Gabriel Richard A. - Scipio Africanus: Romes greatest general

SCIPIO AFRICANUS

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Romes Greatest General

RICHARD A. GABRIEL

Copyright 2008 Potomac Books, Inc.

Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gabriel, Richard A.
Scipio Africanus : Romes greatest general / Richard A. Gabriel.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59797-205-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Scipio, Africanus, ca. 236183 B.C. 2. RomeHistory, Military26530 B.C. 3. GeneralsRomeBiography. 4. Consuls, RomanBiography. I. Title.
DG248.S3G33 2008
937.04092dc22

2007048961

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.

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THE WORLD often misunderstands its greatest men while neglecting others entirely. Scipio Africanus, surely the greatest soldier that Rome produced, suffered both these fates. The man who stood like a beacon above his contemporaries on the strength of his brilliance and character during the Republics darkest hour; who revolutionized Roman military tactics; who set Rome on its imperial course by propounding a wider strategic view of Romes mission than the Roman aristocracy of his time was capable of comprehending; who extended Roman power into Spain, Africa, and Asia; who defeated the great Hannibal and won the Second Punic War; who was the central figure of his time; and who, after all his accomplishments, turned away from the temptation of personal ambition, retired from public life, and preserved the institutions of Roman republicanism remains almost unknown to modern readers. In a cruel paradox one of the men Scipio defeated, Hannibal Barca, captivated the imagination of scholars and laymen over the centuries while the greater soldier and statesman of the two remained unrecognized for his achievements.

The state of modern scholarship regarding Scipio still reflects this undeserved obscurity. No scholarly biography of this great man is in print. Only one book, Basil Liddell-Harts Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoleon, remains available, but it is not a scholarly or accurate account of Scipios life and fails on the grounds of comprehensiveness as well. First published in 1926, Liddell-Hart wrote the book as a response to the anti-Scipionic biographies of Hannibal that were popular at the time. Propagandistic and almost without footnotes and documentation, contemporary historians criticized Liddell-Harts book as a popular and unbalanced work. Although he later became a renowned historian, Liddell-Hart was a journalist when he published this book and was seen as lacking in scholarly credentials, a deficiency manifested in the books pro-Scipio bias and its paucity of documentation. Liddell-Hart read neither German nor Italian, languages in which much of the scholarly research on Scipio was published at the time, forcing him to ignore some of the best available information regarding his subject.

The books shortcomings led two young scholars, Howard Scullard and Richard Haywood, to attempt their own works on Scipio. Scullards work was published in 1929 as part of his doctoral dissertation, and Haywoods was published three years later. A response to the German school of literary Quellenkritik, Scullards work is a typical British academic tome of the period. He attempts in minute detail to resolve the difficulties among the various literary accounts of the original sources. It is more a work of classics than of military history, but it remains a valuable source for the military biographer. Haywoods monograph is a collection of essays on various aspects of Scipios life, and while valuable, it cannot be regarded as a comprehensive attempt at a biography of Scipio. Scullard later rewrote parts of his earlier work, stressing the source materials for Scipios political life and trial. Published in 1970, it has been out of print for thirty years.

It is regrettable that the least scholarly and complete work on Scipio has been the only book on the great general available to modern scholars and general readers. My purpose is to correct this and write a new military biography of Scipio Africanus, one based on more detailed and complete source materials than Liddell-Hart had at his disposal. Scullards and Haywoods works were both written after Liddell-Harts and provide much information on which the military historian can draw. Most of the significant archival material, which Liddell-Hart could not draw on, is in the form of academic monographs and journal articles written in German and Italian between 1890 and 1933 and is readily available to me because of my ability to read both languages.

Of great importance in this regard are two works in German by Johannes Kromayer and George Veith written in 1912 and 1922, respectively. Kromayer was a professor of ancient military history at Leipzig, and Veith was the director of the Military Archive in Vienna and a colonel in the Austrian army. The first of their works (1912) is