1-Acest articol este copiat !
2-Istoria ramane pasiunea mea nr-1.
"Let us relieve the Romans from the anxiety they have so long experienced, since they think it tries their patience too much to wait for an old man's death."
“Ungrateful Fatherland, you will not even have my bones.”
In control of a fleet rather than an army, Rome’s war with the Seleucid Empire would not see a rematch betwixt Scipio and Hannibal Barca. Hannibal set sail to reinforce the Seleucid navy at Ephesus, and then clash with the Rhodian navy at the Battle of Side. Despite initially success, the faster Rhodian ships managed to outmanoeuvre Hannibal’s Seleucid host and heavily damage half of his warships. Though Hannibal managed to preserve most of the fleet, he was now in no position to unite with Polyxendias’ fleet, as his ships needed repairs. The subsequent Battle of Myonessus saw the Romans and their Rhodian allies crush this half of the Seleucid fleet, clearing the Aegean for them to cross the Hellespont to take Romans to Asia for the first time.
The war came to a head with the brothers Scipio commanding their combined legionary and Pergamene army at the Battle of Magnesia in late 190 BC. Building on the earlier legionary success over the phalanx at Cynoscepholae, Magnesia established the Roman legion as the de facto military formation of antiquity. Leading an army up to 72,0000-strong, including 54 elephants, Antiochus III initially looked to have folded the Roman right, but the legions then bulldozed through his centre, breaking his host. The legionary-led army was 30,000 strong, and left up to 54,000 Seleucid soldiers dead on the field. Victory ensured Rome’s dominance over the Mediterranean and spelled the beginning of the end of the Hellenic powers. Following on from his victory, Scipio’s brother was granted the cognomen “Asiaticus”.
A truce was signed in Sardis in early 189 BC, with Antiochus abandoning all claim west of the Taurus Mountains, paying a war indemnity, and promising to hand Hannibal into Roman custody. Suspicious that he would be betrayed by the Seleucid king, Hannibal fled to Armenia and Artaxias I, where he supervised the building of a new capital, Artaxata. Hannibal’s odyssey to escape from the clutches of Rome took him to Crete, and then to Anatolia to Prusias I of Bithynia, who was currently fighting Rome’s ally King Eumenes II of Pergamon. During one of the naval victories Hannibal marked himself as an early pioneer of biological warfare, having his men fill clay pots with vipers before the battle which they would then hurl onto enemy quinqueremes. In an age when magic was believed as fact and many animals were unknown – such snakes were familiar to many as Medusa’s hair – the sight of angry vipers spilling forth from a shattered jar would have been truly terrifying. Hannibal’s tactics also saw him defeat Eumenes in two land battles, though unsurprisingly his involvement attracted the attention of Rome.
When Rome intervened and threatened Bithynia into surrendered Hannibal in 183 BC, Prusias agreed. Hannibal thought was determined not to be paraded in a Roman triumph. When the ex-Consul Falminius – who had triumphed at Cynoscepholae – discovered his whereabouts Hannibal, upon realising that his fortress was surrounded, swallowed the contents of small vial of poison. Upon accepting his fate, he uttered: "Let us relieve the Romans from the anxiety they have so long experienced, since they think it tries their patience too much to wait for an old man's death." He was 63-years-old, and would be remembered by many as Rome’s greatest nemesis. Whenever disaster struck the Eternal City, it would be commonplace for senators to decry “Hannibal ante portas!” (“Hannibal is at the gates!”). It remains a Latin phrase still used today for when a client arrives through the door, or when one is faced with calamity. Coincidentally, his old foe Scipio Africanus would die in the same year.
Back in Rome, Cato the Elder had gained ground in leading the political opposition to the Scipiones. When they returned to Rome in 187 BC, two tribunes prosecuted Scipio Asiaticus on the grounds of embezzling money from the Seleucid war. When Asiaticus was in the process of providing the account books, his brother wrested them off him and tore them to pieces, asking the courts why they were concerned with the spending of 3,000 talents and not concerned with the 15,000 talents that had been won for the states with their victory. This act shamed the prosecution, and the case was dismissed. While Scipio Africanus was often later portrayed as a paragon of Roman virtue, it would not have been uncommon for him and his family to be enriching themselves from the profits of a successful war. The cancer or a greedy aristocracy often led to the collapse of states, as their corruption would spiral out of control at the expense of the nation. Roman commanders saw governorship and military command as giving them an innate right to make money, and as long as the state got rich too, it did not matter if they skimmed money off the top. With Rome now having an empire but with the governing apparatus of a city state, the provinces and client kingdoms were left with a great deal of autonomy, with minimal regulation of state activities there. This, coupled with the technological constraints of the time, made it very easy for the corrupt to swell their wealth when far from the city.
Scipio Africanus was subsequently accused in 185 BC of being bribed by Antiochus. By reminding people that it was the anniversary of Zama, he created a huge popular outpouring of support, as the mob followed him to the Capitol and begged the gods for more Romans like Scipio. Despite this popular support, there were renewed efforts by Cato’s faction to bring Scipio to trial, though these were deflected by a Roman whose sons would come to great renown – Tiberius Gracchus. In gratitude for this support, Scipio betrothed his youngest daughter Cornelia, then aged five, to Gracchus. They would later marry in 172 BC, when she was 18.
Scipio retired from public life in bitterness and resentment, moving to his country seat at Liternum on the coast of Campania. He died aged 53, in suspicious circumstances which may have been the lingering affects of fever from the Seleucid campaign. His final request was that he be buried near his home, and not near the city he served whose Senate had shunned him. Just as the Greeks had hounded Themistocles out of Athens owing to their jealousy over him masterminding their victory over the Persian fleet at Salamis, so Scipio felt the Roman Senate remained envious of him following his success in the Second Punic War. His tomb, which would be visited 150 years later by the first emperor Augustus, bore the epitaph: “Ingrata patria, ne ossa quidem habebis” (“Ungrateful Fatherland, you will not even have my bones”). Scipio was one of history’s few great generals, along with the likes of Alexander, Sulla, Wellington and Subutai, to have never lost a battle. He was the first Roman general to expand the republic’s territory outside of Italia by his campaigning in Iberia, though the peninsula would not be fully pacified until the time of Augustus. While the two titans of the war may have died, tensions betwixt Rome and Carthage remained high, and would soon erupt again – for the final time.
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