a soldier who had gained it by hard slog as a tribune in Spain and Africa, an officer who led from the front and whom many veterans in Rome had fought alongside and could vouch for personally.
Those in the Senate whom Scipio despised, those who represented the social order that had caused him such personal anguish, had not been instrumental in his success. It was his standing as a soldier’s soldier among the legionaries and the veterans and their families that had forced the Senate behind him, even including his enemies, who had feared that not supporting him might lead to a popular uprising and the installation of Scipio as dictator. They included the senators whom Scipio and Polybius knew were traitors to Rome, who had conducted secret negotiations with Carthage to line their own pockets and who looked to the rise of Metellus in Macedonia and Greece as the driving power of a new Rome in the east. In the event, Scipio and Polybius had not needed to expose these men to get Rome behind their cause, but it was a trump card, should there be any hint of the Senate withdrawing support. For now, he was secure in his power base; his regard for his legionaries had paid off in the support that the plebs had given him, and he in turn would provide those men with the glorious victory and future that would more than repay their trust in him.
Fabius looked back over the vast expanse of the Roman fleet anchored behind him, and the encampment of the legions in the plain to the south. There had been another reason for the emergency election of Scipio to the consulship. War with Carth
age had been openly declared more than two years before, ending the period of shady conflict in which Rome had officially only been providing training and advisers for her ally Masinissa in his attempt to counter Carthaginian incursions into Numidian territory. With the arrival of the legions, the Carthaginian stronghold at Utica had been taken, Carthage had been forced to relinquish all territorial gains and there had even been a Roman breakthrough into the northern suburbs of the city itself, albeit quickly repulsed. But the campaign had not gone as hoped. Carthage had become a city besieged, but the war had quickly become a stalemate. There had been a danger of Roman resolve plummeting, the support of the people fading and the next elections producing consuls who were appeasers rather than warmongers. That further lobbying by Polybius had made the election go the other way had put the onus on Scipio to bring the siege to a head, a task that he had taken on with huge relish. In six months of extraordinary activity he had brought the full might of Rome to bear, mustering the largest assault force ever seen. It was now no more than a matter of days, possibly less then twenty-four hours, before the final signal would be given. No army had ever been better prepared to end a siege, one that could change the course of history.
Fabius glanced at the plume on his helmet. Scipio had been true to his word, given five years ago when he had promoted Fabius to centurion after the siege at Intercatia; on being made consul he had promoted Fabius to primipilus, chief centurion, not of a particular legion but on his headquarters staff, meaning that Fabius was the senior centurion of the entire army under Scipio’s command. It was a huge responsibility, giving him de facto authority even over the junior tribunes, as the man the legionaries looked up to as much as they did to Scipio. Fabius had remembered the old centurion Petraeus on his promotion; he had returned to the farm in the Alban Hills to collect the ashes that had been buried in a jar by Brutus after the terrible night when Petraeus had been murdered, and he had taken them to the tomb of Scipio Africanus in Liternum as he had promised Petraeus that he would do, fulfilling Africanus’ own request. Part of him was still in awe of the grizzled old centurions that he saw among the legions before Carthage, and he had to remind himself that he too was now over forty and would have looked just as gnarled to the young legionaries here today. He was one of the dwindling cadre still in the army who had served under Aemilius Paullus at Pydna, the last great set-piece battle fought by a Roman army, but his memories were shared in the mess tents only with other centurions, not with the new recruits. His job as senior primipilus was to maintain discipline in the army, and he could no longer commingle with the men and tell stories of past wars by the campfire; that would be for their fathers and uncles in the taverns of Rome, veterans who would tell of Pydna just as their fathers had of Zama, and as those here today who survived would of the final siege in a conflict that had soaked up Roman blood and treasure for over a century now.
He remembered going with Scipio to the cave of the Sibyl on the eve of their departure for war in Macedonia more than twenty years before, when they had been little more than boys. There had been a smell there too, a reek of sulphur rising from the underworld, and the fragrance of leaves she threw on the hearth that made his head reel. He was meant to have stayed outside while Scipio entered, but had secretly run into the cave for a few moments after the others had left. She had touched him, a wizened finger extending from the darkness, and had spoken in riddles that he knew pointed to his destiny, to the destiny of Scipio and Rome, though he still did not know what they meant. All he knew today was that they were near the endgame in a war that had ravaged Rome for generations and bled out the best of her manhood on fields of battle across half the civilized world.
He remembered standing in front of a map of the Mediterranean in the academy in Rome a few days before that visit, while the old centurion Petraeus traced out Hannibal’s march over the Alps more than fifty years before, showing where they had fought in Gaul, in Italy, in North Africa, but his pointer always coming back to unfinished business: to the city of Carthage itself. Fabius stared out over the city now, a mass of flat-topped buildings and narrow streets leading up to the great temple on the Byrsa hill, the place where Queen Dido of Tyre had staked her claim almost seven hundred years before, centuries that had seen Carthage rise from a Phoenician trading post to the most powerful city in the west, with colonies in Sicily and Sardinia and Spain and ambitions that had nearly eclipsed Rome itself.
The tower he was standing on had been constructed by Ennius and his engineers on the admiral’s island in the centre of the circular harbour, where the Carthaginian fleet had once been housed in shipsheds radiating from the shore. The harbour had been taken after savage fighting a few days earlier, leaving the foreshore drenched with blood and heaped with Carthaginian dead, their bodies still smouldering on the funeral pyres outside. It was only a toehold into the city, but it meant that Carthaginian naval might was smashed for all time. Scipio had ordered his legionaries to go no further, but instead to consolidate their position so that they could exploit the weakness now exposed in the Carthaginian defences behind the harbour, to make sure that when he gave the order the largest amphibious and land assault in history would sweep through the city like a tidal wave.
The enemy killed in the harbour had been soldiers, mostly mercenaries; ahead lay thousands of civilians, men, women and children, terrified and cowering in their homes, counting down their final hours. The night before, on their ship offshore, Polybius had read them passages from Homer’s The Fall of Troy and the playwright Euripides’ The Trojan Women, wanting them to remember the cost of war. Looking across from the ship towards Carthage, the moonlight sparkling off the waves as they lapped the shore, they had listened to the story of Astyanax, the brave son of Hector, Prince of Troy, a little boy who had been hurled off the walls of Troy by the victorious Greeks a thousand years ago, his mother weeping as she was led into slavery. For a while Fabius had let the play affect him, and had thought of his own wife Eudoxia in Rome, of their young son. But now, in the cold light of dawn, compassion seemed a weakness. Now, death, all death, whether to soldier or civilian, was just a calculation of war.
The day before, they had looked across at the walls and seen the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal: a great bear of a man, sunbronzed with a braided beard, his armour draped in a lionskin with jaws that opened over his head. His people may have wanted to surrender, looking in despair at the massed Roman fleet and the legions, but history weighed heavily on Hasdrubal, leader of a city that had lived on borrowed time and might never rise again. Hasdrubal had ordered his soldiers to burn the crops and hack down the olive trees, denying them to the Romans but also taking away the last food source for his own people – a suicidal gesture of defiance. He had executed Roman prisoners in full view of the legions, ensuring that he would be shown no mercy. He was up against a war machine more powerful than any in history, and he was egging them on, taunting them. For Hasdrubal, there was only one way out, and taking as many of his people with him as possible seemed to be his own calculation of war.
Fabius looked back up, and for a few moments, staring at the horizon, it was as if he were suspended in mid-air above the scene; he felt as if he had risen to join the gods and move the affairs of men around like gaming pieces, like the dioramas of battles Scipio and the others had practised on years before in the academy. Then he heard the clatter of Scipio and Polybius climbing the ladder to join him, and he snapped back to reality. They were no gods, but Scipio was consul and general of the largest Roman army ever assembled, and this tower had been built to allow him an eagle’s eye view of the battlefield, to prepare the most devastating assault on a city ever seen in history.
‘Ave, Fabius Petronius Secundus, primipilus.’ Polybius had come up first, and cracked a smile. He had changed little in appearance over the years, except for grey streaks in his beard and lines around his eyes, and seeing him in his decorated breastplate and Corinthian helmet took Fabius back to the last time he had seen Polybius in arm
our, more than twenty years before on the field of Pydna when he had charged single-handedly against the might of the Macedonian phalanx.
Fabius saluted. ‘Ave, Polybius. Any word from Ennius yet?’
‘His men are clearing the last mound of rubble from beside the walls. We will be joining him shortly to see the preparations first hand.’
Scipio came up the ladder, wearing the breastplate he had inherited from his grandfather, newly polished but with the dents and scars of war deliberately left unrepaired. ‘He’d better hurry up,’ he said testily, coming up beside them. ‘I intend to order the attack today.’
‘He knows it. He will be ready.’
Fabius turned to his general. ‘Ave, Scipio Aemilianus Africanus.’
Scipio put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Ave, Fabius, my old friend. We are close to battle again. Are you ready for the assault?’
‘I have been ready for this all my life.’
Fabius glanced at Scipio and Polybius. The two men were very different, one more a man of action and the other by inclination a scholar, but they had been close friends since they had first met when Polybius had been appointed Scipio’s teacher in Rome. Polybius sometimes forgot who was general and who was adviser, but he had an encyclopedic knowledge of military history and gave good counsel, even if Scipio sometimes did not heed it. On this of all days, Fabius had deliberately addressed Scipio by his full name: as Africanus, the cognomen he had inherited from his adoptive grandfather, the great Scipio Africanus who had confronted Hannibal more than fifty years before, yet whose intention to crush Carthage had been thwarted by the weakness of the Senate in Rome, by men who wanted to appease rather than destroy. They had learned their lesson over the next fifty years, had seen Carthage rise again, had seen her war leaders become defiant, and now Scipio stood before the city walls as his grandfather had done, ready to finish the job.
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